National Dress: Preserving the Past, Fashioning the Future

Woman in German national dress, from a photograph album of the Middle East and Europe, 1876.

Asia and Africa were not the only places nineteenth-century European tourists went to observe cultures that were, from their perspective, exotic. Europe itself had much to offer. Large parts of the continent, including the Alps, the Balkans, Scandinavia, and Britain’s “Celtic fringe,” had once been nearly inaccessible to all but the most daring traveler. Now that these areas could be reached by rail and steamship more quickly and easily than ever before, they began to show up on travelers’ itineraries.

As elsewhere, visitors purchased the work of commercial photographers—largely staged scenes—as souvenirs. A common subject of tourist photos taken in Europe was national dress (also called folk costume, ethnic dress, or traditional garment). This distinctive clothing seldom failed to catch travelers’ attention, but how often did people from outside the community fully understand why locals wore it?

Though the nineteenth century saw the growth of European empires overseas, at home the old system of imperial rule was, overall, falling into decline, especially in areas of central and southeastern Europe still under Habsburg or Ottoman control. For Greeks, Slavs, Hungarians, Italians, and other groups that did not have their own ethnically defined state, clothing was among the ways they unified themselves and declared their opposition to their Austrian and Turkish overlords.

In Germany, too, national dress served to forge a common identity; there, however, the goal was to create an empire rather than to take one apart. Prior to the unification of the region as the German Empire (or Second Reich) in 1871, there was no single German state, only a complicated patchwork of small, independently governed territories. Long-term political unity, it was recognized, would depend on cultural unity. To achieve this, Germany turned to art, music, literature, historiography, and a new vision of Das Volk (“the people”) to shift loyalty from the local to the national and, tragically, to the differences between German and non-German. Consequently, photographs of Germans in traditional dress represented more than nostalgia. They also interested tourists as a performance of the “national character” of the new German Empire.

Colorful costumes had an economic benefit as well. The Industrial Revolution and growth of overseas empires brought prosperity to many, but at the same time, it drew people away from rural areas to work in urban factories or move abroad. Together with other cultural attractions, traditional garments helped to lure tourists to areas where old ways of earning a living were becoming harder and harder. In other words, national dress was commodified in response to the changing economy. Like the Tlingit Indians of southeastern Alaska, who allowed Septima Collis to "Kodak” them for a silver dollar, rural Europeans sometimes turned to their own native garb to part tourists from their money.

Folklorist Henry Glassie defines tradition as “the creation of the future out of the past” and history as “not the past” but “the artful assembly of materials from the past, designed for usefulness in the future.” Tourist photographs of national dress are evidence of how tradition was kept alive not for its own sake, but to fashion a secure future.