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fashion is new. Every style you see has evolved from
previous styles. It has been seen and used before.
The same geometric shapes are used:
rectangles, squares and triangles. These shapes were used in primitive
times and are still being used. Primitive people created fabrics,
perhaps accidentally. Clothing tends to fit into a certain number
of basic categories such as draped apparel, pull-on clothing, cut
and sewn on semi-fitted clothing, close fitting and artificial such
as hoops and padding.
SO
WHAT IS FASHION?
If one uses the word in the strict sense of apparel, it implies covering
the body with an article or some articles of clothing that have an
acceptance in a recognized stratum of society. So what do the Australian
Aborigines and the Beverly Hills sophisticates have in common?
THEY BOTH ADORN THEMSELVES
It is how the body is adorned that creates fashion. Furs for Eskimos, cotton
gallabayas for the Egyptians, decoration for cave men and very little clothing
for those living in the warm Mediterranean.
DOES
WEATHER MATTER?
You bet it does!!
Fashion
often interrelates with food. Food interconnects with
body awareness, which in turn is mirrored in clothing.
In a wider, symbiotic sense, our eating habits affect
fashion in other ways--less wool for apparel if sheep
are reduced and less hides for leather if we reduce
our consumption of beef.
Fashion
is a most powerful force. Fashion gives us not only
an insight into the social structure of almost any
society, but enables us to comprehend and understand
the social and economic forces at work. Most societies
develop counter-culture movements. For example, Amelia
Bloomer, rebelling against tight waists and hoops,
introduced a whole new concept of clothing in the middle
of the 19th century.
Children
have dressed in miniature versions of adult apparel.
Children love it but parents encourage this. Fashion
is truly a mirror and our acceptance of styles and
changes in styles is a subconscious reaction to the
society in which we live.
It
is only by looking back in time, into the distant past,
that we understand were we are today. What we wear
on our bodies in the 20th century are bits and pieces
of apparel from other eras. We owe so much to other
ages, other times. The 21st century will be here before
we know it.
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