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Fashion and wonder - A Historical Perspective
cosmetics - Greater than 40 000 years back the inhabitants of Western Europe adorned themselves with jewelry of ivory and bone. Clothes, worn to safeguard their own health in the elements or 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. 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 not only afforded protection against the Rays of the sun but also signified social status. The earliest of these textiles, produced in Anatolia in Turkey, date about 6500 BC.
style - 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. In the classical world the toga, worn not merely by rulers but in addition by philosophers and teachers, was thought to be symbolic of civilization. Breeches and tunics, in comparison, were considered usual for barbarian, tribal societies.
dresses - Nevertheless the notion of fashion, with its ever-changing cycles of styles and trends, first became predominant 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 newest tastes. Men's robes, which had previously been ankle-length, now reached above 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 using 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, based on 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 straightforward Empire gown. Style was a mark of individual freedom, adopted because of its own sake. No more used by with 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 products were made available through the Industrial Revolution. These 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 business, not the court. The dark suit became 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 overwhelmed by petticoats and their mobility restricted by delicate shoes.
Within the late 1800s attempts began to make female dress more 'sensible'. But beliefs in fashion and beauty held sway, with department stores offering ready-made copies from the newest styles featured in magazines, society photographs and, from the early 1900s, the cinema. From all of these beginnings the consumer-orientated 20th-century fashion and sweetness industries were launched.
