-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Christopher Hodson, Hilary Doda. Fashioning Acadians: Clothing in the Atlantic World, 1650–1750., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 499–500, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae608
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
The prospect of a history of fashion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Acadia practically seems to define the term “non-starter.” As Hilary Doda readily admits in the opening pages of Fashioning Acadians: Clothing in the Atlantic World, 1650–1750, whatever else observers wrote about that region’s Mi’kmaw natives and the French-speaking and mostly Catholic colonists known as Acadians, they agreed that none of them possessed anything approaching style. Remoteness, poverty, and rusticity, the sources suggest, guaranteed as much. In any case, since not a single stitch of clothing has survived from before the brutal deportation of the Acadians during the 1750s, the evidence to support any argument about fashion in Acadia appears not to exist.
And yet Hilary Doda’s well-researched study, rooted in clever interpretations of artifacts, texts, and images, teases fresh perspectives on Acadian sociability from the faint traces of colonial fashion that remain. Her sources consist primarily of objects for creating, manipulating, repurposing, and adorning cloth and clothing: beads, scissors, snips, pins, needles, thimbles, lacing rings, buttons, crucifixes, and so on. These have been recovered from four major archaeological sites scattered across Acadia: the Melanson site and the village of Belleisle, both within hailing distance of Port Royal/Annapolis Royal, capital of French Acadia and, after 1713, British Nova Scotia; Louisbourg, the French fortress and town on French-ruled Ile Royale (now Cape Breton Island); and Beaubassin, an Acadian settlement on the Siknikt/Chignecto isthmus that today links the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
