Fashion
Fashion is a popular style or
practice, especially in clothing, footwear, accessories, makeup, body piercing, or furniture. Fashion is a distinctive and often habitual
trend in the style in which a person dresses. It is the prevailing styles in
behaviour and the newest creations of textile designers. The more technical term costume has
become so linked to the term "fashion" that the use of the former has
been relegated to special senses like fancy dress ormasquerade wear, while
"fashion" means clothing more generally, including the study of it.
Although aspects of fashion can be feminine or masculine, some trends are androgynous.
Clothing fashions
Early
Western travelers, whether to Persia, Turkey, India, or China, would frequently remark on the absence of change in fashion there, and
observers from these other cultures commented on the unseemly pace of Western
fashion, which many felt suggested an instability and a lack of order in
Western culture. The Japanese Shogun's secretary boasted (not completely accurately) to a Spanish visitor in
1609 that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years.[4] However, there is considerable evidence in Ming China of rapidly changing fashions inChinese clothing.[5] Changes in costume often took place at times of economic or social change,
as occurred inancient Rome and the medieval Caliphate, but then a long period without major changes would follow. In 8th century Moorish Spain the famous musician Ziryab introduced to Córdoba in Al-Andalus sophisticated clothing-styles based on seasonal and daily fashions from his native Baghdad, modified by his own inspiration. Similar changes in fashion occurred in
the 11th century in the Middle East following the arrival of the Turks who introduced clothing styles from Central Asia and the Far East.
The
beginning in Europe of continual and increasingly rapid change in clothing
styles can be fairly reliably dated. Historians, including James Laver andFernand Braudel, date the start of Western fashion in clothing to the middle of the 14th century. The most
dramatic early change in fashion was a sudden drastic shortening and tightening
of the male over-garment from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing in the chest to make it look bigger.
This created the distinctive Western outline of a tailored top worn over
leggings or trousers.
The pace of
change accelerated considerably in the following century, and women and men's
fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning of the hair, became equally
complex. Art historians are therefore able to use fashion with confidence and precision to date
images, often to within five years, particularly in the case of images from the
15th century. Initially, changes in fashion led to a fragmentation across the
upper classes of Europe of what had previously been a very similar style of
dressing and the subsequent development of distinctive national styles. These
national styles remained very different until a counter-movement in the 17th to
18th centuries imposed similar styles once again, mostly originating from Ancien Régime France. Though the rich usually led fashion, the increasing affluence of early modern Europe led to the bourgeoisie and even peasants following trends at a distance, but still uncomfortably close for the
elites – a factor that Fernand Braudel regards as one of the main motors of
changing fashion.
Albrecht Dürer's drawing contrasts a well turned out bourgeoise from Nuremberg(left) with her counterpart from Venice. The Venetian lady's high chopines make her look taller.
In the 16th
century national differences were at their most pronounced. Ten 16th century
portraits of German orItalian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats. Albrecht Dürer illustrated the differences in his actual (or composite) contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of the 15th century (illustration, right). The "Spanish style" of the late
16th century began the move back to synchronicity among upper-class Europeans,
and after a struggle in the mid-17th century, French styles decisively took
over leadership, a process completed in the 18th century.
Though
textile colors and patterns changed from year to year,[14] the cut of a gentleman's coat and the length of his waistcoat, or the
pattern to which a lady's dress was cut, changed more slowly. Men's fashions
were largely derived from military models, and changes in a European male silhouette were galvanized in
theaters of European war where gentleman officers had opportunities to make
notes of foreign styles such as the "Steinkirk" cravat ornecktie.
Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI, leader of fashion
Though there
had been distribution of dressed dolls from France since the 16th century and Abraham Bosse had produced engravings of fashion in the 1620s, the pace of change picked
up in the 1780s with increased publication of French engravings illustrating
the latest Paris styles. By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike (or
thought they were); local variation became first a sign of provincial culture
and later a badge of the conservative peasant.[15]
Although
tailors and dressmakers were no doubt responsible for many innovations, and the textile industry certainly led many trends, thehistory of fashion design is normally understood to date from 1858 when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the
first true haute couture house in Paris. The Haute house was the name
established by government for the fashion houses that met the standards of
industry. These fashion houses have to adhere to standards such as keeping at
least twenty employees engaged in making the clothes, showing two collections
per year at fashion shows, and presenting a certain number of patterns to
costumers.[16] Since then, the professional designer has become an increasingly dominant
figure, despite the origin of many fashions in street fashion. For women, the flapper styles of the 1920s marked the most significant alteration in Western
women's fashion in several centuries, with a drastic shortening of
skirt-lengths and much looser-fitting clothes. With an occasional revival of
long skirts, variations of the shorter length have remained dominant ever
since. Though there were many variations, the “flapper uniform,” so to speak,
consisted of high-heeled shoes, which were often embellished with buckles or
gems, significant amounts of jewellery, especially pieces adorned with gems and
pearls, and shorter dresses, the upper portion of which could be either loose
or form-fitting. Flappers also often wore cloches, small hats often featuring
narrow, downward-oriented brims, to frame their short hairstyles. Flappers were
seen as especially seductive figures, and their fashion was at the time
controversial for many.
The four
major current fashion capitals are acknowledged to be Paris, Milan, New York City, and London, which are all headquarters to the greatest fashion companies and are
renowned for their major influence on global fashion. Fashion weeks are held in these cities, where designers exhibit their new clothing
collections to audiences. A succession of major designers such as Coco Chanel and Yves Saint-Laurent have kept
Paris as the center most watched by the rest of the world, although haute couture is now
subsidized by the sale of ready-to-wear collections and perfume using the same branding.
Modern Westerners have a wide number of choices available in the selection of their clothes.
What a person chooses to wear can reflect his or her personalityor interests. When people who have high cultural status start to wear new or different clothes, a fashion trend may start. People
who like or respect these people become influenced by their personal style and
begin wearing similarly styled clothes. Fashions may vary considerably within a society according toage, social class, generation, occupation, and geography and may also vary over time. If an older person dresses according to the
fashion young people use, he or she may look ridiculous in the eyes of both
young and older people. The terms fashionista and fashion victim refer to someone who slavishly follows current
fashions.
One can
regard the system of sporting various fashions as a fashion language incorporating various fashion statements using a grammar of fashion. (Compare some of the work of Roland Barthes.)
In recent
years, Asian fashion has become increasingly significant in local and global
markets. Countries such as China, Japan, India, and Pakistan have traditionally
had large textile industries, which have often been drawn upon by Western
designers, but now Asian clothing styles are also gaining influence based on
their own ideas.
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