FASHION ?

CLOTHES
 Clothing is defined, in its broadest sense, as coverings for
the torso and limbs as well as coverings for the hands (
gloves), feet (socks, shoes, sandals, boots) and head (hats,
caps). Humans nearly universally wear clothing, which is
also known as dress, garments, attire, or apparel.
 People wear clothing for functional as well as for social
reasons.
 Clothing protects the vulnerable nude human body from
the extremes of weather, other features of our
environment, and for safety reasons.
 But every article of clothing also carries a cultural and
social meaning.
 Cont’d
 People also decorate their bodies with makeup or
cosmetics, perfume, and other ornamentation;
 They also cut, dye, and arrange the hair of their heads,
faces, and bodies (hairstyle), and sometimes also mark
their skin (by tattoos, scarifications, and piercings).
 All these decorations contribute to the overall effect and
message of clothing, but do not constitute clothing per se.
 Articles carried rather than worn (such as purses, canes,
and umbrellas) are normally counted as
fashion accessories rather than as clothing. Jewelry and
eyeglasses are usually counted as accessories as well,
even though in common speech thease items are
described as being worn rather than carried.
 Clothing as functional technology
 The practical function of clothing is to protect the
human body from weather — strong sunlight, extreme
heat or cold, and precipitation — as well as protect
from insects, noxious chemicals, weapons, and contact
with abrasive substances.
 In conclusion, clothing protects against anything that
might injure the naked human body. Humans have
shown extreme inventiveness in devising clothing
solutions to practical problems.
 See, among others: armor, diving suit, swimsuit,
motorcycle leathers, high-visibility clothing, and
protective clothing
 Clothing as social message

 Social messages sent by clothing, accessories, and decorati

ons
can involve social status, occupation, ethnic and religious
affiliation, marital status and sexual availability, etc.
 The manner of consciously constructing, assembling, and
wearing clothing to convey a social message in any culture
is governed by current fashion.
 The rate at which fashion changes varies; easily modified
styles in wearing or accessorizing clothes can change in
months, even days, in small groups or in media-influenced
modern societies.
 More extensive changes, that may require more time,
money, or effort to effect, may span generations. When
fashion changes, messages from clothing change.
 Social status

 In many societies, people of high rank reserve special items of

clothing or decoration for themselves as symbols of their social status.
 In ancient times, only Roman senators could wear garments dyed
with Tyrian purple; only high-ranking Hawaiian chiefs could wear
feather cloaks and palaoa or carved whale teeth.
 In Imperial China and many parts of Southeast Asia, only the
[monarch] could wear yellow.
 In many cases throughout history, there have been elaborate systems
of sumptuary laws regulating who could wear what.
 In other societies (including most modern societies), no laws prohibit
lower-status people from wearing high-status garments, but the high
cost of status garments effectively limits purchase and display.
 In current Western society, only the rich can afford so-called
haute couture. Additionally, the threat of social ostracism may limit
garment choice.
 Occupation
 Military, police, and firefighters usually wear uniforms, as
do workers in many industries.
 School children often wear school uniforms, while college
and university students sometimes wear academic dress.
 Members of religious orders may wear uniforms known
as habits.
 Sometimes a single item of clothing or a single accessory
can declare one's occupation or rank within a profession
— for example, the high toque or chef's hat worn by a
chief cook.
 Doctor's wear white coats to cover thier own dressing
while consulting a patient.
 Ethnic, political, & religious affiliation

 In many regions of the world, national costumes and styles in clothing and
ornament declare membership in a certain village, caste, religion, etc.
 A Scotsman declares his clan with his tartan.
 A Sikh displays his religious affiliation by wearing a turban and other traditional
clothing.
 A French peasant woman would have identified her village with her cap or coif.
 Clothes can also proclaim dissent from cultural norms and mainstream beliefs, as
well as personal independence.
 In 19th-century Europe, artists and writers lived la vie de Bohème and dressed to
shock:
 George Sand in men's clothing, female emancipationists in bloomers, male artists
in velvet waistcoats and gaudy neck cloths.
 Bohemians, beatniks, hippies, Goths, Punks and Skinheads have continued the (
countercultural) tradition in the 20th-century West.
 Now that haute couture plagiarizes street fashion within a year or so, street
fashion may have lost some of its power to shock, but it still motivates millions
trying to look hip and cool.
 Marital status

