Fashion through the Ages:
The Eclectic Apparel of World Travelers
Introduction
World travel is not a new phenomenon. From ancient times to the modern age, the human spirit has yearned for exploration, to reach unseen places and interact with other cultures. What we consider the “common era,” the past two thousand years, has been defined by travel and the exchange of cultural influence. The context of this travel varies dramatically based on the time and culture at hand, but nevertheless, travel is the common thread.
Among these cultures, there is another common thread: fashion. Regardless of time or place, apparel is a substantial factor in cultural identity, often used to represent citizenship, wealth, or status. Fashion has changed and evolved throughout time, but there are many similarities amongst cultures. As these societies interact, they are inevitably influenced by each other. We are currently living in the most globalized society to date in which virtually anyone can possess garments from all over the world and incorporate those styles together in a single outfit. The prevalence of a “globalized outfit” is a contemporary phenomenon, but its possibility can be centuries old. Although it was historically uncommon, a traveling figure could have developed a multicultural wardrobe.
Throughout time, world travelers have roamed the globe as merchants, traders, explorers, missionaries, and tourists. Along their travels, many collected keepsakes from the places they visited. The purpose of this project is to imagine four world travelers, each from a different era, in order to demonstrate the interaction between cultures and illustrate the possibility of their multicultural clothing collections. These are hypothetical rather than historical figures, used to succinctly exhibit the changes and continuities of fashion through time and across cultures. Although the people in this project are not real, the interactions between societies truly took place. The goal of this project is to visualize the attire of fictional world travelers contextualized within specific eras of world history:
The Parthian Merchant – enabling trade along the Silk Road between Xi’an and Antioch.
The Viking Warrior – trading and raiding in the Byzantine and Abbasid Empires.
The French Fur Trader – trading beaver furs between North America, Europe and Russia.
The American Hobbyist – visiting Japan and Korea to explore her cultural heritage.
In what follows, I will provide illustrations of each figure accompanied by descriptions of their travel. The fashion of each traveler is meant to symbolize and visualize the exchange between cultures. If you are interested in seeing what the eclectic apparel of world travelers might look like, continue reading to see fashion through the ages.