It’s easy to forget how fluid textiles can be with the labels we give them. What was so special about the puttees is that the name is a testament to its chaotic, shifting, unpredictable history. Puttee comes from the Hindi/Urdu word pattis (पट्टी/پٹی) which means bandage. During the British Raj, the British army changed their military uniforms to better adapt to their new environment. For example, khaki, also derived from Hindi/Urdu for dirt-colored, replaced the bright scarlet British uniforms to offer camouflage. Puttees, similarly, were native to British India and then adopted by the British army.
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Textile and Costume Collection at Thomas Jefferson University T&CC 1991.6.1g,h
The puttees in the Jefferson Univeristy's Textile and Costume Collection were part of an American World War 1 uniform. By the early 20th century, neutral colors such as khaki and puttees became the norm for Western military uniforms such as the American and British uniforms.
For my redesign, I wanted to pay homage to the history of this cloth in the World War and its South Asian origins. First, I had to examine to puttees in Jefferson’s collection. They are wool, olive drab, knit puttees. They are heavily felted making it difficult to identify the structure. I was able to look at them under a microscope in the Bruner lab. Through that process, we were able to identify a weft insert. This explained why the puttees had such limited stretch. So, for my recreation, I used polyester and wool yarns in a knit milano structure with an inserted weft. To get a similar effect to felted wool, I brushed one side on my puttees.
My original hope for this project was to find the original application of pattis and then recreate them. It became challenging to pinpoint the exact culture the British adopted the puttees from and what their original usage for them was. Though we know pattis means bandage, as it’s still used today, it can refer to many fabrics of different fiber types and structures. As stated earlier, textile history is fluid, and I believe that applies to all cultures. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much I could find other than they came from a Himalayan tribe.
One instance of puttee-like objects being worn that I found especially interesting, were by the Kohistan Rangers. These were men recruited from the Kohistan region of modern day Pakistan during the First Afghan War. The British wanted to gain Kabul as part of their empire but were unsuccessful and the Kohistani men eventually revolted against the British (Rattray). In the image below you can see layered cloth around their ankles and shins. This is just one possibility I found and I am unsure of whether it’s where the British adopted puttees from. It could be its own huge research project to find how they transferred from pattis to puttees.
One instance of puttee-like objects being worn that I found especially interesting, were by the Kohistan Rangers. These were men recruited from the Kohistan region of modern day Pakistan during the First Afghan War. The British wanted to gain Kabul as part of their empire but were unsuccessful and the Kohistani men eventually revolted against the British (Rattray). In the image below you can see layered cloth around their ankles and shins. This is just one possibility I found and I am unsure of whether it’s where the British adopted puttees from. It could be its own huge research project to find how they transferred from pattis to puttees.
Kohistani soldiers wearing puttee-like wraps (Rattray).