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Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective

Fashionista - Greater than 40 000 in years past the inhabitants of The european union adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to protect their health in the 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 defense against the cold in approximately 25000 BC. Inside the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants such as flax, and also the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to form lightweight fabrics that doesn't only afforded protection from the Sunshine but also signified social status. The initial of such textiles, made in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.

Fashionista - 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. In the classical world the toga, worn not merely by rulers but also by philosophers and teachers, was viewed as a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by contrast, were considered conventional barbarian, tribal societies.

beauty - But the idea of fashion, using its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first became predominant in the mid 1300 in Paris, London and the Italian city-states, once the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to show the latest 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 of 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 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, using 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 women adopted the easy Empire gown. Style became a mark of person 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 made available from the Industrial Revolution. These were popular with the middle 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 had been a male 'uniform', while women paraded the household's status through their own in addition to 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 started to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of beauty and fashion held sway, with shops offering ready-made copies from the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, in the early 1900s, the cinema. From all of these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and wonder industries were launched.