History of Fashion Essay

Fashion has always been a saying of the collective mind and unconsciousness of society. In politically conservative times, elan reflects the staidness of the majority, but in like manner the subversive elements of the minority. No less a controversial figure than King Louis XIV of France was rumored to confirm said that room was a mirror. Music, films, and television, all potent protoactinium refining mirrors in their take right of the anxieties, hopes, and dreams of any society, all collectively form a interactional relationship with fashion, each informing, influencing, and cross-pollinating the others in various turns.Fashion is also a knock down culture manifestation of the intellectual and cultural snub of post moodrnism. Fashion depends on newness summer, fall, winter, spring are seasons that occur inexorably each year, and with them, the demand for new fashion lines. The inexhaustible hunger for new ideas and inspirations in fashion and other pop culture arenas lea ds inevitably to cannibalization, plagiarism, re-contextualization, and re-imagination of ideas past and empower the essence of postmodernism.If we survey the landscape of where pop culture and fashion have been, we can to some degree holler the elements which may define where it will go, though in the postmodern universe of the 21st century, it is next to out of the question to predict what incarnations will come to pass. Fashion is the byproduct of a empty society that has transcended many of the basic human struggles on the lower train of Maslows Hierarchy of Needs.Most people in prosperous occidental nations are fortunate enough to lead lives in which the acquisition and/or maintenance of food, shelter, and habiliment is not a struggle that consumes their existence, as is deplorably true in many African nations, for example. Free to ponder the message of their lives and the many ways in which it is possible for humans to express their inner(a) thoughts and feelings, c itizens of the leisure society began to use fashion as a mode of self-expression and reflection of any number of zeitgeists of their time.As far back as the 1700s, French women consulted fashion magazines to learn the upstartlyst fashion trends. Sketch artists were pass in royal courts to perform note of the fashion choices made by the ruling classes, and communicated these ideas to dressmakers across the nation, who in turn crafted facsimiles for those who were able to afford such(prenominal) fashion mimicry. The French have historically held a special situation in the fashion universe since this time.As the 1800s and 1900s saw western societies explicate from agrarian societies to industrial societies, with the concurrent increase in wealth and government activity income, the focus on and indulgence in fashion increased. With the advent of pop medical specialty, most notably rock-and-roll in the 1950s, and television, teenagers all around the founding saw the likes of El vis Presley and his gyrating hips, causing a global fashion sensation. Boys all over began to sport white t-shirts (in whose sleeves the more raucous ones rolled packs of cigarettes), blue jeans, and malicious gossip their hair.Celebrities from the arenas of music, film, and then television became the new royalty, the new elites, for Western cultures, and the fashion trends they embodies became inspirations for millions in each successive generation. The messages of rock-and-roll became more complex, subversive, and powerful in the 1960s, same with the United States controversial entry into the Vietnam war and a wholesale rejection on both sides of the Atlantic of many of the traditional values of the C sure-enough(a) War era.The Beatless turn from fresh-scrubbed, feel-good bubblegum pop to psychedelic and metaphysical subject upshot influences a new set of fashion trends which shocked the Establishment to the core. workforce and women everywhere began wearing colorful (both l iterally and figuratively), consciencelessly expressive, and even outlandish fashions, and allowing their hair to grow long. The exhaustion from the myriad political and socio-cultural r ontogenesiss of the 1960s, and the stagnant Western economies of the 1970s gave way to a culture preoccupied with escapism and entirely having a good time.Sit-ins and political protests gave way to champagne-filled boogie nights. The flower-power psychedelia fashion trends of the late 1960s and early 1970s gave way to the groovy leisure accommodate styles inspired by the music trend of disco music that consumed the world from around 1976 to 1980 and cemented by the global box office phenomenology of the film Saturday Night Fever, star John Travolta and featuring a soundtrack packed with disco hits written by the Bee Gees. The scrawny and well-cut suits worn by Travolta, and the sexy, stylish dresses and pantsuits of the women in the film inspired millions to switch their wardrobes accordingl y.On the tail end of the disco era came a design but potent preoccupation with cowboy fashion, inspired by the remarkable utilitarian clothing from the American Old West cowboy boots, furrowed blue jeans, ten-gallon cowboy hats, etc. , again propelled into the collective fashion consciousness of the world by another hugely successful film, 1982s urban Cowboy. At the same time the fashion trends inspired by disco and cowboy culture were dying out, the realm of the political again deeply affected the universe of fashion.The elections of conservative political figureheads Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. sparked a schizophrenic revolution in clothing and music as economical recoveries were engineered on the backs of the working poor, the culture that proclaimed greed is good took to reveling in the wearing conservative, yet expensive or even shocking clothing furs, for example which reflected the mindset of conspicuous consumption. Simultaneously, those cultural elements who were not benefiting from the economic miraculous food were rebelling against the conservative establishment trends and adopting controversial styles embodied, for example, in the slut-chic clothing popularized by the music and videos of Madonna.Music videos, a new invention in pop culture and institutionalized by the power of MTV, became a new showcase for outrageous fashion statements in the mid-eighties and beyond. The greed and spiritual bankruptcy of the 1980s gave way to the hippie nouveaux culture of the Earth-and-cause-friendly early-to-mid 1990s, and then to the greed nouveaux culture of the late 1990s, spawned by the phenomenal economic growth of the Internet boom.By this time, pop culture had begun to liberally cannibalize itself for new ideas, having exhausted much of its strength for true originality. As technology and civilization continue their exponential evolution of consumption, genuinely original ideas become more and more difficult to gen erate, atomic number 82 fashion designers to borrow from past ideas, to combine hitherto uncombined or un-combinable ideas, as evidenced by the infamous phrase Whats old is new whats new is old. The early 21st Century is a time of profound uncertainty in fashion, with a myriad of recycled influences competing for the roof of the next hot fashion trend. The inherent self-referentiality and cannibalism of post-modernism, however, makes it virtually impossible to predict which trends will take hold and when. The next decade will make for a fascinating time in the universe of fashion.