ErnieEsta79
De BISAWiki
Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective
Fashionista - A lot more than 40 000 years back the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to safeguard their bodies from the elements in order to provide covering for modesty's sake, came later. The folks of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as defense against the cold in approximately 25000 BC. Inside the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants for example flax, and the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to make lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection from the Rays of the sun but also signified social status. The earliest of these textiles, manufactured in Anatolia in Turkey, date to around 6500 BC.
models - As civilizations developed, so varieties of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, as the people of northern Europe and the East wore stitched, tubular garments. Within the classical world the toga, worn not just by rulers but in addition by philosophers and teachers, was regarded as symbolic of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by contrast, were considered conventional barbarian, tribal societies.
beauty - However the notion of fashion, with its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first became predominant within the mid 1300 in Paris, London and the Italian city-states, when the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to demonstrate the most recent tastes. Men's robes, which in fact had previously been ankle-length, now reached above the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons and also the introduction of the décolletage. As people desired to change their silhouettes at regular intervals - a trend that coincided having a growing international textiles trade - so cutting and tailoring developed.
Early fashion belonged for the elite, who attempted to preserve their social superiority with 'sumptuary laws' forbidding tradesmen and yeomen from wearing expensive and lavishly embroidered fabrics. Nevertheless the French code of dressing, based on a fixed social hierarchy and courtly etiquette, was overturned by the Revolution of 1789. Elaborate wigs and powdered hair were abandoned, men's clothes were no longer embellished with embroidery and lace, and ladies adopted the straightforward Empire gown. Style was a mark of individual freedom, adopted for the own sake. No more the preserve with the aristocracy, it soon became linked to the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.
In the uk affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and products were created available by the Industrial Revolution. These were popular with the middle classes, who saw them as a means of expressing their new confidence and success. For males power now lay in operation, not legal court. The dark suit was a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family's status through their own and their children's dress. Fashion and femininity were inextricably entwined. Women were overwhelmed by petticoats and their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.
Within the late 1800s attempts started to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of beauty and fashion held sway, with shops offering ready-made copies with the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, from the early 1900s, the cinema. From all of these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and wonder industries were launched.
