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Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective
Fashionista - More than 40 000 in years past the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to protect their health from the elements in order to provide covering for modesty's sake, came much later. Individuals of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as protection from the cold in about 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 make lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection against the Sun's rays but also signified social status. The first of those textiles, made in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.
dresses - As civilizations developed, so styles 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. Inside the classical world the toga, worn not just by rulers but also by philosophers and teachers, was viewed as symbolic of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by comparison, were considered conventional barbarian, tribal societies.
beauty - But the concept of fashion, having its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first took hold in the mid 1300 in Paris, London as well as the Italian city-states, if the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to show the newest tastes. Men's robes, that have previously been ankle-length, now reached above the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons as well as the introduction from the décolletage. As people planned 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. However the French code of dressing, using a 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 women adopted the easy Empire gown. Style had been a mark of individual freedom, adopted because of its own sake. Will no longer used by of the aristocracy, it soon became linked to the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.
In the uk affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and finishing touches were created available through the Industrial Revolution. They were popular with the guts classes, who saw them as a means of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay in operation, not a legal court. The dark suit was a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family's status through their very own as well as their children's dress. Fashion and femininity were inextricably entwined. Women were weighed down by petticoats and their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.
Within the late 1800s attempts began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But ideals of beauty and fashion held sway, with department stores offering ready-made copies of the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, from the early 1900s, the cinema. From these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and wonder industries were launched.
