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Fashion and Beauty - A Historical Perspective

models - More than 40 000 years ago the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to guard their bodies in the 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 in approximately 25000 BC. Within the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants such as flax, and also the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to make lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection against the Sun's rays but additionally signified social status. The first of these textiles, made in Anatolia in Turkey, date to about 6500 BC.

makeup - As civilizations developed, so types of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, as the people of northern Europe and the East wore stitched, tubular garments. Within the classical world the toga, worn not just by rulers but additionally by philosophers and teachers, was regarded as synonymous with civilization. Breeches and tunics, by contrast, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.

makeup - Nevertheless the idea of fashion, using its ever-changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold within 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 above the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons and also the introduction of 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 to the elite, who attempted 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, using a fixed social hierarchy and courtly etiquette, was overturned from the Revolution of 1789. Elaborate wigs and powdered hair were abandoned, men's clothes weren't any 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 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 products were created available by the Industrial Revolution. These were well-liked by the center classes, who saw them as a means of expressing their new confidence and success. For guys power now lay running a business, not legal court. The dark suit was a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family's status through their own and their children's dress. Fashion and femininity were inextricably entwined. Women were overwhelmed by petticoats and their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.

Within the late 1800s attempts began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But beliefs in beauty and fashion held sway, with shops offering ready-made copies with 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.