Contextualization of Traditional Clothing

Project No.: LU-BA-PG-2024/1-0023
Implementation period: 01.09.2024.–31.08.2025.
Project costs: EUR 61380.00
Project leader: Dr. art. Ieva Pigozne
 

Project provides a new understanding of traditional clothing and its context as a valuable source for interdisciplinary research of social history of poorly documented communities. Based on a systematic critical analysis of historiography, archival, and object-based studies, this interdisciplinary project integrates the approaches and methodology of dress history, ethnology, microhistory, and historical anthropology to contextualize traditional clothing.

The project will study the characteristics and context of traditional clothing in Riga worn until the 1840s, and how its influence reached Latgale, the farthest rural region of Latvia. To create a project proposal for further research that will investigate the role of local men, women, travelling merchants, and timber rafters in introducing innovations to clothing in rural areas, it will be important to find significant connections between the traditional dress of Latgalian peasants and the common Rigans: Latvian, German, Russian, and Jewish working people.

Hosted at the Institute of Latvian History, University of Latvia, this project will rely on a scrutinized analysis of rarely researched sources from the collections of the National History Museum of Latvia, Museum of the History of Riga and Navigation, Ethnographic Open-air Museum, Academic Library, Repository of Ethnographic Material, as well as other memory institutions.

Keywords: Traditional clothing, traditional dress, context, social history, Riga, 18^th century, 19^th century