tignon

A young Creole woman of color in a tignon of her own creation. Note that the rosette in the tignon is repeated as either a brooch or in the linen at her neck. Painting from the Historic New Orleans Collection.

A tignon (also spelled and pronounced tiyon) is a series of headscarves or a large piece of material tied or wrapped around the head to form a kind of turban that resembles the West African gélé. It was worn by Creole and African-American women in Louisiana beginning in the Spanish colonial period, and continuing to a much lesser extent to the present day.

This headdress was the result of sumptuary laws passed in 1785 under the administration of Governor Esteban Rodriguez Miró. Called the tignon laws, they prescribed and enforced appropriate public dress for female gens de couleur in colonial society. At this time in Louisiana history, women of color vied with white women in beauty, dress, ostentation and manners. Many of them had become the placées of white French and Spanish Creole men, and this incurred the jealousy and anger of their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and fiancées. One complaint that found currency with the authorities was that white men, in pursuing flirtations or liaisons, sometimes mistook and accosted women of the elite for the light-skinned, long-haired, but mixed-race women.

As a result, Governor Miró decreed that women of color and black women, slave or free, should cover their hair and heads with a knotted headdress and refrain from "excessive attention to dress" themselves in jewels or feathers to maintain class distinctions. But the women who were targets of this decree were inventive and imaginative. They decorated tignons with their jewels, ribbons, or by using the finest colored materials with which to wrap their hair. In other words, "[t]hey effectively re-interpreted the law without technically breaking the law"^[1]--and they continued to be pursued by men.

The tignon can be wrapped in many ways, and part of its uniqueness is that it was and is worn in an entirely different way by every woman. Madras was a popular fabric for tignons among both free and slave populations, and has become iconic. Tignons were often created out of scraps of undyed fabric given to slaves by their masters. The fabrics, of course, were of seemingly disparate weaves, prints or patterns. Wasted or flawed material was made to unaccountably match and appear festive. The tignons worn by women of color or African women slaves in Louisiana and the Caribbean could be much more distinctive than those worn by American black slaves, and even had hidden messages.^[2]

The tignon or gélé is experiencing a resurgence in African American fashion. It is found particularly in African-themed weddings. Celebrities such as Erykah Badu and Jill Scott have revived it, transforming the controversial headwrapping into a celebration of African-American culture.

Notes

1. ^ http://www.cr.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/FrenchAmA.htm
2. ^ http://nutrias.org/~nopl/info/aarcinfo/aarc2005/aarctignon.htm

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