The three piece suits and the interest in modern history

Jack Robinson in Miss Fisher's
Murder Mysteries

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

~ L.P. Hartley

When I tell people I am an archaeologist, I usually get an entusiastic answer that they have an interest in history too. This is always wonderful to hear and I start to elaborate about my interest in the Vikings and the Vasa era. Then, however, almost everyone start to retract their answer a bit, saying they meant that they are only really interested in the latest 200 or so years.

This has for a long time made me extremely confused since I do not see any differences between modern history and earlier ones. In fact, I have longed find the 20th century quite boring. It was not until I got into imperialism and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries that I found something that actually interested me in the 19th and 20th century.

Because there are so much talk about fashion in the fandom of the latter, I thought they would enjoy seeing the Sture costumes (photo below), which are the only more or less completely preserved male renaissance costumes in the world today. However, the ones I have shown, have almost always said that they are not the least bit interested, because the perfect male clothing is the three piece suits. They claim that it's the only male clothing that enhance the male body.

There is nothing wrong with liking a modern male suit of course, but I cannot help but thinking there is a clue to people's preferences towards modern history in there.

The Sture costumes

Professionally, I work a lot with postcolonial theory in relation to Vikings as well as colonial narratives of history. There are a lot of things one can say about those theories and I can well understand the criticism that has been raised towards them, but at the same time, I also think they are thoughtprovoking in what they have to say.

Postcolonialism is really an umbrella term for theoretical standpoints based on colonial issues and the most important of the postcolonial theories for this blogpost is the thoughts about the creation of "The Other" that Edward Said deals with in his famous book Orientalism from 1978.

Said's thoughts deals with how the Western world tends to create stereotypes about the area in Asia and Northern Africa which usually goes by the name the Orient and that these stereotypes are created from a Western world view. This means that one has been very biased and onesided in portrayals of the societies and cultures of the Oriend, not least to legitimize imperialism. This has also created a hierarchy of cultures where the Western world has always been on the highest level and seen as the measurement for all other societies.

There is a clear tendency to view the Enlightenment as a breaking-point in history. A time where the modern society was created for real and then it became truely modern with the industrialism. Modernism is also very much based in the here and now and tend to have a small interest in the past. Can this be why we have a harder time to related to earlier history? From a Swedish perspective, there are Vikings of course, but the "real" history is often said to start with the king Gustav Vasa in what is known as the Early modern period (or the Premodern Period). The name of the period itself is quite interesting in this case too since it seems to depart in modernism and is often more or less seen as a long runway towards the Enlightenment.

This sort of shallow view of time is evident in Swedish ethnologists's interest too. Inger Lövkrona does not even go as far as Gustav Vasa in the 16th century and instead claim that the the premodern timeperiod starts with the Swedish Empire Era (Stormaktstid) in the 17th century. She also describes the premodern time as being qualitatively and structuraly different than the modern one in her article Hierarki och makt - den förmoderna familjen som genusrelation (1999:20).

I love ethnology and anthropology's perspective of societies and cultures, but for an archaeologist, the shallow time frame appears very strange and evolutionistic. Lövkrona's description of premodern cultures however is interesting in that it claims that our own society appears (suddenly from what it seems) from the industrialisation. That means it is not until then we can relate to people in the past.

I started this blog post with a quote from L.P. Hartley about historical individuals being different in the same way that foreign cultures are for us today. This has been paraphrased by Douglas Adams who said that people in the past is living in a foreign country since they act like us. I think they are both right and I think it is really important for us to realize that people in the past are both like us and not like us at the same time. Just as people of different cultures are for us today and I think one can learn a lot about this similarities and differences among living people of today, but studying them in the past. In the global world we live in, we need to be able to feel empathy and connections to people differnt from ourselves as well as for those similar to us. And it is not so easy to dismiss the more distant past. Quick breakups in history are seldom as quick when studied more closely and it all has to do with ones perspective. Modernity (and the Enlightenment) wanted to see itself as the beginning of something new and totally different and the older past was therefore viewed as less valued and an "Other" was created about it. A perspective we still seem to have today.

Children's scribbles?

I recently found what looks like children's scribbles in Kristina Gyllenstierna's Book of Hours from the 16th century (collage to the left) and I could not feel more delighted. They lived 500 years ago in a completely different world than myself, but I feel such a strange connection to them and the fact that some behaviours are really timeless.

But what about the three piece suits then? Is that not a matter of different taste? Well, taste is also quite a lot connected to culture even though we do not think about it so much. The three piece suit is not only a piece of clothing either. It is, and has been since the industrialisation, a symbol of power and status.

And the Sture costumes can also show a lot of their owners's figures. Svante Sture's for example indicate that he was a short and stout little man. His story is a bit tragic because he lost most of his family due to the wars between Denmark and Sweden and spent his early childhood in Danish prison where a lot of his family and friends died. This has me wondering if he was not malnourished which often results in children ending up shorter than they should otherwise. He might also have had an eating disorder because malnourishment in children often ends up with them getting a disrupted sense of food. Despite all this, I cannot help wondering if there ever has been a piece of fashion enhancing "masculinity" as well as the codpiece...

• Lövkrona, Inger 1999. Hierarki och makt - den förmoderna familjen som genusrelation, i: Familj och kön. Etnologiska perspektiv. red: B. Meurling, B. Lundgren & I. Lövenkrona, Lund, s19-39