Beginning in the 1550s, Hispanic King Philip II’s unmistakable style established the fashion of combining black robes with white ruffs. By the 1560s, some women, and especially men, adopted this fashion. In subsequent years high-ranking Christians around the world embraced courtly black. Among New World officials and nobles, it spread quickly. The Portuguese carried this fashion to their outposts in Goa and Macau. And by the early 1600s, some Japanese converts to Christianity like the samurai courtier Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga (支倉六右衛門常長) of Sendai, who travelled to Spain and the Vatican by way of Mexico, adopted the austere Spanish fashion.
Portrait of Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga
Portrait of Hasekura Rokuemon Tsunenaga, 1615, in prayer, wearing typical Habsburg court attire during his travels from Sendai to the Vatican (courtesy of Sendai City Museum).
Adrian Masters
Further reading
- Colomer, J.L., and A. Descalso (eds.) (2014) Spanish Fashion at the Courts of Early Modern Europe, vol. 2 (Madrid: CEEH).
- Contreras Sánchez, A. (1990) Historia de una tintórea olvidada: el proceso de explotación y circulación del palo de tinte, 1750–1807 (Mérida: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán).
- Cooper, M. (1974) Rodrigues the Interpreter: An Early Jesuit in Japan and China (New York, NY: Weatherhill).
- Elliott, J.H. (1990) Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Penguin Books).
- Harvey, J. (1995) Men in Black (New York, NY: Columbia University Press).
- Jarvis, M.J. (2010) In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World, 1680–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).
- McDonald, K.P. (2018) ‘“Sailors from the woods:” Logwood cutting and the spectrum of piracy’, in The Golden Age of Piracy: The Rise, Fall,and Enduring Popularity of Pirates, edited by Head, 50–74 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press).
- Netherton, R., and G.R. Owen-Crocker (eds.) (2007) Medieval Clothing and Textiles, vol. 3 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press).
- Pastoureau, M. (2008) Black: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
- Record, S.J., and R.W. Hess (1943) Timbers of the New World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
- Richmond Ellis, R. (2012) They Need Nothing: Hispanic-Asian Encounters of the Colonial Period (Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
- Roquero, A. (2006) Tintes y tintoreros de América (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura).
- Tiesler, V., and M.C. Lozada (eds.) (2018) Social Skins of the Head: Body Beliefs and Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press).
- Valentini, M.B. (1704) Museum Museorum, oder Vollständige Schau-Bühne aller Materialen und Specereyen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlegung Johann David Zunners).
