Pareo, A Print Odyssey: Part I
This is taken from the essay “Pareo Print Narrative” — part of the RISD Museum’s collection along with samples of this print.
I am indebted to Dale Hope who brought a wealth of knowledge in his generous conversations with me.
Pareu History
(Pareu and pareo are respectively the French and English versions of the same Tahitian word pāreu.)
Pareus are large pieces of fabric used as a unisex clothing in Tahiti and other parts of Polynesia. Before European contact, pareus were made out of kapa/tapa, a barkcloth fabric, and dressing in it had complicated ritual and gender specific functions (see here). Pareu also refers to a type of simplified, knocked out floral print. So, a pareu can be a wrap or a print, or both things at once. They are closely identified with Tahiti but can also be used to represent Polynesian-ness.
In the 1700s European traders brought pareu print cotton cloth as trade goods to the Tahitian islands and other parts of Polynesia. Because these cotton items could withstand rain, unlike tapa/kapa, they were readily adopted. The origin of the prints themselves is not completely clear. It is probable that these prints were developed specifically for trade in the Pacific in England and France:
“The men all wear pareos of Manchester cotton stuff, prepared expressly for these isles, and of the most wonderful patterns. Those most in favour are bright crimson with a large white pattern, perhaps groups of red crowns on circles of white, arranged on a scarlet ground, or else rows of white crowns, alternating with groups of stars…and though they certainly sound " loud " when thus described, they are singularly effective. It is wonderful what a variety of patterns can be produced, not one of which has ever been seen in England.”
—Lady Constance Gordon-Cumming, Scottish explorer/painter, 1878
And from a recent article on Pareus…
“The earliest pareu had a specific design of white leaves and flowers printed on a darker background of red or blue. Nothing about those patterns were traditional to the South Seas region..they were more akin to what might have been used for upholstery, curtains, or wallpaper in Europe.”
These prints also have a gendered component in the western colonial imagination as a “wrapper” for a potentially unwrappable “polynesian maiden,” connoting sexual availability.
These prints have a complex, problematic history and at the same time they are visually stunning. I have an incredible admiration for them and the designers who made them.
Although there are no hard rules for pareo/u prints they are typified by the following features:
Knocked out simplified floral motif on a primary color ground- red or blue
Originally made of cotton, now made of rayon
Styles change over time with the early examples being bands of knocked out florals, then moving into an all over repeat as printing technology became available.
Styles also evolve to match the tastes of that time of manufacture: large Art Nouveau florals typify the early prints (perhaps indicative of French origin); 1950s versions use smaller scale all over prints and have some classic MCM atomic shapes (ironic given the nuclear testing done in the region); 1970s versions look more psychedelic etc.
Frustratingly, I have not been able to find actual material samples of the print, or documentation on the origin of the print, such as a fabric sample book. All I have are photographic representations.
Author and textile historian Dale Hope, who is completing a book on these prints, has also been unable to locate original samples of the actual prints in archives or find out exact manufacturing origin.
My speculation is these trade goods were too humble to be documented by their manufacturers.
The Hawaiian Pareo print: Duke’s Pareu
These prints were brought into Hawaiʻi in the 1930s and integrated into fashion there too. Pareo prints were used on shirts, dresses and other aloha wear goods.
Possibly the most beloved example in Hawai’i is “Duke’s Pareu” (Duke Kahanamoku) developed for Kahala Shirts in 1960.
The designer of this iconic aloha print is Avi Kiriaty. He’s Israeli, grew up on a kibbutz, lived first in a cabin in New Hampshire as a young adult, and then moved to Hawaiʻi. Hawaiʻi has always been a fertile place for cultures to meet, particularly in print design and fashion.
My Motivation
I wanted to find the “source” of this print type and return it to how it “originally” looked. From the start I understood these prints are both deeply Tahitian and not Tahitian simultaneously. They belong to the place and are also an imposition on that place. I was looking for an “origin point” while I also understood that as a mythic construction to buttress the modernist concept of progress. This quote by Susan Stewart from her seminal work on the souvenir comes to mind.
“[Nostalgia] is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to history… and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a particularly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past…”
I imagined myself creating that “future-past” for these prints. I imagined an alternate reality where this work wasn’t disregarded as kitsch. Where it entered the cannon as an erudite discussion of postcolonial thought. Unlike the horrid, actual reality where these prints (and all other fashion prints) are mostly cheaply churned out on non-biodegradable fabrics to satisfy a market need with little thought to design, sustainability or history.
I was going to change everything with this one pareo print!
But as I did more research it turned out these pareo prints were always cheaply made and fairly thoughtlessly designed. It was my mistake, my misunderstanding. I was wearing the rose colored glasses of nostalgia.
I felt unsettled, as nostalgia was making me an accomplice to a very complicated history. I came across Svetlana Boym’s essay:
“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one…it can create a phantom homeland…Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition…”
Boym goes on to delineate two types of nostalgia: “restorative” nostalgia that attempts “ to conquer and specialize time” and “reflective” nostalgia that “cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space.”
“Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another... ”
All was not lost.
This Lucien Gathier’s 1910 postcard (to the side/above) explicates Boym’s concept of nostalgic mourning. The model’s heavily staged body typifies a “paradise lost” theme. It’s a “regret narrative” by and for people who benefit from their privileged place in the colonial power structure. (See O’Brien’s Firsting and Lasting)
In a nutshell, the colonial power bemoans the loss of “purity” (racial, environmental, etc) that colonization caused, de-historicizes its subjects (so they have no agency), and forces them to pantomime this mourning as a representation of indigenity.
The 1889 Exposition Universelle
The promise of a French Polynesian as “eden” was popularized at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was what gave Gaugin the idea to go to Tahiti.
“The exhibits at the fair gave the impression that these new worlds were ones Europeans could simply stroll into. The way the exhibits were set up gave the idea that one could go from “one ‘colony’ to another, from one exotic spectacle of sight, sound, and smell to another [and] assured visitors of the Other’s distinctive difference and also extended the promise of seamless entry into the Other’s world.”
Gurley, Madison. The Myth of Tahiti
Integral to the colonialist project was to get French citizens (men) to settle in Tahiti. Sexually objectified representations of Tahitian women (by French men) played a crucial role in this effort. Popular culture amplified these representations, creating a toxic, misogynistic feedback loop.
It should be no wonder that Tahiti was a disappointment for Gaugin, and I’m sure countless other Westerners. Tahiti was a real place with real people that you couldn’t “seamlessly enter” into and was not a hedonistic, untouched, uncivilized paradise. In the 1890s Gauguin wrote, with equal measures of self pity and self aggrandizement, about Tahiti:
“it was all over – nothing but civilized people left. I was sad, coming so far … Shall I manage to recover any trace of that past … the present had nothing to say to me. [I wish] to get back to the ancient hearth, revive the fire.”
These Tahitian postcards are inherently cynical artifacts. They are a sleight of hand.
These women in “native” dress were actually wrapped in trade goods imported from Europe. The photographer controls the entire narrative, he dresses the subject in a cloth of the photographer’s imported culture, he poses them in a way to naturalize a colonialist narrative of passivity and sexual availability, and he sells these images back to its European audience as a souvenir of the exotic and authentic.
Echoes of this reverberate in how Tahitians choose to represent themselves. And in how other cultures perceive Tahiti.
It is soul crushing looking at these cheap erotic postcards for the print and “looking around” the topless objectified women. About six months into the process I was about to abandon the design.
A footnoted version of this text is available.
Sources
Boym, Svetlana “Nostalgia” Atlas of Transformation, Odehnal, Martin, tranzit, 2011.
Cheung, Alexis “The Pareu, Uncovered.” 2018. Halekulani Living. July 5, 2018.
Gordon Cumming, C. F. (Constance Frederica). A Lady's Cruise in a French Man-of-war. William Blackwood and Sons, 1882. Accessed through the Internet Archive.
Gurley, Madison. 2015. The Myth of Tahiti: Breaking Colonial Confines and Finding the Subaltern Voice through a Revival of Traditional Art Forms. University of Colorado, Boulder.
Hamm, Catharine “Alfred Shaheen’s Influence beyond the Hawaiian Shirt.” Los Angeles Times. October 21, 2012.
Hope, Dale. The Aloha Shirt: Spirit of the Islands. Patagonia Works, 2016.
Jones, Laura “The Pareu.” Artistic Heritage in a Changing Pacific. John, Philip, and Roger G Rose. Honolulu (Ill.): University Of Hawaii Press, Cop. 1993.
O’Brien, Jean M. Firsting and Lasting:Writing Indians out of Existence in New England. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993
Traxler, Rika. Clothing the Un-clothed: The Evolution of Dance Costumes in Tahiti and Rarotonga. California State University, Northridge. December 2011.
Zilboorg, Anna. Knitting for Anarchists. Unicorn Books. January 2002
Photo Sources
“Max Du Pont, A. S. C. Off to Tahiti For Long Rest” American Cinematographer 4 no. 11 ( February 1924 ): 22. “Vitacolor is Born” American Cinematographer 9 no.6 (September 1928): 17. ”Roster” American Cinematographer 32 no. 1 (January 1951): 24 Bopp du Pont photo archive, Bibliothèque universitaire de l'Université de la Polynésie française
Houles, Pierre “The Problem of Chu Chu Malave.” Esquire Magazine (February 1974): 75.
Young girl from Rimatara Island. Drawing by E. Ronjat, based on a photograph 1885. Les Belles Tahitiennes - Pure Caste.1906 Tahitian family, illustration from 'Tahiti', published in London, 1882 Portrait de trois Marquisiennes Photo: Arthur Ekström 1886 Mediatheque Historique de Polynesie
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