Pandemic Fashions, or the Historical Inequality of It All

In this chapter, I take a critical view of both fashion history and the approaches to fashion history that are widespread in fashion studies, by recognizing some factors that, although probably known to many at some level, yet are often left out or quickly passed, or even glossed over. I seek to retell parts of the ‘European’ fashion narrative by recognising complex trans-regional influences. The lens I use to do so is that of historical pandemics, namely the Black Death of 14th century Eurasia, the Cocoliztli in central America of the 16th century, the world-wide Spanish Flu of the early 20th century, and the global Covid pandemic of the early 21st century. Pandemics have had profound socio-economic trans-regional influences on fashion, going well beyond obviously visible and temporary changes only. Epidemics never treat people equally, and this is certainly so in terms of their effects on fashion phenomena. Pandemics are also always narrated from a point of view, and this point of view is often of those who either suffered less under, or came eventually to gain from the consequences of, the disease. Furthermore, in pandemic times, people like looking back in history, presumably to ‘learn from the past’, but often simply making feeble comparisons, assimilating situations that in reality were and are not similar. By focussing on structural long-term changes in fashion systems, I seek to avoid the twin traps of focusing on superficial phenomena only, and of making unsound comparisons between pandemics. By developing an account of the interplay between fashion and disease, I attempt to bring new considerations to bear on how fashion history is carried out, as well as to consider how its lessons may be put to work in order to understand in novel manners how global and trans-regional sartorial fashion has come to be the way it is today.