Children’s first words are remarkably consistent over languages and over time: They first talk about people (dada, mama), food (juice), body-parts (eye), clothing (sock), animals (dog), vehicles (car), toys (ball), household objects (key), routines (bye), and activities (uhoh, up). Their first productions emerge between 12 months and 24 months, and they attain some 50 words in production about 6 months later. Earlier claims about a vocabulary spurt may rather reflect increased motor skill that aids production. Do children learn to produce nouns before verbs? The proportions of nouns and verbs differ by context, e.g., toy play versus book reading. Spontaneous speech samples and parental checklists of vocabulary often differ. Overall, production lags behind comprehension. This leads to communicatively driven overextensions in production until 2;6 or so, as well as reliance on general purpose terms (do, go, that). As children add more words, they stop using earlier overextensions. Early word meanings are based on children’s existing conceptual and perceptual categories, based on their experience of the world so far. And as they take different perspectives, they begin to use of different words for the same referent (animal, dog, pug; do, mend).

Using consumption data, this chapter profiles in detail the arrival of China’s age of abundance, from improvements in diet, to clothing, housing, and transportation. It documents and establishes the arrival of China’s age of material abundance.

This section contains examples of four wills made by members of the laity, both men and women, at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. This is a genre of which many examples survive in local records and in episcopal registers. Here one can see the kind of things that people would leave to their relatives or to the poor, from domestic articles, often associated with their profession, and clothes, to sums of money.

Clothing and style are important aspects of heavy metal culture, used by musicians and fans to identify with the broader values and norms of the subculture, and to communicate difference from mainstream culture. Denim and leather garments are fundamental to metal wardrobes, with band t-shirts worn nearly universally to signify particular metal preferences. For serious metal fans, battle jackets offer a unique way to demonstrate musical taste and dedication to metal. A battle jacket is a customised denim jacket (usually with the sleeves removed) embellished with band patches, badges, studs, hand-painting and other additions. Jacket customisation has been practised by fans for nearly as long as heavy metal has existed, and thrives in contemporary metal subcultures, bolstered by online jacket forums and patch trading opportunities. Historically, battle jackets can be connected with WW2 bomber jackets and custom motorcycle patch vests. For fans, battle jackets offer a way to externalise their allegiance to metal and to reinforce a sense of ‘outsider’ status. The jackets also carry highly personal meanings for their wearers and help to articulate a sense of self that extends beyond recreational fandom.

Similarities in the imagery of Etruscan and Western Anatolian dress fashions, such as pointed shoes and Ionic chitons, indicate an obvious connection between the clothing systems of the two cultures. Indeed, Larissa Bonfante (2003) in her groundbreaking book Etruscan Dress classifies an “Ionian Phase” (550–475 BCE) in the development of the Etruscan clothing system. This chapter investigates the adaptation of Ionian dress items into the Etruscan dress repertoire through a comparative iconographic study of dress fashions in western Anatolia and Etruscan funerary art of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. After an overview of prevailing dress fashions in both cultures, it explores the specific case of shoes with upturned toes (Etruscan/Hittite shoes, as they are commonly known) to show the changing meanings and cultural connections the adopted dress items conveyed.

When we think of Tolstoy we picture a man who looks as far from a typical Russian nobleman as possible: bearded and wearing peasant-style clothes. This chapter examines the clothing choices Tolstoy made throughout his life and sets them in the contexts of imperial dress codes and his own thinking about Christianity and his place in the world. After Peter the Great introduced European dress for the nobility in the early eighteenth century, a large cultural divide developed between peasants and nobles. Tolstoy grew up wearing the clothing of the European elite while the peasants on his family estate wore more traditional Russian dress. However, in the 1860s Tolstoy began to wear a peasant-style beard and long, loose shirts, albeit made from more luxurious materials than were worn by the peasants themselves. Then, in the 1880s he began to make his own leather boots. This was all part of his broader philosophical project and attempt to lead a simpler, more Christian life. Though Tolstoy’s lifestyle choices often made things more difficult for his family, he nonetheless inspired many followers who imitated his dress style.

This chapter examines the relationship between Wallace’s writing and works of visual art. Beginning with the many moments of ekphrasis that punctuate the writing, ranging from myths of tapestry-weaving to Leutze’s mural of Manifest Destiny, encompassing Bernini and Escher in Infinite Jest alone, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace makes use of the language of images in his writing, situating narrative in conversation with visual culture and reaching beyond language to image, color and texture. Reflecting on prior scholarly attention to art positioned in Wallace’s writing, the chapter explores the connections between attention and aesthetic. The chapter also examines the ways in which visual cues appear in other ways in Wallace’s work, from the defecatory art of Brint Moltke in “The Suffering Channel” to the incidence of color as a motif throughout the work, specifically Wallace’s insistent references to clothing. The chapter highlights the materiality of these instances, attending to both the visual and the haptic elements of his narrative deployment of art in fictional worlds. This chapter works in concert with the next, delineating the intermediate nature of Wallace’s writing, poised between language, sense and image, and how his inclusion and occlusion of art recalibrate and reflect the relationships between author and reader.

