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Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective

Fashionista - A lot 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 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 approximately 25000 BC. In the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants for example flax, and also the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to make lightweight fabrics that does not only afforded protection from the Rays of the sun but also signified social status. The initial of these textiles, produced in Anatolia in Turkey, date to around 6500 BC.

cosmetics - As civilizations developed, so styles of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, while the people of northern Europe as well as the East wore stitched, tubular garments. Within the classical world the toga, worn not just by rulers but additionally by philosophers and teachers, was viewed as a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, in comparison, were considered conventional barbarian, tribal societies.

Fashionista - Nevertheless the notion of fashion, with its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold inside the mid 1300 in Paris, London as well as the Italian city-states, once the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to exhibit the most recent tastes. Men's robes, which in fact 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 with a growing international textiles trade - so cutting and tailoring developed.

Early fashion belonged to 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 through the Revolution of 1789. Elaborate wigs and powdered hair were abandoned, men's clothes weren't any longer embellished with embroidery and lace, and women adopted the easy Empire gown. Style became a mark of person freedom, adopted for its own sake. No more the preserve from the aristocracy, it soon became from the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.

In great britan affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and finishing touches were made available from 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 business, not the court. The dark suit became a male 'uniform', while women paraded the household's status through their particular and 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.

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