ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how whiteness intersects with the material histories of textiles, fashion and slavery in her analysis of textile as material culture in the long eighteenth century (1660–1820). Dress, according to Lemire, is a particularly powerful medium to analyse, as hierarchies were enacted, disputed and displayed in relation to dress and dressing. The chapter shows how the interaction of white fabrics and fashion in the Anglo Atlantic world effected a new racialised ordering of dress, aligned with the wider imperial project. In the imperial metropole, white garments became normalised within this schema, including racialised styles conceived as emerging from ‘classical’ heritage. Lemire combines material culture with critical whiteness theory and takes seriously the power of things, teasing out meanings arising from objects and object systems. Fashions in textile and dress were part of the ‘interconnected global system’, and a contemporary challenge for scholars is therefore to bring museum collections of textiles and current histories in conversation with this wider narrative, illuminating the myriad roles of politicised commodities and the racialised strategies they served.
