Scarves marked Chinese officers centuries before runway looks
A scarf is fabric for neck, shoulders or head—warmth, sun, fashion, faith or team colors. Nefertiti supposedly wore a tight headscarf around 1350 BC; Ashurnasirpal II’s ninth-century BC statue shows a shawl. Under China’s First Emperor Cheng (259–210 BC), scarves flagged warrior rank among terracotta figures.
Ancient uses were varied. Athenian women around 500 BC used scarves to heighten their allure, and Indian women of the same era wore them playfully on the head. In Rome around AD 10 the focale or sudarium, literally a sweat cloth, served men for mopping the face and neck in hot weather, worn at the throat or tied to a belt. In the 1200s Egyptian belly dancers tied a scarf-like band low on the hips to accent their movements.
The necktie grew out of a military scarf. In 17th-century Croatia soldiers of every rank wore one, officers in silk and the rest in cotton, and Croats serving as mercenaries with the French had their neckcloths dubbed cravates, the French word for Croat. During the Revolution, French men and women wore scarves in colours that signalled their politics. Napoleon bought Egyptian scarves for Josephine, who is believed to have amassed over 400 of them in three years at a cost of about £80,000, and weavers in Paisley, Scotland, soon began making their own. By the early 19th century the scarf was firmly a fashion item for both sexes.
American women in both world wars knitted scarves for troops as a patriotic duty, and pilots wore them against the cold of altitude, to keep exhaust smoke out of their mouths, and to stop their necks chafing as they scanned for enemies. Hermès modelled its silk scarves on those of Napoleon's soldiers, and Grace Kelly wore one; Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall followed on screen, and Madonna used one to tame her perm in the 1980s.
Religious and ceremonial variants abound: the Tibetan white khata offered as a gift, the Anglican black silk scarf, the blue or purple Masonic procession scarf, the Scout neckerchief that doubles as a sling. British and Irish students wear two-metre Saxony-wool college scarves, and football fans, who took up club scarves in the early 1930s, hold them overhead in a scarf wall while singing anthems like "You'll Never Walk Alone."
Source: Scarf
