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Fashion and sweetness - A Historical Perspective

clothing - More than 40 000 years ago the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to safeguard their bodies from the elements or provide covering for modesty's sake, came much later. The people of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as defense against the cold in about 25000 BC. In the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants including flax, and the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to make lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection up against the Sunshine but also signified social status. The earliest of such textiles, manufactured in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.

makeup - As civilizations developed, so styles 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. In the classical world the toga, worn not only by rulers but additionally by philosophers and teachers, was regarded as synonymous with civilization. Breeches and tunics, in comparison, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.

clothing - However the concept of fashion, having its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold inside the mid 1300 in Paris, London and the Italian city-states, when 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 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 tried to preserve their social superiority with 'sumptuary laws' forbidding tradesmen and yeomen from wearing expensive and lavishly embroidered fabrics. But 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 became a mark of human freedom, adopted because of its own sake. No longer used by from 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 fashion accessories were made available through the Industrial Revolution. They were popular with the center classes, who saw them as a method of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay in operation, not legal court. The dark suit was a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family'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 in addition to their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.

Within the late 1800s attempts began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of fashion and beauty held sway, with shops offering ready-made copies from the newest styles featured in gossip columns, society photographs and, from your early 1900s, the cinema. Readily available beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and beauty industries were launched.