 Hindu women, once married, wear sindoor, a red

powder,
 in the parting of their hair; if widowed, they abandon
sindoor and jewelry and wear simple white clothing.
 Men and women of the Western world may wear
wedding rings to indicate their marital status. See also
 Sexual interest
 Some clothing indicates the modesty of the wearer. For example, many
Muslim women wear head or body covering (see hijab, burqa or bourqa,
chador and abaya) that proclaims their status as respectable women.
 Other clothing may indicate flirtatious intent. For example, a Western woman
might wear extreme stiletto heels, close-fitting and body-revealing black or
red clothing, exaggerated make-up, flashy jewelry and perfume to show
sexual interest.
 A man might wear a tightly-cut shirt and unbutton the top buttons.
 What constitutes modesty and allure varies radically from culture to culture,
within different contexts in the same culture, and over time as different
fashions rise and fall.
 Moreover, a person may choose to display a mixed message. For example, a
Saudi Arabian woman may wear an abaya to proclaim her respectability, but
choose an abaya of luxurious material cut close to the body and then
accessorize with high heels and a fashionable purse.
 All the details proclaim sexual desirability, despite the ostensible message of
respectability.
 Sexual fetishes involving clothing

 Because clothing and adornment are closely related to ideas of human

sexuality and sexual display, humans may develop clothing fetishes.
 They may be strongly aroused by the sight of another person wearing
clothing and accessories they consider arousing or sexually exciting.
 Sometimes the object of clothing becomes the object of arousal itself.
 Fetishes have been documented in every culture and have been
recorded throughout history.
 Common fetishes involving clothing include arousal by or involving
shoes, leather, uniforms, or lingerie.
 Fetishes vary as much as fashion. Sometimes the clothing itself
becomes the object of fetish,.
 Some clothing manufacturers make fetish clothing, designed to
arouse buyers with specialized tastes.
Religious habits & spl. religious clothing

