Fashion Forward: rewriting history and place in Oceania

The opening pages of Joanne Entwistle’s book The Fashioned Body (2015) asks an intriguing question: does fashion refer only to dress and adornment found in capitalist modernity? If fashion is equated with regular and systemic change, is it only uniquely connected to the emergence of mercantile capitalism, the rise of bourgeois class culture and the emergence of cities in which to display clothing to an audience of other consumers? Does this mean that before capitalism people were un-fashionable? This paper attempts an aesthetic rewriting of fashion history from a Pacific perspective. It begins with the popularity of T-shirts and sarongs decorated with family events and island names and continues backwards to 1896, to a white shirt with a village name sewn upon it. This early object helps to apprehend fashion as an anticipatory social force that carries across time, place and divergent economies.