From Darmopyszka to Chopionka, or the Identity Significance of Clothing in Upper Silesia in the Era of Industrialization

Abstract

At the end of the 18th century, Upper Silesia began a process of dynamic cultural changes associated with the development of industry. Everyday culture, including every day and festive clothing, began to be impacted by the contact between agrarianism and industrialism. A significant time caesura in the evolution of the forms and functions of clothing worn in Upper Silesian rural and working-class communities was the second half of the 19th century, when the influence of urban fashion (also known as “lordly” fashion) became increasingly expansive. At that time, various types of clothing, especially festive folk costumes, ceased to be purely regional artifacts, differentiating the inhabitants of individual local communities, but became an important identity message, used as a weighty argument in the nationality discourse. However, despite efforts to preserve and perpetuate the tradition of wearing folk costumes at the turn of the 20th century, the process of their apparent marginalization and change of function began: from a common festive garment to a type of costume worn only in certain circumstances, especially ceremonial ones. Outside of relic rural communities, this process had different dynamics for male costumes, which disappeared faster, and female costumes, which survived longer. The most vivid example (vital at least until the 1970s, and endemically even later), which had nothing to do with the establishment of folk costume or any attempts at reconstruction, was the clothing worn on a daily basis and on holidays by the so-called chopionki, i.e. women who never donned clothes that conformed to current fashion, but wore different variations (depending on the circumstances) of skirts (kiecka), aprons (fortuch), apron skirts (zopaska), headscarves and jaklas (jackets). The chopionski did not have a sense of fashion anachronism; on the contrary, their attire was a testament to their attachment to what was familiar and indigenous.

Nowadays, folk costumes (diverse in form and provenance) in the cultural reality of the former Upper Silesian industrial district are present in several variants, among which, as it were, at two poles is the use of surviving ancestral folk costumes or their faithful replicas, reconstructed with great care, and the much more popular donning of festive folk costumes inspired especially by the Rozbark costume. This is not a symbol of national or social choices as in the times of industrialization, but a sign of attachment to regional heritage, and even a kind of ethnic marker indicating the vitality of local cultural traditions and the need to cultivate the tangible and intangible heritage of Upper Silesia.