Traditional clothes

The clothing set today commonly defined by the expression “popular costume of Sardinia” is the result of long and complex dynamics of transformation and re-functionalization that occupied the period between the 16th century and ended at the end of the 19th century.

The most important eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century travelers (J. Fuos, W. Smith, the Frenchman A.C. Pasquin known as Valery, A. Bresciani, etc.) in their accounts praise, admired, of the magnificence of Sardinian clothes and jewelry. Some works are illustrated by the same author, such as Les îles oubliées (1893) by Valery, others accompanied by plates made by draftsmen and painters, such as the lithographs attached to the Atlas of La Marmora created by G. Cominotti and E. Gonin, published for the first time in 1826.

Precious from a documentary point of view are additional period iconographic sources on Sardinian folk clothing: from the plates of the Luzzietti Collection (datable between the late 1700s and the beginning of the 1800s), to the watercolors of Tiole (1819-1826), to the color lithographs by L. Baldassarre (1841), to the Dalsani Gallery of Sardinian Costumes (1878).

The “outside” view of travelers contributed a lot to cloaking traditional Sardinian clothing with a mythical aura, declined in an antiquarian perspective and compared to the biblical world or classical antiquity. Especially the texts of the authors of the last thirty years of the 19th century (von Maltzan, Mantegazza, Corbetta, Vuillier, etc.) enhance the chromatic harmony of the clothes of the commoners and their “ancient and proud” beauty. The conservative nature of clothing is reflected in the austere ethics of the people who wear it and in the hieratic posture.

Despite the obvious mythologizing intent, which will also be absorbed by Sardinian writers, including the Nobel Prize winner Grazia Deledda, however, travelers' accounts capture with extreme attention the dividing function of the shapes of dressing between one country and another.

Women [...] in Sardinia don't go out of their way for anything in the world. And it is as if the villages of Selargius, Pauli, Pirri, Sestu, Maracalagonis are so close to each other that some hear the bells of the surrounding parish churches, yet each village differs from the other in such a way, that at first glance it is said: that is a woman from Quartu, that other one is from Sestu, from Pauli, or from Sinai: this is no wonder to those who know the country, especially in the innermost places of the island. (A. Bresciani, 1850).

This identifying function of the “flag dress”, which binds to feelings of belonging to identity, remains today. Currently, traditional clothing no longer meets the practical functions it fulfilled in the past: to warm the body in the coldest seasons, to mark civil and social identity, to indicate the state of mind (joy in the bright colors and mourning, mainly expressed by black). Today, “the re-proposed costume” is worn only for special occasions, such as processions, festivals and tourist events. Yes, it responds to the need to identify and carry the village or city flag high, but it is above all linked to the function of defining a single ethnic identity, the Sardinian one, despite the varied multiplicity of its local affiliations.

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