Cherokee Turban
Unlike most music festival goers would have you believe, the Cherokee did not wear headdresses. This was a feature of the plains tribes and anyone wearing a headdress who claims it’s ok because their “great grandma was a Cherokee Princess” should receive a clean slap on the mouth.
There is some debate as to the origins of the turban in Cherokee dress–some claim it was something that had been a part of the culture for generations. Another source claims that during the expansion of colonialism within the early Americas, a delegate party of Cherokees traveled across the Atlantic to ask King of England to please control his subjects because this whole moving into their territory thing just wasn’t funny anymore.
They arrived in traditional dress, which would have included buckskin pants, loin cloth, no shirt, and shaved heads with a small knot of hair at the crown of their head–as was tradition at the time.
The courtiers decided this was highly inappropriate to delicate English sensibilities and that the delegation could not be presented to the king in such a state. They scrambled to find something else for the group to wear.
Luckily for them, a visiting group of Indians–actual Indians, from India (thanks Christopher Columbus, that hasn’t caused any confusion at all)–had left behind some of their clothing. This included robes and, you guessed it, turbans. Rumor among some is that the delegate body then brought this new fashion back to the Americas, where it became a staple of mens dress. This look was later immortalized by the creator of the Cherokee syllabay, the polymath Sequoyah, who basically coined the look.