Fashion, a general term for the style and custom prevalent at a given
time, in its most common usage refers to costume or clothing style.
The more technical term, costume, has become so linked in the public
eye with the term "fashion" that the more general term "costume" has
in popular use mostly been relegated to special senses like fancy
dress or masquerade wear, while the term "fashion" means clothing
generally, and the study of it. This linguistic switch is due to the
fashion plates which were produced during the Industrial Revolution,
showing the latest designs.[citation needed] For a broad cross-
cultural look at clothing and its place in society, refer to the
entries for clothing, costume and fabrics. The remainder of this
article deals with clothing fashions in the Western world.[1]
Contents
[hide]

* 1 Clothing fashions
* 2 Media
* 3 Intellectual property
* 4 See also
* 5 References
* 6 Further reading
* 7 External links

[edit] Clothing fashions
2008 runway show

For detailed historical articles by period, see History of Western
fashion

The continually changing fashions of the West have been generally
unparalleled either in antiquity or in the other great civilizations
of the world until recent decades. Early Western travellers, whether
to Persia, Turkey, Japan or China frequently remark on the absence of
changes in fashion there, and observers from these other cultures
comment on the unseemly pace of Western fashion, which many felt
suggested an instability and lack of order in Western culture. The
Japanese Shogun's secretary boasted (not completely accurately) to a
Spanish visitor in 1609 that Japanese clothing had not changed in over
a thousand years.[2] However in Ming China, for example, there is
considerable evidence for rapidly changing fashions in Chinese
clothing.[3]

Changes in costume often took place at times of economic or social
change (such as in ancient Rome and the medieval Caliphate), but then
a long period without large changes followed. This occurred in Moorish
Spain from the 8th century, when the famous musician Ziryab introduced
sophisticated clothing styles based on seasonal and daily timings from
his native Baghdad and his own inspiration to Córdoba, Spain.[4][5]
Similar changes in fashion occurred in the Middle East from the 11th
century, following the arrival of the Turks who introduced clothing
styles from Central Asia and the Far East.[6]

The beginnings of the habit in Europe of continual and increasingly
rapid change in styles can be fairly reliably dated to the middle of
the 14th century, to which historians including James Laver and
Fernand Braudel date the start of Western fashion in clothing.[7][8]
The most dramatic manifestation was a sudden drastic shortening and
tightening of the male over-garment, from calf-length to barely
covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing on the
chest to look bigger. This created the distinctive Western male
outline of a tailored top worn over leggings or trousers.
Marie Antoinette was a fashion icon

The pace of change accelerated considerably in the following century,
and women and men's fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning
of the hair, became equally complex and changing. 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. These remained very different until a counter-movement in the
17th to 18th centuries imposed similar styles once again, mostly
originating from Ancien Régime France.[9] Though the rich usually led
fashion, the increasing affluence of early modern Europe led to the
bourgeoisie and even peasants following trends at a distance sometimes
uncomfortably close for the elites - a factor Braudel regards as one
of the main motors of changing fashion.[10]
Albrecht Dürer's drawing contrasts a well turned out bourgeoise from
Nuremberg (left) with her counterpart from Venice. The Venetian lady's
high chopines make her taller

Ten 16th century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten
entirely different hats, and at this period national differences were
at their most pronounced, as Albrecht Dürer recorded in his actual or
composite contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of
the 15th century (illustration, right). 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.[11]

Though colors and patterns of textiles changed from year to year,[12]
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 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 16th century, and Abraham Bosse had produced
engravings of fashion from the 1620s. By 1800, all Western Europeans
were dressing alike (or thought they were): local variation became
first a sign of provincial culture, and then a badge of the
conservative peasant.[13]

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. The four major current
fashion capitals are acknowledged to be Milan, New York City, Paris,
and London. Fashion weeks are held in these cities, where designers
exhibit their new clothing collections to audiences, and which are all
headquarters to the greatest fashion companies and are renowned for
their major influence on global fashion.

Modern Westerners have a wide choice available in the selection of
their clothes. 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 considerably 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 terms fashionista or fashion victim
refer to someone who slavishly follows the current fashions.

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.)
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