Kerchiefs, Scarves, and Ribbons: The 19th-Century Global Textile Trade and the Shaping of Taste in Rural Europe

In my research, I investigate the circulation of textile patterns in nineteenth-century Europe, focusing on how rural societies engaged with expanding cultural and economic networks and became active participants in nation-building processes. As carriers of new visual forms, textiles shaped cultural identities more rapidly than many other communication media, particularly in predominantly rural societies.

This circulation coincided with broader economic transformations, such as the abolition of serfdom, which accelerated the monetisation of labour and expanded rural purchasing power. Aesthetically, industrial textiles were especially appealing: vivid colours and pre-fabricated patterns replaced time-consuming domestic handwork, offering rural populations an accessible way to embellish clothing. Within relatively stable rural social structures, expanding networks of textile traders facilitated the gradual adoption of these goods, which were reconfigured into distinctive markers of group-based cultural identity. By the first half of the nineteenth century, political elites increasingly appropriated this evolving visual culture for nation-building purposes, embedding textiles within symbolic narratives designed to engage broader social strata.

Methodologically, I combine historical research with advanced digital humanities tools. I apply visual recognition techniques, including convolutional neural networks such as VGGNet, within machine learning frameworks like PyTorch to a large corpus of textile imagery. This approach allows me to conduct systematic, comparative analyses of visual materials from ethnographic and textile museums, uncovering previously untraceable patterns of influence and mapping the cultural and economic exchanges across Europe.