Whalebone and fashion in seventeenth-century England : Changing consumer culture, trade and innovation

[Extract] At the end of the seventeenth century the consumer landscape of England was vastly different from that of the sixteenth century as new raw materials from around the world made their way into people’s homes and wardrobes. Historians have shown that the diets of fashionable Europeans increasingly contained goods such as sugar, tea and coffee, and their households and wardrobes were filled with colourful porcelain and cotton calicoes. This connected English men and women to a widening world of global trade and consumption, often at the expense of the people and animals that provided such goods. By the eighteenth century, the silhouettes of English women and men were altered with foreign commodities that had come to replace local materials once used to structure fashion. These imported materials included rattan, a type of cane imported in large quantities by the English East India Company, and whale baleen that was sourced from the Arctic and North America. Baleen is the name given to keratinous plates in the mouth of baleen whales that form part of a filter-feeder system. In the early modern period, it was known as whale fin in its raw form and whalebone after being cut for use.1 The unique flexibility, strength and malleability of this natural material made it popular in clothing and other manufacturing right up until the twentieth century.

Selection, editorial matter, Introductions © Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza, 2024

Individual chapters © their Authors, 2024