Reading past dress fashions tradition towards modernity

Abstract

Fashion plays with time. It is the celebrated ‘tigers leap’ into the past in which the essence and relationship between fashion and modernity is identified. Fashion also represents the traditions which society followed. Traditions of a society reveal how things have changed. This paper studies past dress fashions described in poetic literature and recorded in several visual formats during the 16TH century Kotte period with a view to identifying salient dress features that have been assimilated by tradition and also seeks to investigate how it moved towards modernity with hybridization of several dress details and components In comparison to world dress fashions The study reveals that the Kotte period marked the culmination of an emerging novel fashion movement towards modernity. In addition to a deliberate attempt at design, the form and the structures were changed and organized by internal explicit design units such as pleating, knotting, folding, frilling, and tucking which made up a rich set of possible combinations. Data for this research was gathered from historical literary records, texts, and pictorial records from the two ivory caskets at present in the Munich Treasury, Germany, wood carvings from Rambawa Aludeniya temple, Gampola and two cloth paintings presently at the National Museum, Colombo. The qualitative research method was adopted for the study and a systematic sequence of observational studies was carried out to gather, sort and analyze data in a systematic manner. The research methods with procedure adopted, the research design, observation and procedure of data analysis have been included.