Fashion is an art

from The Fashion Gurus

Fashion is an art, like architecture and music. Fashion is an ever-changing phenomenon that captivates the entire world. Though there are signs from earlier, it can be fairly clearly dated to the middle of the 14th century, to which historians including James Laver and Fernand Braudel date the start of fashion in clothing. 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. Fashion 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 Ancient regime France. The habit of continually changing the style of clothing worn, which is now worldwide, at least among urban populations, is a distinctively Western one.

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. Fashion The fashions of the West are unparalleled either in antiquity or in the other great civilizations of the world. 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.

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. When people who have cultural status start to wear new or different clothes a fashion trend may start. The terms "fashionista" or "fashion victim" refer 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. 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. Other people, 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.