Where clothes and fashion come from
Plenty of clothes carry the name of the wrong place, or of none at all. Each story shows where a garment, hat, shoe or fabric was first made and worn.
23 stories from 6 continents
- Africa · 3
- Asia · 4
- Europe · 6
- North America · 4
- South America · 3
- Oceania · 3
Africa
Aso oke (hand-woven cloth)
📍 Yorubaland (south-west Nigeria)
Aso oke is cloth hand-woven by Yoruba weavers, usually men, and Iseyin in south-west Nigeria is its great weaving town. Shimmering red or purple alaari, tan sanyan and indigo etu are made into gowns, caps and the women's gele head-tie.
Kente cloth
📍 Ghana (Asante & Ewe lands)
Kente is woven in narrow strips, often just a hand's width, that are sewn together into a big, bright cloth. Asante and Ewe weavers in today's Ghana have made it since at least the 1600s; Asante legend says a spider's web inspired it.
Kuba cloth (raffia 'velvet')
📍 Kasai, DR Congo (Kuba Kingdom)
Kuba cloth comes from the old Kuba Kingdom in the Kasai region of DR Congo. Men weave squares from raffia palm fibre, then women embroider them and snip the stitches into a soft pile that looks and feels like velvet.
Asia
Folding fan
📍 Kyoto–Nara, Japan
Most historians credit Japan with the folding fan. In 988 a Japanese monk sent folding fans to the Chinese emperor, and the Chinese called them 'Japanese fans'. Portuguese traders were probably the first to bring them to Europe, where Spain made them famous.
High heels
📍 Persia (Iran)
Heels began as riding footwear in Persia, where they helped horsemen keep their feet in the stirrups. Around 1600, as Shah Abbas's Persia caught Europe's eye, European men took up heels, and at Louis XIV's court red heels marked the privileged.
Manila shawl (mantón de Manila)
📍 Canton (Guangzhou) & Macau, China
Despite the name, Manila shawls were silk shawls embroidered in Canton (Guangzhou), China, for export. Ships carried them to Spain by way of Manila, and with their long silk fringes they became part of the flamenco dancer's costume.
Sari
📍 Indian subcontinent
A sari is one unstitched length of cloth, about 4 to 8 metres long, wrapped around the waist and draped over the shoulder. It grew out of an ancient Indian trio of a waist wrap, a shoulder cloth and a chest band; its name comes from Sanskrit for 'strip of cloth'.
Europe
Beret
📍 Western Pyrenees, France & Spain
The beret was the everyday hat of shepherds in the western Pyrenees, from the Ansó and Roncal valleys to Béarn. Workshops around Oloron-Sainte-Marie began making them commercially in the 1600s, and the world came to know it as the 'Basque beret'.
Blazer
📍 Cambridge, England
The first blazers were the bright red jackets of the Lady Margaret Boat Club, the rowing club of St John's College, Cambridge, founded in 1825. They were called blazers because of their blazing colour, and the name spread to other club jackets.
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Chelsea boots (elastic-sided)
📍 London, England
Pull-on boots with elastic sides were invented in Victorian London by J. Sparkes Hall, Queen Victoria's bootmaker, who boasted that she walked in them daily. They only became 'Chelsea boots' in the 1950s and '60s, when the King's Road crowd revived them.
Lederhosen (leather breeches)
📍 Bavarian & Austrian Alps
Leather breeches were once worn across Europe, but they lived on as work and hunting wear in the Alps of Bavaria and Austria. When even there they began to fade, a teacher founded a club in 1883 to save the local costume, and now they're Oktoberfest favourites.
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Necktie (cravat)
📍 Croatia (Habsburg Military Frontier)
The necktie goes back to the knotted neck scarves of Croatian soldiers serving in France during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Parisians copied them and named them 'cravates', after 'Croates'. Croatia now celebrates Cravat Day on 18 October.
Wellington boots (wellies)
📍 London, England
Wellies are named after the 1st Duke of Wellington, who had his London bootmaker, Hoby of St James's Street, rework the Hessian riding boot in the early 1800s. The first wellingtons were leather; waterproof rubber ones followed in the 1850s.
North America
Baseball cap
📍 Brooklyn, New York, USA
The baseball cap goes back to 1860, when the Brooklyn Excelsiors took the field in a rounded cap with a long peak; by 1900 the 'Brooklyn-style' cap had caught on. A latex stiffener added in the 1940s gave the modern cap its shape.
Mola (layered cut-cloth panel)
📍 Guna Yala (San Blas Islands), Panama
Guna women make molas by layering coloured cloth and cutting away shapes to reveal the colours below. The designs began as body painting and moved onto trade cloth in the 1800s; today molas decorate their blouses.
Navajo wearing blanket
📍 Navajo Nation (Arizona & New Mexico), USA
Before they made rugs, Navajo women wove striped wool blankets to wear around the shoulders. Plains peoples prized them: in 1850 one could cost $50 in gold. The switch to floor rugs came only after the railway reached Navajo land in the 1880s.
Polar fleece
📍 Lawrence, Massachusetts, USA
Polar fleece was developed in the late 1970s at Malden Mills, a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which turned its polyester baby-bunting fabric into a light, warm rival to wool. It was never patented, so fleece soon spread everywhere.
South America
Chullo (knitted hat with earflaps)
📍 Andes of Peru & Bolivia
The chullo, a knitted hat with earflaps, comes from the highlands of Peru and Bolivia. Andean knitters, who learned the craft from the Spanish, make it of alpaca, llama or sheep's wool; on Taquile Island in Lake Titicaca, chullo knitting is UNESCO-listed heritage.
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Panama hat
📍 Ecuador (Montecristi to Cuenca)
Panama hats are woven in Ecuador from toquilla palm straw. They got the wrong name because travellers, including Gold Rush prospectors crossing the isthmus, bought them in Panama. UNESCO listed the weaving craft in 2012.
Sombrero vueltiao (striped cane hat)
📍 Sinú & San Jorge valleys (Córdoba & Sucre), Colombia
The black-and-white sombrero vueltiao comes from the Zenú people of Colombia's Sinú and San Jorge valleys. It is braided from caña flecha cane, its name refers to the braid being turned round and round, and in 2004 it became a national symbol.
Oceania
Bilum (string bag)
📍 New Guinea (Papua New Guinea)
The bilum is a stretchy string bag that women in New Guinea loop by hand from bark fibre. Highland women wear it with the strap across the forehead and the bag down the back, hauling up to 20 kg of sweet potatoes, yams or firewood.
Feather cape (ʻahu ʻula)
📍 Hawaiian Islands
Hawaiian chiefs wore ʻahu ʻula, capes covered in tiny red and yellow feathers tied onto olonā-fibre netting. Kamehameha's great cloak is said to hold 450,000 feathers from about 80,000 birds; in 1779 a chief draped one over Captain Cook.
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Possum-skin cloak
📍 South-eastern Australia (Victoria, NSW & SA)
Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia wore cloaks of dozens of possum pelts sewn together with kangaroo sinew, with clan designs scored into the skin side and rubbed with ochre. Only a handful of cloaks made before 1900 survive.