 Religious clothing might be considered a special

case of occupational clothing.
 Sometimes it is worn only during the performance
of religious ceremonies.
 However, it may also be worn everyday as a
marker for special religious status.
 Clothing materials
 Common clothing materials include:
 Cloth, typically made of
 cotton,
 flax, wool,
 hemp, ramie,
 silk, or
 synthetic fibers
 Leather
 Less-common clothing materials include:
 Jute
 Rubber
 PVC
 Tyvek
 Rayon
 Reinforcing materials such as wood, bone, plastic and metal may be used in
fasteners or to stiffen garments.
 Early 21st-century clothing styles
 Western fashion has to a certain extent become international fashion, as
Western media and styles penetrate all parts of the world.
 Very few parts of the world remain where people do not wear items of
cheap, mass-produced Western clothing.
 Even people in poor countries can afford used clothing from richer
Western countries.
 However, people may wear ethnic or national dress on special occasions
or if carrying out certain roles or occupations. For example, most Japanese
women have adopted Western-style dress for daily wear, but will still wear
silk kimonos on special occasions.
 Items of Western dress may also appear worn or accessorized in
distinctive, non-Western ways.
 A Tongan man may combine a used T-shirt with a Tongan wrapped skirt,
or tupenu.
 Western fashion, too, does not function monolithically. It comes in many
varieties, from expensive haute couture to thrift store grunge
 Origin and history of clothing
 According to archaeologists and anthropologists, the earliest clothing probably consisted of fur,
leather, leaves or grass, draped, wrapped or tied about the body for protection from the elements.
 Knowledge of such clothing remains inferential, since clothing materials deteriorate quickly
compared to stone, bone, shell and metal artifacts.
 Archeologists have identified very early sewing needles of bone and ivory from about 30,000
BC, found near Kostenki, Russia, in 1988.
 Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking, anthropologists at the
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, have conducted a genetic analysis of
human body lice that indicates that they originated about 107,000 years ago.
 Since most humans have very sparse body hair, body lice require clothing to survive, so this
suggests a surprisingly recent date for the invention of clothing.
 Its invention may have coincided with the spread of modern Homo sapiens from the warm
climate of Africa, thought to have begun between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago.
 However, a second group of reseachers used similar genetic methods to estimate that body lice
originated about 540,000 years ago (Reed et al. 2004. PLoS Biology 2(11): e340). For now, the
date of the origin of clothing remains unresolved.
 Some human cultures, such as the various peoples of the Arctic Circle, until recently made their
clothing entirely of furs and skins, cutting clothing to fit and decorating lavishly.
 Other cultures have supplemented or replaced leather and skins with cloth: woven, knitted, or
twined from various animal and vegetable fibres. See weaving, knitting, and twining.
 Although modern consumers take clothing for granted, making the fabrics that go into clothing is
not easy.
 One sign of this is that the textile industry was the first to be mechanized during the
Industrial Revolution ; before the invention of the powered loom, textile production was a tedious
and labor-intensive process. Therefore, methods were developed for making most efficient use of
textiles.
 One approach simply involves draping the cloth. Many peoples wore, and still wear, garments
consisting of rectangles of cloth wrapped to fit — for example, the Scottish kilt or the Javanese
sarong. Pins or belts hold the garments in place. The precious cloth remains uncut, and people of
various sizes can wear the garment.
 Another approach involves cutting and sewing the cloth, but using every bit of the cloth rectangle in
constructing the clothing. The tailor may cut triangular pieces from one corner of the cloth, and then
add them elsewhere as gussets.
 Traditional European patterns for men's shirts and women's chemises take this approach.
 Modern European fashion treats cloth much more prodigally, typically cutting in such a way as to
leave various odd-shaped cloth remnants. Industrial sewing operations sell these as waste; home
sewers may turn them into quilts.
 In the thousands of years that humans have spent constructing clothing, they have created an
astonishing array of styles, many of which we can reconstruct from surviving garments, photos,
paintings, mosaics, etc., as well as from written descriptions.
 Costume history serves as a source of inspiration to current fashion designers , as well as a topic of
professional interest to costumers constructing for plays, films, television, and
historical reenactment .
 Future trends
 As technologies change, so will clothing. Many people, including
futurologists have extrapolated current trends and made the following
predictions:
 Man-made fibers such as nylon, polyester, Lycra, and Gore-Tex already
account for much of the clothing market.
 Many more types of fibers will certainly be developed, possibly using
nanotechnology. For example, military uniforms may stiffen when hit
by bullets, filter out poisonous chemicals, and treat wounds.
 "Smart" clothing will incorporate electronics.
 Clothing may incorporate wearable computers, flexible wearable
displays (possibly leading to fully animated clothing and some forms of
invisibility cloaks), medical sensors, etc.
 Present-day ready-to-wear technologies will presumably give way to
computer-aided custom manufacturing.
 Low power laser beams will measure the customer; computers will draw
up a custom pattern and execute it in the customer's choice of cloth.
 COSTUME
 The term costume can refer to wardrobe and dress in general, or to the distinctive style of
dress of a particular people, class, or period.
 It can also refer to the artistic arrangement of accessories in a picture, statue, poem, or play
, appropriate to the time, place, or other circumstances represented or described, or to a
particular style of clothing worn to portray the wearer as a character or type of character
other than their regular persona at a social event such as a masquerade, a fancy dress party
or in an artistic theatrical performance.
 Theatrical costumes, in combination with other aspects, serve to portray characters' age,
gender role, profession, social class, personality, and can even reveal information about
the historical period/era, geographic location, time of day, as well as the season or weather
of the theatrical performance.
 Sometimes theatrical costumes literally mimic what the costume designer thinks the
character would wear if the character actually existed. On the other hand, often stylized
theatrical costumes can exaggerate some aspect of a character.
 Without theatrical costumers, the audience would be left wondering who is related to
whom, and which person is which. Costuming truly is as important as the set and the
script, yet most audiences take it for granted.
 National costume or regional costume can express local (or exiled) identity and emphasise
uniqueness. It is often a source of one's National pride. Think Scotsman in a kilt or
Japanese in a kimono.
 The wearing of costumes has become an important part of Mardi Gras
and Halloween celebrations, and (to a lesser extent) people may also
wear costumes in conjunction with other holiday celebrations, such as
Christmas and Easter. Mardi Gras costumes are usually jesters and other
fantasy characters, while Halloween costumes traditionally take the form
of supernatural creatures such as ghosts, vampires, and angels. Christmas
and Easter costumes typically portray mythical holiday characters, such
as Santa Claus by donning a santa suit and beard or play the
Easter Bunny by putting on a furry costume and head. Costumes may
serve to portray various other character themes during secular holidays,
such as an Uncle Sam costume worn on the Independence day for
example.
 One of the more prominent places people see costumes is in theatre, film
and TV. Another very popular place for costumes is sporting events and
college games Those costumes are called mascots. These team mascots
hep the club or team rally around their own teams cause.
 FASHION
 The term fashion usually applies to a prevailing mode of expression, but quite often applies to a personal mode of
expression that may or may not adhere to prevailing ideals. Inherent in the term is the idea that the mode will
change more quickly than the culture as a whole.
 The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" are employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with
the current popular mode of expression. The term "fashion" is often used in a negative sense, as a synonym for
fads and trends.
 In this sense, fashions are essentially a relief from bourgeoisie and petit bourgeoisie boredom, or a distraction
from important matters, for the idle rich.
 The term is also frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour and style. In this sense, fashions
are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness.
 Fashions are social psychology phenomena common to many fields of human activity and thinking. The rises and
falls of fashions have been especially documented and examined in the following fields:
 Architecture, interior design, and landscape design Arts and crafts Body type, clothing or costume, cosmetics,
grooming, and personal adornment Cuisine Dance and music Forms of address, slang, and other forms of speech
Economics and spending choices, as studied in behavioral finance Entertainment, games, hobbies, sports, and
other pastimes Etiquette Politics and media, especially the topics of conversation encouraged by the media
Philosophy and spirituality (One might argue that religion is prone to fashions, although official religions tend to
change so slowly that the term cultural shift is perhaps more appropriate than "fashion") Technology, such as the
choice of programming techniques
 Of these fields, costume especially has become so linked in the public eye with the term "fashion". The more
general term "costume" has been relegated by many to only mean fancy dress or masquerade wear, while the term
"fashion" means clothing generally, and the study of it.
 This linguistic switch is due to the so-called fashion plates which were produced during the Industrial Revolution,
showing novel ways to use new textiles.
 For a broad cross-cultural look at clothing and its place in society, refer to the entries for clothing and costume.
The remainder of this article deals with clothing fashions in the industrialized world.
 Fashion and variation

