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Fashion and Beauty - A Historical Perspective

hair - More than 40 000 years back the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to guard their health in the elements or provide covering for modesty's sake, came later. The folks of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as protection from the cold in about 25000 BC. In the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants including flax, and also the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to create lightweight fabrics that does not only afforded protection from the Sun's rays but additionally signified social status. The first of those textiles, made in Anatolia in Turkey, date to around 6500 BC.

Fashion - As civilizations developed, so styles of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, even though the people of northern Europe as well as the East wore stitched, tubular garments. Inside the classical world the toga, worn not only by rulers but in addition by philosophers and teachers, was thought to be synonymous with civilization. Breeches and tunics, in comparison, were considered typical of barbarian, tribal societies.

style - Nevertheless the idea of fashion, having its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first became predominant within 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 show the most recent tastes. Men's robes, which in fact had previously been ankle-length, now reached over the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons and also 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.

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. However 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 some women adopted the straightforward Empire gown. Style had been a mark of person freedom, adopted for its own sake. No more the preserve with the aristocracy, it soon became associated with the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.

In Britain affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and products were made available from the Industrial Revolution. They were favored by the center classes, who saw them as a method of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay in business, not a legal court. The dark suit became a male 'uniform', while women paraded the household's status through their very 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 begun to make female dress more 'sensible'. But beliefs in fashion and beauty held sway, with department stores offering ready-made copies with 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.