Back in fashion : western fashion from the middle ages to the present

Abstract

Eight centuries of western fashion would need a much longer treatment than can be provided here. This means that instead of a purely chronological survey, this book offers a more specific treatment of key topics in the history of fashion. The first three chapters cover the period from circa 1300 to the late eighteenth century. This is a period that many historians have considered outside the ‘history of fashion’; it is instead contextualised in the more traditional narrative of history of dress, costume and clothing. This book argues instead for the centrality of fashion in late medieval and early modern life. Fashion developed not just within the world of the courts, but also in bustling urban environments. The novelty of the phenomenon worried legislators and moral leaders, who argued for the curbing of fashion. Yet fashion was also internalised by both men and women and came to be seen as an integral feature of daily life: this was true not only of the prescriptive literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also of commercial life that saw increasingly diverse sectors of society engaged in the purchasing of fashionable goods in the eighteenth century. The following two chapters chart the period from the late eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century. This has often been seen as the moment in which ‘fashion as we know it’ emerged, and the notion of ‘modernity’ has been invoked to explain the importance of urban life, the mechanisation of production, the role of the consumer, the emergence of couture and the success of European forms of dress across the globe. This section argues that profound continuities were already in place and that ‘modern fashion’ was the result of developments based upon pre-existing notions: it was a reaction to previous ideas, and at times a development and re-definition of the contours of fashionable behaviour. Although fashion came to be increasingly perceived as ‘feminised’, it penetrated artistic as well as industrial and political life to such an extent that theorists have proposed the extended concept of ‘democracy’ to encompass the role of fashion in nineteenth- and twentieth- century societies. The final three chapters consider the period from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. They question in what ways fashion shaped the twentieth century. The previously mentioned paradigm of ‘democracy’ needed both users and media. Fashion was and still remains strongly connected to forms of political emancipation, sexual liberation and leisurely pursuits. But the emergence of a possible ‘fashion system’ was based on the fashion object as well as on its iconographic and textual representations. Cinema, television and magazines challenged top-down forms of ‘fashion diffusion’ and contributed to new social behaviours including the creation of subcultures. Some of the features of fashion as seen in previous periods were magnified in the age of post-modernity and hyper-reality.