The European idea of fashion as a personal statement rather than a cultural expression begins in the 16th century: ten
portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats. But the local culture still set the bounds,
 Fashions among upper-class Europeans began to move in synchronicity in the 18th century; though colors and patterns

of textiles changed from year to year, (Thornton), 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 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 (see Cravat).
The pace of change picked up in the 1780s with the publication of French engravings that showed the latest Paris styles.

By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike: local variation became first a sign of provincial culture, and then a
badge of the conservative peasant
Fashion in clothes has allowed wearers to express emotion or solidarity with other people for millennia. Modern

Westerners have a wide choice available in the selection of their clothes among females, and to a significantly lesser
extent among males.
What a person chooses to wear can reflect that person's personality or likes. When people who have cultural status start to

wear new or different clothes a fashion trend may start. People who like or respect them may start to wear clothes of a
similar style.
Fashions may vary significantly within a society according to age, social class, generation, occupation and geography as

well as over time. If, for example, an older person dresses according to the fashion of young people, he or she may look
ridiculous in the eyes of both young and older people. The term "fashion victim" refers to someone who slavishly follows
the current fashions (implementations of fashion).
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.)

 Fashion and the process of change
 1913 cartoon on the dictates of fashion, from the old "Life" magazine.
 Fashion, by definition, changes constantly. The changes may proceed more rapidly than in most other fields of
human activity (language, thought, etc). For some, modern fast-paced changes in fashion embody many of the
negative aspects of capitalism: it results in waste and encourages people qua consumers to buy things
unnecessarily.
 Others, especially young people, enjoy the diversity that changing fashion can apparently provide, seeing the
constant change as a way to satisfy their desire to experience "new" and "interesting" things.
 Note too that fashion can change to enforce uniformity, as in the case where so-called Mao suits became the
national uniform of mainland China.
 Materially affluent societies can offer a variety of different fashions, in clothes or accessories, to choose from.
 At the same time there remains an equal or larger range designated (at least currently) 'out of fashion'. (These or
similar fashions may cyclically come back 'into fashion' in due course, and remain 'in fashion' again for a while.)
 Practically every aspect of appearance that can be changed has been changed at some time, including heels for
men, skirt lengths ranging from ankle to mini, etc. I
n the past, new discoveries and lesser-known parts of the world could provide an impetus to change fashions
based on the exotic:
Europe in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, for example, might favor things Turkish at one time, things
Chinese at another, and things Japanese at a third. A modern version of exotic clothing includes club wear.
Globalization has reduced the options of exotic novelty in more recent times, and has seen the introduction of non-
Western wear into the Western world such as kaftans for women (traditionally a man's garment), and various
skirted wear such as kilts and sarongs for men - common articles of men's clothing found elsewhere, but novel
throughout most of Western culture.
 Fashion houses and their associated fashion designers, as well as high-status consumers (including celebrities),
appear to have some role in determining the rates and directions of fashion change.
Fashion and status
 Fashion can suggest or signal status in a social group.
Groups with high cultural status like to keep 'in fashion' to
display their position;
 A luxury product with promised quality and limited
availability is what they pursue.
 People who do not keep 'in fashion' within a so-called "style
tribe" can risk shame.
 Fashion-minded consumers are often characterized as
'sheep', dwelling too much on what others think and blindly
following trends chronicled by the mass media (often based
on public relations materials created by the manufacturers of
fashionable goods); see the derogatory term fashionista).
Fashion journalism

 A major part of fashion is fashion journalism.

 Journalists comment about the latest fashions on
the runway, as well as on the red carpet.
 Fashion critique and commentary can be found in
magazines, on TV, and now more recently in blogs.