The Origins of the Dirndl: Textile Printing and Global Dependencies
Jutta Wimmler
BCDSS Research Group Leader
The “traditional” Austrian and Bavarian women’s dress has its origins in the early modern period and is connected to American plantations and European expansion. The characteristic patterns of the skirts and aprons developed with the rise of textile printing in Europe, and depended on dyeing materials extracted by enslaved laborers.
In the fifteenth century, Columbus “discovered” America and Vasco da Gama circumvented the African continent and reached India. This had a profound impact on European material culture, especially in the textile sector. Indian artisans were much more skilled than Europeans in creating beautifully colored fabrics. Europeans first imported them, and later tried to imitate them with the help of expert migrant workers, especially from Armenia. This led to a major technological breakthrough in the seventeenth century: the development of textile printing. Before this development, European artisans usually wove or stitched colorful patterns onto cloth. Printing works differently: patterns are applied to a piece of cloth with a wooden (later a copper) block on which the pattern is engraved. While this seems simple, it actually required the creation of high-quality dyes that would fuse permanently with the fiber – otherwise the color would quickly disappear when the cloth was washed or exposed to the sun. Textiles printed in the “Asian style” in Europe were usually cheaper than the original Asian imports, so more people could afford them. The reason such prints were cheap in the early modern period is that Europeans had easy access to the raw materials needed for it – the dyeing materials primarily came from the newly “discovered” Americas and from Africa and were extracted by enslaved laborers.
Fig. 1: Ausseer Dirndl (drawing: A. Schüssler, 2024).
The “traditional” women’s dress in Austria and Bavaria – the dirndl – was originally a textile print. Today, they are no longer produced this way, but if you visit Altaussee in Styria, home to one of the most famous Austrian dirndls, you can still see wooden blocks showcased in some shops. Dirndl fabrics were usually a special subvariety of textile prints, called reverse or resist printing.
Further Reading
Chassagne, Serge, 2003. “Calico in Printing in Europe Before 1780.” In David Jenkins (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Textiles Vol. I, 513–28. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Edwards, Eiluned, 2019. “Indian Block Printing: Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Across Time and Place.” In Kim Siebenhüner, John Jordan, and Gabi Schopf (eds.), Cotton in Context: Manufacturing, Marketing, and Consuming Textiles in the German-speaking World 1500–1900, 61–87. Cologne: Böhlau.
Riello, Giorgio, 2010. “Asian Knowledge and the Development of Calico Printing in Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of Global History 5: 1–28.