The Fashion Police vs Free Black Women in 18th Century Cape Town

Pocket watching in 18th century Cape Town was out of hand

Imagine looking so good that it becomes illegal. Despite the excess of wealth, glamour and spectacle available to the settler elite in 18th century Cape Town, their biggest sartorial competition came from the 118 emancipated women of colour in the Dutch Cape Colony. In 1765, sumptuary laws were introduced, prohibiting these women from coloured silks, fine laces, adorned bonnets and even fake jewellery so that they could not visually appear equal to (or, more honestly, better than) their European counterparts.

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Sumptuary laws weren’t a new concept to the Colony at this time. Economic and social mobility was much easier in the colonies than in their homelands and formerly lower and working-class settlers found themselves in fierce contests of conspicuous consumption with high-ranking officials and families of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) I’ve previously discussed this Gossip Girl-esque drama in a YouTube video while talking through the expenditure and lifestyles of select VOC and burgher women at the time but in the latest episode of Clothes Minded, we’re going a little deeper into the lives of their Free Black counterparts.

Even on such matters as dress, the settlers wished to curtail the activities of freed slave women. In 1765 the local authorities took notice of the tiny contingent of the colony's 118 free black women, who by their dress, placed "themselves not only on a par with other respectable burghers' wives, but often pushed themselves above them". The all-male Political Council, perhaps prompted by settler women, deemed such behaviour "unseemly and vexing to the public"; henceforth no free black women were to appear in public in coloured silk clothing, hoop skirts, fine laces, adorned bonnets, curled hair or even earrings. Emancipated female slaves in everyday aspect were ordered to wear no other material but chintz and striped cotton and "being well-behaved, if christened, [or] married and at other occasions in church, [to wear] a habit (kledje) of black silk." (Shell, 1994)

I’ve searched high and low for images of these women in this specific period of 1750-1770 and since my results have yielded nothing, last year I attempted some experimental archaeology and recreated my own version. I took inspiration from the dress of working-class women in Europe to put together a shift, petticoat and jumps look and then, for the headwear, I opted for a tignon style headwrap as seen on contemporary Afro-Carribbeans of the time in Agostino Brunias paintings. I managed to find a floral shweshwe which is not only in line with popular 18th-century Indian chintz but is produced here in South Africa by Da Gama Textiles. Everything else is a plain cotton—all the fabrics were purchased from Chamdor.

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We’ll probably never know exactly what these women of Asian and African descent wore and did that could demand legal intervention but the existence of these sumptuary laws reveals to us not only the access they possessed but perhaps some insight into how they held onto their indigenous culture and found ways to humanise themselves.

An illustration of Greenmarket Square depicts enslaved people performing various duties, by Johannes Rach, c. 1764, via GroundUp

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References:
(For my notes and highlighted sections, visit my Patreon)

Coetzee, L.-M. (2015) Fashion and the world of the women of the VOC official elite. dissertation. School for Basic Sciences, Vaal Triangle Campus, North-West University. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/54196858.pdf (Accessed: 09 October 2024).

Emancipation – slavery in South Africa (no date) Iziko Museums of South Africa. Available at: https://slavery.iziko.org.za/slaveemancipation/ (Accessed: 09 October 2024).

Ross, R. (1999) Status and Respectability in the Cape Colony, 1750-1870: A Tragedy of Manners. Cape Town, Western Cape: Cambridge University Press.

Shell, R. (1994) Tender ties: Women and the slave household. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/8766826.pdf (Accessed: 2022).

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