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Fashion and Beauty - A Historical Perspective<br /><br />[http://brainorbeauty.com dresses] - A lot more than 40 000 years ago the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to guard their health from the elements or to provide covering for modesty's sake, came later. The people 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 such as flax, as well as the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to make lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection against the Sun's rays but additionally signified social status. The first of those textiles, made in Anatolia in Turkey, date to about 6500 BC.<br /><br />[http://brainorbeauty.com style] - As civilizations developed, so styles of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, as the people of northern Europe and also the East wore stitched, tubular garments. In the classical world the toga, worn not just by rulers but also by philosophers and teachers, was thought to be a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by comparison, were considered conventional barbarian, tribal societies.<br /><br />[http://brainorbeauty.com dresses] - However the idea of fashion, having its ever-changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold in the mid 1300 in Paris, London as well as the Italian city-states, once the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to exhibit the most recent tastes. Men's robes, which had previously been ankle-length, now reached across the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons as well as the introduction from the décolletage. As people desired to change their silhouettes at regular intervals - a trend that coincided with a growing international textiles trade - so cutting and tailoring developed.<br /><br />Early fashion belonged to the elite, who tried to preserve their social superiority with 'sumptuary laws' forbidding tradesmen and yeomen from wearing expensive and lavishly embroidered fabrics. However the French code of dressing, based on a fixed social hierarchy and courtly etiquette, was overturned from the Revolution of 1789. Elaborate wigs and powdered hair were abandoned, men's clothes weren't any longer embellished with embroidery and lace, and some women adopted the straightforward Empire gown. Style became a mark of human freedom, adopted for its own sake. No more the preserve of the aristocracy, it soon became from the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.<br /><br />In Britain affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and products were created available through the Industrial Revolution. These were popular with the center classes, who saw them as a way of expressing their new confidence and success. For males power now lay in operation, not a legal court. The dark suit had been a male 'uniform', while women paraded the household's status through their own in addition to their children's dress. Fashion and femininity were inextricably entwined. Women were overwhelmed by petticoats in addition to their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.<br /><br />In the late 1800s attempts began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of fashion and beauty held sway, with malls offering ready-made copies from the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, in the early 1900s, the cinema. From these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and sweetness industries were launched.