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Fashion and wonder - 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 protect their health in the elements or 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 including flax, as well as the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to form lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection up against the Sunshine but also signified social status. The initial of those textiles, made in Anatolia in Turkey, date to about 6500 BC.

clothing - As civilizations developed, so varieties of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, as the people of northern Europe as well as the East wore stitched, tubular garments. Within the classical world the toga, worn not merely by rulers but also by philosophers and teachers, was thought to be symbolic of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by contrast, were considered typical of barbarian, tribal societies.

clothing - Nevertheless the notion of fashion, having its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first became predominant within the mid 1300 in Paris, London and the Italian city-states, when the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to demonstrate the newest 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 with 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 towards the elite, who attemptedto preserve their social superiority with 'sumptuary laws' forbidding tradesmen and yeomen from wearing expensive and lavishly embroidered fabrics. Nevertheless the French code of dressing, with different 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 ladies adopted the simple Empire gown. Style had been a mark of human freedom, adopted because of its own sake. No longer used by with the aristocracy, it soon became associated with the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.

In great britan affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and finishing touches were created available through the Industrial Revolution. These were favored by the center 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 particular in addition to 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 malls offering ready-made copies of the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, from the early 1900s, the cinema. Readily available beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and beauty industries were launched.