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Whalebone and fashion in seventeenth-century England : Changing consumer culture, trade and innovation
Bendall, Sarah
Bendall, Sarah
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Abstract
[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.
Keywords
whalebone, baleen, clothing, seventeenth century
Date
2023
Type
Book chapter
Journal
Book
Everyday Fashion : Interpreting British Clothing Since 1600
Volume
Issue
Page Range
21-35
Article Number
ACU Department
Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences
Faculty of Education and Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts
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Open Access Status
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All rights reserved
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Controlled
Notes
Selection, editorial matter, Introductions © Bethan Bide, Jade Halbert and Liz Tregenza, 2024
Individual chapters © their Authors, 2024