Quite often when the word “armour” is mentioned in connection with a fashion collection or a specific garment, we instantly think about heavy Medieval or Renaissance armours, forgetting that nature can provide us with great construction materials. So let's look at three forms of natural armouring and at the meanings behind them.
The first is a fine cloak woven from muka (prepared fibre from the harakeke New Zealand flax plant) in the taniko style. Taniko is the name of the ornamental geometric border at the bottom of the cloak.
Cloaks like this were hand-made and sometimes decorated with dog hair or feathers. Master weavers - always female - maintained a close relationship with the Earth mother and knowledge was passed down from women to their daughters.
The Hunterian Museum in Glasgow has an internationally important collection of early Maori cloaks, many collected on the voyages of Captain Cook. Cloaks such as this were handed down from generation to generation. They carried the power of generations of chiefs, the mana, and were regarded as having a magic of their own. These early cloaks connect spiritually and culturally to the past and the Hunterian regularly welcomes Maori experts who study the cloaks so that the important values imbued in them inform the work of contemporary weavers.
The second example is a proper armour made with densely woven coconut fibre in Kiribati (ca. 1918) and preserved at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The low-lying coral atolls at Kiribati have few natural resources and this is an example of how the locals employ the materials available to them.
As well as being in plentiful supply, coconut plants were thought to possess special protective powers. Warriors used to solve disputes through duels and the armour was required to protect their bodies from the leathal blows that could be inflicted by the shark tooth weapons used in combat.
The third armour is the suit of the Burryman that we saw in a previous post in connection with Gareth Pugh's S/S 15 collection. This ancient ritual from the Scottish folk tradition (images courtesy of Frank Boyle) takes place every August in South Queensferry, near Edinburgh. A local man is covered from head to ankles in thousands of burrs (sticky flowerheads or seedheads of two species of burdock) that grow locally (the man impersonating the Burryman collects them for himself).
The stickiness of this natural Velcro armour doesn't allow him to walk properly, so he walks with his legs apart and arms held out, supporting them on poles decorated with flowers and helped by two attendants. As he walks around the town, the Burryman is given a drink of whisky through a straw by the people who meet him or at the pubs where he stops. The tradition probably harks back to pagan festivals of harvest and life, or to the Green Man Festival, and therefore the Burryman could be interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, regeneration and fertility.
What's interesting about these three armours is that, apart from radically transforming and physically protecting the wearers (though the Burryman has actually got to protect himself from the sticky plants by wearing several layers of clothing...), they also seem to grant them special powers that elevate them above the rest of the community.
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