This talk examines the fashion economies in western Europe and the Caribbean, with occasional forays into West Africa, where the entangled politics of race, clothing, and laundry informed everyday life.
Whiteness was more than a matter of skin colour, although that was a core part of hardening racial paradigms over this period, for ‘the slavery business’ shaped western cultures and economies. Additionally, whiteness of the ‘social skin’ – clothing and adornment – enhanced standing through the insistent presentation of vivid white apparel, renewed with each washing: ‘testimony to the cleanliness and whiteness of bodies and soul.’ The long eighteenth century was defined by textile whiteness, an aesthetic more widely desired than in all previous eras, aligned with the expansion of linen and cotton trades and the perennial need for laundering. Textile whiteness was fleeting, a material state desired by respectable and aspiring members of society. Washed clothes were also sought by the enslaved and secured at some costs.
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