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Fashion and Beauty - A Historical Perspective

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

clothing - As civilizations developed, so varieties of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, even though the people of northern Europe and the East wore stitched, tubular garments. Inside the classical world the toga, worn not only by rulers but additionally by philosophers and teachers, was thought to be a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by comparison, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.

style - But the notion of fashion, using 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, when the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to demonstrate the most recent tastes. Men's robes, which had previously been ankle-length, now reached over the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons as well as the introduction from the décolletage. As people planned 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 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 ladies adopted the simple Empire gown. Style had been a mark of person freedom, adopted because of its own sake. No more used by from the aristocracy, it soon became linked to the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.

In great britan affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and finishing touches were made available through the Industrial Revolution. They were well-liked by the guts classes, who saw them as a means of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay running a business, not the court. The dark suit was a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family's status through their very own and 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 began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But beliefs in fashion and beauty held sway, with malls offering ready-made copies of the newest styles featured in gossip columns, society photographs and, from the early 1900s, the cinema. From these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and beauty industries were launched.