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The pace of change accelerated considerably in the following
century, and women's fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning
of the hair, became equally complex and changing. Art historians are
therefore able to use fashion in dating images with increasing
confidence and precision, often within five years in the case of 15th
century images. Initially changes in fashion led to a fragmentation of
what had previously been very similar styles of dressing across the
upper classes of Europe, and the development of distinctive national
styles, which remained very different until a counter-movement in the
17th to 18th centuries imposed similar styles once again, finally those
from Ancien regime France.[6] Though fashion was always led by the rich, the increasing affluence of Early Modern Europe led to the bourgeoisie and even peasants
following trends at a distance sometimes uncomfortably close for the
elites - a factor Braudel regards as one of the main motors of changing
fashion.[7]
The fashions of the West are often believed to be unparalleled
either in antiquity or in the other great civilizations of the world.
Early Western travellers, whether to Persia, Turkey, Japan or China
frequently remark on the absence of changes in fashion there, although
they understood little of the cultures they were describing, and
observers from these other cultures comment on the unseemly pace of
Western fashion, which many felt suggested an instability and 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.[8]
However in Ming China, for example, there is considerable evidence for
fastly changing fashions, see Timothy Brook's book "The Confusions of
Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China" (University of California
Press 1999), it has a whole section on fashion in particular.
Ten 16th century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show
ten entirely different hats, and at this period national differences
were at their most pronounced, as Albrecht Dürer recorded 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 end of the 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.[9]
Though colors and patterns of textiles changed from year to year,[10]
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 largely derived from military
models, and changes in a European male silhouette are galvanized in
theatres of European war, where gentleman officers had opportunities to
make notes of foreign styles: an example is the "Steinkirk" cravat or necktie.
The pace of change picked up in the 1780s with the increased publication of French engravings that showed the latest Paris styles; though there had been distribution of dressed dolls from France as patterns since the sixteenth century, and Abraham Bosse
had produced engravings of fashion from the 1620s. By 1800, all Western
Europeans were dressing alike (or thought they were): local variation
became first a sign of provincial culture, and then a badge of the
conservative peasant.[11]
Although tailors and dressmakers were no doubt responsible for many innovations before, and the textile industry certainly led many trends, the History of fashion design is normally taken to date from 1858, when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the first true haute couture
house in Paris. Since then the professional designer has become a
progressively more dominant figure, despite the origins of many
fashions in street fashion.
Fashion in clothes has allowed wearers to express emotion
Street Wear Men’s Street Wear Women’s Street Wear Urban Street Wear Street Wear Fashion Street Wear Style Street Wear Clothing Street Wear Clothes
Urban Streetwear Men’s Urban Streetwear Women’s Urban Streetwear
Street Fashion Men’s Street Fashion Women’s Street Fashion
Street Style Men’s Street Style Women’s Street Style
Men’s Indie Fashion Women’s Indie Fashion Men’s Indie Style Women’s Indie Style Men’s Indie Clothing
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