So announced Filippo Pigafetta in a passage on “the clothing of that people, before they became Christians, and after” in his 1591 Account of the Kingdom of Kongo and Surrounding Lands, Based on the Writings and Words of the Portuguese Duarte Lopez. A Portuguese merchant who spent 1578–83 in west Central Africa, Lopez then served as envoy of King Alvare I of Kongo to papal Rome, where he met and frequently conversed with the Italian Pigafetta, himself a one-time papal emissary; out of these meetings was born the Account. Lopez was one of many European merchants, missionaries, and travelers who reported on the lifeways of the diverse peoples with whom they came in contact across the nascent Atlantic world. Some of their works were sketchy, superficial, filled with errors and fabrications. Others, however, were discerning, richly detailed, proto-ethnographic expositions, frequently accompanied by engravings that illustrated or supplemented the text. Despite inaccuracies, omissions, and blind spots, writings of the latter type make it possible to delineate Atlantic dress regimes just as movement and exchange began to intensify throughout the basin from the early seventeenth century.

Dress encounters: cues and codes

The authors of these works had good reason to comment upon dress. Readers expected information about commercial possibilities in newly explored regions, particularly for goods like apparel textiles that had long been valuable and valued trade commodities. Their own experience, moreover, had taught Europeans that social and cultural cues and codes were woven into clothing, adornments, and their deployment. Hence knowledge about dress practices would yield insight into such crucial matters as class and gender structures, receptivity to unfamiliar religious, diplomatic, and material influences, and level of development of peoples previously unknown to them.