Blaine221Antonio197
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Fashion and Beauty - A Historical Perspective
Fashionista - Greater than 40 000 in years past the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to guard their own health from the elements in order to provide covering for modesty's sake, came much later. The folks of northern Europe probably first slung animal skins around themselves as protection from the cold in approximately 25000 BC. In the Mediterranean and Middle East, fibers from plants including flax, and also the hair of goats and sheep, were woven to form lightweight fabrics that not only afforded protection up against the Rays of the sun but additionally signified social status. The first of these textiles, manufactured in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.
hair - 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 also 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 viewed as a symbol of civilization. Breeches and tunics, by contrast, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.
hair - But the concept of fashion, having its ever changing cycles of styles and trends, first became predominant in the mid 1300 in Paris, London and the Italian city-states, when the elite rejected their flowing garments for tight-fitting clothes decorated to demonstrate the most recent tastes. Men's robes, that have previously been ankle-length, now reached above the knee, while female dress was transformed by lacing, buttons and the introduction with 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. Nevertheless the French code of dressing, based on a fixed social hierarchy and courtly etiquette, was overturned from the Revolution of 1789. Elaborate wigs and powdered hair were abandoned, men's clothes were no longer embellished with embroidery and lace, and some women adopted the straightforward Empire gown. Style became a mark of human freedom, adopted for its own sake. No more used by from the aristocracy, it soon became from the avant-garde, Romantic writers and artists, political activists and dandies.
In the uk affordable, mass-produced printed textiles and products were created available from the Industrial Revolution. They were favored by the middle classes, who saw them as a way of expressing their new confidence and success. For males power now lay in business, not legal court. The dark suit had been a male 'uniform', while women paraded the family'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.
In 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. Readily available beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and beauty industries were launched.
