The history of national dress in Lithuania consists of two distinct and separate periods of development. Initially, the nobility of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth affected, and identified as national, a so-called Sarmatian costume; this won symbolic value after the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. At a later stage, a national costume based on the garments worn by the female peasantry came to be considered to represent a Lithuanian ethnic tradition.
The insurrectionary nobility of the collapsed Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in their patriotic motivation to regain independence, frequently invoked traditional culture. Tadeusz Kościuszko, for instance, wore the peasants’ chamarres (fur-lined outer garment) during his 1794 insurrection as a gesture of solidarity. National dress also included the vengierka (a blue or black Hungarian coat) and the sermėga (a homespun wollen overcoat). Headgear would include a magierka skullcap. The Sarmatian apparel of bygone days, of old imported into Poland by the Lithuanian nobility, and later banned by the tsar, came to stand for the bygone glory of the old state; noblemen would wear kontushes (long slash-sleeved overcoats) over a żupan coat tied with a slutsk sash. Footwear would be yellow boots. All those elements became a “national” attire but vanished with the decline of the nobility after the 1863 insurrection.
A popular-ethnic national Lithuanian dress only really emerged around 1900, although a run-up can be discerned from the 1840s onwards. Romantic intellectuals such as Teodoras Narbutas, Simonas Daukantas, Liudvikas Adomas Jucevičius, Jonas Basanavičius, and Vydūnas (Wilhelm Storost) reflected on the history of the Lithuanian peasants’ attire and thereby invested them with the value of ethnic Lithuanian authenticity. The dress style celebrated in these terms was traditional, even obsolescent peasant attire made of linen, with natural colours, tailored simply, but also more festive, elaborate garments and accessories.
Developments took slightly distinct paths in the two separated districts, East-Prussian Lithuania Minor and Russian-governed Lithuania Major. In Lithuania Minor, Lithuanians had been prohibited by law from dressing as Germans (1681), from wearing silk clothes (1731), or from wearing other shop-bought (manufactured) clothing and accessories (1733); conversely, the Salzburg Protestants who settled in the Lithuanian lands (after having been expelled from their city by the prince-bishop in 1731) were prohibited from dressing as Lithuanians (1732). Such restrictions fixed Lithuanian clothing in an archaic stasis which later, in the 19th century, appeared exotic to the German elite. Meanwhile, in Lithuania Major a more differentiated dress sense (on social and confessional grounds) made it less easy to distinguish Lithuanians from other ethnic groups.
In Lithuania Minor, the sartorial signing of ethnic specificity became a conscious gesture when in the 19th century traditional attire was used for special occasions, involving Lithuanian-German encounters: Lithuanian delegations greeting the Prussian king on visits to the region, or offering congratulations on feast days, or seeking support in Berlin for linguistic or cultural demands. Press coverage of such events is in evidence from the 1830s onwards. Germans also took a cultural interest in the obsolescent traditional costume: in 1881 and 1893 Georg Sauerwein (ps. Girėnas, 1831–1904) organized festivals where Lithuanians were invited to appear in traditional costume. Photographs were taken on those occasions, and used as illustrative material in Sauerwein’s lectures. Sauerwein also addressed Lithuanians directly, exhorting them to maintain or to revive their ancient garments so as to display their nationality.
Particularly momentous was his suggestion to the choral leader Vydūnas that his choir, the Tilsit Singers’ Society, should perform in Lithuanian costume. Accordingly, the female songsters dressed up in white aprons, white embroidered shirts, with their heads decorated with blue ribbons and green myrtle wreaths – a description suggesting a marked departure from the style then current in Tilsit (dark-coloured suits, dresses, and headscarves). Vydūnas and Marta Augusta Raišukytė (1874–1933) subsequently undertook to identify the essential features of the Lithuanian costume which could be used in choir garments, and encouraged other Lithuanian women to do so. National dress henceforth became a matter of Lithuanian self-identification; and, as in Latvia and Estonia, it was part of collective-performative public presence involving choral singing or amateur theatre. The attire was home-made (possibly after collective consultations), based on the specimens or reports of two generations. In 1900 such outfits were demonstrated for the first time as a national costume during a Singers’ Society concert in Tilsit. Sets of women’s garments were subsequently devised by Vydūnas, possibly in collaboration with Raišukytė, each based on historical examples from a different historical period; photographs of these were published in his Litauen in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart (1916). These examples were soon followed by members of other choral societies (e.g. the Aida Society of Klaipėda) in their performances and concerts.
