Like their fellows who colonized the tropical Americas, free settlers in the more temperate zones of the Atlantic were accustomed to European clothing, imported textiles, and metropolitan standards. The climatic conditions they faced, socioeconomic ecologies they constructed, and relations with indigenous people they developed were individually more disparate and collectively quite different from those obtaining in the tropics. Yet the dress regimes they created were less syncretic and more oriented to European norms than those found in warmer areas.

South Atlantic singularities

At the edges of both the Atlantic basin and European Atlantic empires, the colonies centered on Cape Town and Buenos Aires developed dress regimes that always stood somewhat apart from Atlantic trends. Yet to express sartorially their specific geoclimatic environments and their distinctive development trajectories, both increasingly employed metropolitan European textiles, garments, and styles.

The dress of Cape Town residents in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was shaped by their mixed demographic origins, cultural orientations at once to Europe and to the East Indies, and the VOC's ready access to Asian textiles and monopoly control of imports to its nascent provisioning station and settlement. Two-fifths of all inventoried attire was tailored from cottons and another fifth from silks, as against just over a third from Dutch woolens and linens combined. The Cape's population was, in fact, precocious among colonists not merely in wearing large amounts of varied cotton garments but in the pronounced gendering that came to characterize apparel fabrics in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. Whereas Cape women preferred cottons for about half their items, and silks for another third, men's favorite textiles were woolens (half, as against less than ten percent among women), followed by cottons (a third), while silks were just a tenth.