Through an examination of scraps of clothing collected from the sites of lynching, this chapter theorizes the persistence of the reliquary object into the nineteenth- and twentieth-century South. The chapter focuses on the particularity of clothing as material objects capable of holding sensory and conceptual memories of the human body. This comes as part of a larger discussion of relics and reliquary cultures and builds on discourses on the Black male body from history, African American studies, and visual culture studies.

In these articles Black writers addressed the perceived need to create stable families and the consequences of not doing so.Most contributors to the Black press shared their larger societies' conviction that orderly, disciplined families were foundational to orderly, disciplined nations.They deemed efforts to reform sexual behavior and family relations even more essential for the Black population, who because of the vicissitudes of slavery and poverty found it especially difficult to constitute family units that fit the national ideal.The Black press included articles asserting that women and children should be governed by male patriarchs and calls for Black people to work toward racial improvement by investment in hygienic families.While some criticized the ways that conventions about honor and legitimacy harmed women who became pregnant outside of wedlock and illegitimate children, others condemned women who handed their children over to be servants in wealthy White households.Writers similarly debated whether Black parents (and by extension the Black community) had dedicated themselves sufficiently or correctly to the project of educating children.Some argued for limiting education to training in manual trades.Others complained that criticisms of the supposed failings of Black morality and education failed to recognize the great progress made by the community.

The Conradian fauna range from the albatross to the yearling and contain more than 150 different species of nonhuman animal. Despite the biodiversity, it is easy to overlook Conrad’s animals because they most frequently appear in metaphors and similes: at first sight, they lack agency, physical presence and independent meaning. But contrary to an articulated evaluative ideal of animal studies, Conrad’s animal metaphors invite reflection on human–animal relations, and demonstrate that an author can write attentively, sympathetically and thoughtfully on animals, despite primarily mentioning them in metaphors. The unreality effect, which I argue unites Conrad’s unconventional animal metaphors, confronts the reader to question the reality of the fictional construct. The unconventional sayings that produce this unreality effect all say: we have the appearance of a marginal, incidental detail but we are one of the most complicated structures in the text.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

This chapter traces the rise of consumer goods in Europe and its colonies between 1650 and 1800. Women and men consumed ever larger quantities of clothing, personal accessories, household furnishings, and colonial products. However, any claim that the growth of consumption was “revolutionary” must confront two powerful objections: (1) that there were strict social limits to the spread of new types of consumption; and (2) that the growth of consumption was less sudden than it appears, having roots in the urban life and court society of preceding centuries. Taking these objections seriously, the chapter argues that consumption grew most intensively among nobles, gentry, professionals, skilled artisans, and better-off farmers. Many peasants, unskilled laborers, migrants, and enslaved people were excluded from participating in the consumer boom. Consumption was also gendered, with women leading the way in the acquisition of clothing. In the Americas, where indigenous Americans, European-descended settlers, African-descended slaves, and free people of color interacted, heterogeneous forms of consumption proliferated. The hybridity of sartorial culture reflected degrees of agency and self-fashioning among different socioracialized groups. The growth of towns and the advent of royal courts had encouraged new forms of consumption before 1650, but Europe experienced a more thoroughgoing social transformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume of goods increased, their variety widened, and their social reach deepened.

In both his writings and appearance, Richard Wright was acutely attuned to the power of dress to convey meaning and build identity. From his early stories collected in Uncle Tom’s Children, where the clothed and naked bodies of young Southern Black men signify poverty, innocence and, to whites, danger, through his late novel, Savage Holiday, where the naked body of a white man precipitates chaos and disaster, Wright’s attention to clothing and to the naked and nude bodies of Black and white men and women—including his meticulous self-presentation as an expatriate writer in Paris—allowed him to explore how attire and style produced sensations of self. The rituals of dressing (Lawd Today), the temptations of naked skin revealed beneath robes and coats (Native Son, The Outsider), the forms of nudity (“Big Boy Leaves Home,” Savage Holiday), the class dimensions of clothing (Black Boy) serve to display psychological and sociological forces of race, gender, sexuality, and power.

This chapter focuses on the diversity and dialectal distribution of Spanish lexemes used to denote articles of clothing and related accessories. The fifteen entries are organized according to the relative level of synonymy displayed for each item: minimal, moderate, and extensive. The etymologies of the words in question are traced to their remotest known origins, after which the progress and change in these terms is described, including how many came to exist only in certain dialects of the language. Nation-specific word tallies appear at the end of each entry. Nation-specific word tallies appear at the end of each entry and a set of pedagogical questions is given at the end of the chapter.

Accepting that white and black soldiers were physically different meant that army commanders could treat them differently too. White soldiers were housed in the newest barracks and healthiest locations precisely because it was thought that black soldiers preferred, and indeed would thrive in, places too sickly for whites. If economies in diet or clothing needed to be made, it was generally thought that West India Regiment soldiers enjoyed living off the land and could easily cope without army rations, or complete uniforms. But it was the perceived ability of black soldiers to labour in tropical conditions that caused the most significant problems. Some unscrupulous commanders were willing to use the men as forced labour. This was not uncontested, some army commanders warned against it, and the men of the 8th West India Regiment mutinied in Dominica in 1802 as a direct result of being used, as they saw it, as slaves. The blame for this mutiny was eventually laid at the feet of abusive commanders, but differential treatment was clearly shaped by an understanding that white and black bodies were not the same.