ABSTRACT
Dress was one of the most visible mechanism through which their commodification and the negation of their individuality and ethnicity was accomplished. The enslaved deployed a variety of formal and informal means to access clothing. Focusing on the procedures in place for the supply of apparel to the enslaved does more than illustrate the features of one provisioning system. After 1731, when transatlantic shipments of enslaved Africans to Louisiana halted, attention veered away from matters of life and death pertaining to the high mortality rate of those who were made to undergo the middle passage. There is limited information about the origins of textiles and clothing sent to Louisiana for the use of slaves. Fundamentally, slave clothing was about the politics of subjugation and control; but from the outset, officials and slave owners framed it primarily as a functional need.
