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Fashion and Beauty - A Historical Perspective

Fashion - More than 40 000 years back the inhabitants of Western Europe 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 later. The people of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as defense against the cold in approximately 25000 BC. Within the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants for example flax, as well as the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to create lightweight fabrics that does not only afforded protection against the Sunshine but in addition signified social status. The first of those textiles, manufactured in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.

cosmetics - As civilizations developed, so styles 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 merely by rulers but in addition by philosophers and teachers, was regarded as symbolic of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by comparison, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.

clothing - But the idea of fashion, with its ever-changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold within the mid 1300 in Paris, London and also 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, which in fact 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 having a growing international textiles trade - so cutting and tailoring developed.

Early fashion belonged for 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 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 became a mark of individual freedom, adopted for the own sake. Will no longer the preserve with 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 finishing touches were created available by the Industrial Revolution. These were popular with the middle classes, who saw them as a way of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay in operation, not legal court. The dark suit was a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family's status through their particular as well as their children's dress. Fashion and femininity were inextricably entwined. Women were weighed down by petticoats as well as their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.

Within the late 1800s attempts began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of fashion and beauty held sway, with shops 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.