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Fashion and sweetness - A Historical Perspective

clothing - 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 health in the elements or 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 in about 25000 BC. Inside the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants such as flax, and also the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to create lightweight fabrics that does not only afforded protection up against the Rays of the sun but additionally signified social status. The first of such textiles, made in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.

beauty - As civilizations developed, so varieties of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, while the people of northern Europe as well as 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 viewed as a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by contrast, were considered typical of barbarian, tribal societies.

style - Nevertheless the concept of fashion, using its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first became predominant within the mid 1300 in Paris, London as well as the Italian city-states, if the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to exhibit the newest tastes. Men's robes, that have previously been ankle-length, now reached over the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons and also the introduction with 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 tried 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 through the Revolution of 1789. Elaborate wigs and powdered hair were abandoned, men's clothes weren't any longer embellished with embroidery and lace, and women adopted the straightforward Empire gown. Style was a mark of human freedom, adopted for its own sake. No more used by with the aristocracy, it soon became associated with the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.

In the uk affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and fashion accessories were made available through the Industrial Revolution. We were holding popular with the middle classes, who saw them as a method of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay in operation, not the court. The dark suit became a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family's status through their own as well as their children's dress. Fashion and femininity were inextricably entwined. Women were weighed down by petticoats and their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.

In the late 1800s attempts started to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of fashion and beauty held sway, with department stores offering ready-made copies with the newest styles featured in gossip columns, 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.