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Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective

style - More than 40 000 years ago the inhabitants of The european union adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to protect their own health in the elements or to provide covering for modesty's sake, came much later. Individuals of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as defense against the cold within 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 not only afforded protection up against the Rays of the sun but also signified social status. The first of such textiles, produced in Anatolia in Turkey, date to around 6500 BC.

beauty - 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 merely by rulers but additionally by philosophers and teachers, was viewed as a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by comparison, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.

hair - But the notion of fashion, with its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold inside the mid 1300 in Paris, London and the Italian city-states, if the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to show the most recent tastes. Men's robes, that have previously been ankle-length, now reached over the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons and also 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 to the elite, who attemptedto preserve their social superiority with 'sumptuary laws' forbidding tradesmen and yeomen from wearing expensive and lavishly embroidered fabrics. However 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 some women adopted the easy Empire gown. Style had been a mark of individual freedom, adopted for the own sake. No longer the preserve with the aristocracy, it soon became linked to 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 well-liked by the guts classes, who saw them as a method of expressing their new confidence and success. For males power now lay in operation, not a legal court. The dark suit became a male 'uniform', while women paraded the household's status through their own and their children's dress. Fashion and femininity were inextricably entwined. Women were overwhelmed by petticoats in addition to their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.

Within the late 1800s attempts started to make female dress more 'sensible'. But beliefs in beauty and fashion held sway, with department stores offering ready-made copies of the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, in the early 1900s, the cinema. From these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and beauty industries were launched.