Against the perceived backwardness of using ancient models, people tended to prefer, however, a national design based on a more contemporary style. Whereas the sartorial revivalism of Vydūnas intended to demonstrate an authentically native Lithuanian tradition, primarily vis-à-vis the German population, Raišukytė focused more on a Lithuanian cultural self-understanding and maintaining a handicraft tradition by the creation of ornaments and colour-schemes, with room for individual creativity. In a series of articles on the concept of Lithuanian feminine beauty (1911) she expressed the hope that fostering Lithuanians’ aesthetic taste would prepare the emergence of artists and dress designers. Against the perceived backwardness of using ancient models, people tended, however, to prefer basing national designs on a more contemporary style.
After the lifting of the printing ban in Lithuania Major in 1904, periodicals there extended their coverage of Lithuanian social and cultural events, accompanied by illustrations of girls in national costumes. This press coverage indicates that national garments were at first worn by Lithuanians residing outside the Lithuanian lands – in St Petersburg, Warsaw, Riga, Moscow, etc. Lithuanians there formed national societies and organized festivals, concerts, exhibitions, and lectures, and participated in multi-ethnic banquets, where they encountered the example of Latvians and Poles in national costumes. It appears that the pattern established in Lithuania Minor (the idea to re-create clothing from items in the grandparents’ wardrobe) was followed.
Amidst different, conflicting proposals for the proper style of a national garment (reflecting a lack of historicist consensus and the absence of an informed body of research into the sartorial history of the various ethnicities in the Lithuanian lands), educated women made national garments from such materials and models as came to hand: cashmere headscarves found in the wardrobe of their grandmothers (Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė, 1886–1958), silk skirts invoking family usage (Marija Piaseckaitė-Šlapelienė, 1880–1977), etc. Most of these Lithuanian national dresses reflect the Romantic imagery known from Kanutas Ruseckas’s painting “Harvesting Girl” (Pjovėja, 1844): fashionable skirts, newly-tailored white aprons (or, more rarely, patterned aprons), and shirts with bodices broadly fastened by laces. Uncertainty as to what determines the Lithuanian nature in garments led to a generic folk-style costume very close to a Bavarian/Tyrolean dirndl or the Polish “Cracow costume”. This provoked a nativist reaction.
A description of national costume in the St Petersburg-based weekly Lietuvių laikraštis (1905) by Juozas Zauka (1862–1943), then conductor of the Mutual Aid Society’s choir, elicited a response by one M. Baltrukas published in 1907 in the newspaper Viltis, which attempted to define the characteristics of Lithuanian national clothing by means of a Lithuanian-Polish contrast relation: in the “Cracow costume” the Polish apron is white, whereas the Lithuanian apron should be homemade and narrow; if the Polish skirt is short and made of cotton, the Lithuanian skirt should be homespun and slightly longer, etc. A similar principle was observed by the writer Sofija Ivanauskaitė-Pšibiliauskienė (ps. Lazdynų Pelėda, 1867–1926), who, in an article also published in Viltis (1911), criticized the copying of national costumes from other countries, and encouraged Lithuanian women to weave their own fabrics and use native-Lithuanian patterns.
There was also a historicizing Lithuanian national dress style, based on the alleged dress of the legendary Grand Duchess Birutė (her earliest known depiction is a Romantic lithograph in the Polish-language poetry collection Biruta, edited by Józef Krzeczkowski, Vilnius 1837). The melodrama Birutė by Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, with music by Mikas Petrauskas, brought this iconography to the stage; the characteristic bodice was first worn in a 1910 production in Marijampolė. After 1919, this type became popular among the women of the newly independent country’s elite (officials’ and officers’ wives, etc.): bodice, open-necked shirt with wide, half-length sleeves, silk apron, calf-length skirt (later lengthened as per the traditional longer skirt, owing to critical strictures).
