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Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective

beauty - Greater than 40 000 years ago the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to guard their own health in the elements in order to provide covering for modesty's sake, came later. Individuals of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as defense against the cold within 25000 BC. Inside the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants for example flax, as well as the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to create lightweight fabrics that does not only afforded protection against the Sun's rays but in addition signified social status. The earliest of those textiles, produced in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.

clothing - As civilizations developed, so varieties 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 in addition by philosophers and teachers, was regarded as a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by comparison, were considered typical of barbarian, tribal societies.

clothing - But the concept of fashion, using its ever-changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold in the mid 1300 in Paris, London and also the Italian city-states, once the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to demonstrate the newest tastes. Men's robes, that have previously been ankle-length, now reached above the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons as well as the introduction from the décolletage. As people wished 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. However the French code of dressing, with different fixed social hierarchy and courtly etiquette, was overturned by the Revolution of 1789. Elaborate wigs and powdered hair were abandoned, men's clothes weren't any longer embellished with embroidery and lace, and ladies adopted the easy Empire gown. Style was a mark of individual freedom, adopted because of its own sake. No more the preserve from the aristocracy, it soon became linked to the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.

In Britain affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and products were created available through the Industrial Revolution. These were favored by the guts classes, who saw them as a method of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay in business, not legal court. The dark suit had been 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 as well as their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.

Inside the late 1800s attempts began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But beliefs in fashion and beauty held sway, with department stores offering ready-made copies from the newest styles featured in gossip columns, society photographs and, in the early 1900s, the cinema. From these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and sweetness industries were launched.