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Fashion and Beauty - A Historical Perspective
Fashionista - More than 40 000 years ago the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to safeguard their bodies from 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 protection from the cold in about 25000 BC. Inside the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants such as flax, as well as the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to create lightweight fabrics that doesn't only afforded protection from the Sun's rays but also signified social status. The earliest of those textiles, manufactured in Anatolia in Turkey, date to about 6500 BC.
Fashion - As civilizations developed, so types of dress also evolved. In Egypt, Greece and Rome, clothes were draped, even though the people of northern Europe and also the East wore stitched, tubular garments. In the classical world the toga, worn not only by rulers but in addition by philosophers and teachers, was thought to be a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by contrast, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.
dresses - Nevertheless the concept of fashion, using 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, once the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to demonstrate the latest tastes. Men's robes, which had previously been ankle-length, now reached over 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 towards the elite, who tried to preserve their social superiority with 'sumptuary laws' forbidding tradesmen and yeomen from wearing expensive and lavishly embroidered fabrics. Nevertheless 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 weren't any longer embellished with embroidery and lace, and women adopted the easy Empire gown. Style became a mark of human freedom, adopted for the own sake. Will no longer the preserve with 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 created available through the Industrial Revolution. They were popular with the middle classes, who saw them as a means of expressing their new confidence and success. For men power now lay running a business, not a legal court. The dark suit was a male 'uniform', while women paraded the household's status through their own 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 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 gossip columns, society photographs and, from the early 1900s, the cinema. From these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and wonder industries were launched.
