CareyJoanne81

De BISAWiki

Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective

clothing - Greater than 40 000 years ago the inhabitants of The european union adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to safeguard their bodies from your elements in order to provide covering for modesty's sake, came much later. The people of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as protection from the cold within 25000 BC. Within the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants for example flax, and also the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to create lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection up against the Sun's rays but also signified social status. The first of such textiles, made 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, while the people of northern Europe and the East wore stitched, tubular garments. Within the classical world the toga, worn not merely by rulers but additionally by philosophers and teachers, was thought to be symbolic of civilization. Breeches and tunics, in comparison, were considered typical of barbarian, tribal societies.

cosmetics - However the concept of fashion, with 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 demonstrate 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 with the décolletage. As people wished 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 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, using a fixed social hierarchy and courtly etiquette, was overturned through 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 simple Empire gown. Style had been a mark of human freedom, adopted for 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 the uk affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and products were created available by the Industrial Revolution. They were popular with the guts classes, who saw them as a means of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay in business, not a legal court. The dark suit had been a male 'uniform', while women paraded the household'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.

Inside the late 1800s attempts started to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of beauty and fashion held sway, with malls offering ready-made copies from the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, from the early 1900s, the cinema. From these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and wonder industries were launched.