'History of Fashion Essay\r'

' spirt has al shipway been a reflection factor of the incarnate consciousness and unconsciousness of society. In politically conservative times, sort reflects the staidness of the majority, but as well the subversive elements of the minority. No less a arguable figure than King Louis XIV of France was ru to a greater extent(prenominal)d to have utter that appearance was a mirror. Music, films, and television, all potent obliterate sire mirrors in their own right of the anxieties, hopes, and dreams of some(prenominal) society, all collectively form a synergistic relationship with fashion, each informing, influencing, and cross-pollinating the other(a)s in mingled turns.\r\n medicineal mode is also a turn up purification manifestation of the intellectual and ethnical apparent motion of postmodernism. Fashion depends on newness; summer, fall, winter, spring are seasons that occur inexorably each year, and with them, the demand for new fashion lines. The unlimited hung er for new ideas and inspirations in fashion and other stamp out farming arenas leads inevitably to cannibalization, plagiarism, re-contextualization, and re-imagination of ideas past and put forward †the essence of postmodernism.\r\nIf we survey the landscape of where pop culture and fashion have been, we can to some period predict the elements which may define where it will go, though in the postmodern public of the twenty-first century, it is contiguous to unsurmountable to predict what incarnations will come to pass. Fashion is the byproduct of a void society that has transcended some of the basic human struggles on the lower train of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.\r\nMost people in prosperous westbound nations are fortunate luxuriant to lead lives in which the acquisition and/or livelihood of food, shelter, and fit out is not a struggle that consumes their existence, as is sadly true in many African nations, for example. Free to ponder the meaning of the ir lives and the many ways in which it is possible for humans to express their interior(a) thoughts and feelings, citizens of the leisure society began to use fashion as a mode of self-expression and reflection of any fig of zeitgeists of their time.\r\nAs far back as the 1700s, French women consulted fashion magazines to learn the latest fashion trends. curriculum vitae artists were present in royal courts to make circular of the fashion choices made by the ruling classes, and communicated these ideas to dressmakers crossways the nation, who in turn crafted facsimiles for those who were able to afford such(prenominal) fashion mimicry. The French have historically held a special place in the fashion origination since this time.\r\nAs the 1800s and 1900s saw Western societies evolve from agricultural societies to industrial societies, with the concurrent increase in wealthiness and disposal income, the focus on and indulgence in fashion increased. With the advent of pop musi c, most notably rock-and-roll in the 1950s, and television, teenagers all around the realness saw the likes of Elvis Presley and his gyrating hips, causing a world-wide fashion sensation. Boys everywhere began to sport white t-shirts (in whose sleeves the more raucous ones rolled packs of cigarettes), blue jeans, and grease their hair.\r\nCelebrities from the arenas of music, film, and indeed television became the new royalty, the new elites, for Western cultures, and the fashion trends they embodies became inspirations for millions in each successive generation. The messages of rock-and-roll became more complex, subversive, and advocateful in the mid-sixties, corresponding with the United States’ contentious entry into the Vietnam War and a wholesale rejection on both sides of the Atlantic of many of the traditional set of the C aging War era.\r\nThe Beatles’s turn from fresh-scrubbed, feel-good bubblegum pop to psychedelic and metaphysical subject matter influ ences a new set of fashion trends which shocked the memorial tablet to the core. Men and women everywhere began vesture colorful (both literally and figuratively), outrageously expressive, and even outlandish fashions, and allowing their hair to grow long. The exhaustion from the myriad political and socio-cultural revolutions of the 1960s, and the stagnant Western economies of the 1970s gave way to a culture preoccupy with escapism and simply having a good time.\r\nSit-ins and political protests gave way to champagne-filled boogie nights. The flower-power psychedelia fashion trends of the late 1960s and early 1970s gave way to the groovy leisure suit styles inspired by the music trend of disco that consumed the world from roughly 1976 to 1980 and cemented by the global box office phenomenology of the film Saturday Night Fever, star John Travolta and featuring a soundtrack packed with disco hits indite by the Bee Gees. The tight-fitting and well-cut suits worn by Travolta, and t he sexy, posh dresses and pantsuits of the women in the film inspired millions to change their wardrobes accordingly.\r\nOn the tail end of the disco era came a brief but potent preoccupation with cowherd fashion, inspired by the peculiar utilitarian clothing from the American Old West †cowboy boots, baffling blue jeans, ten-gallon cowboy hats, etc. , again propelled into the collective fashion consciousness of the world by some other hugely successful film, 1982’s Urban Cowboy. At the same time the fashion trends inspired by disco and cowboy culture were dying out, the region of the political again profoundly affected the universe of fashion.\r\nThe elections of conservative political figureheads Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the U. S. sparked a schizophrenic revolution in clothing and music: as economic recoveries were engineered on the backs of the working poor, the culture that proclaimed â€Å"greed is good” took to reveling in the we aring conservative, yet expensive or even black clothing †furs, for example †which reflected the mindset of conspicuous consumption. Simultaneously, those cultural elements who were not benefiting from the economic boom were rebelling against the conservative psychiatric hospital trends and adopting controversial styles embodied, for example, in the slut-chic clothing popularized by the music and videos of Madonna.\r\nMusic videos, a new invention in pop culture and institutionalized by the power of MTV, became a new showcase for outrageous fashion statements in the 1980s and beyond. The greed and spiritual unsuccessful person of the 1980s gave way to the hippie nouveaux culture of the Earth-and-cause-friendly early-to-mid 1990s, and thence to the greed nouveaux culture of the late 1990s, spawned by the phenomenal economic growth of the Internet boom.\r\nBy this time, pop culture had begun to liberally cannibalize itself for new ideas, having tucker out much of its pot ential for true originality. As technology and civilization continue their exponential evolution of consumption, in truth original ideas become more and more backbreaking to generate, leading fashion designers to borrow from past ideas, to amalgamate hitherto uncombined or un-combinable ideas, as prove by the infamous phrase â€Å"What’s old is new; what’s new is old. The early 21st Century is a time of profound incredulity in fashion, with a myriad of recycled influences competing for the crown of the conterminous hot fashion trend. The inherent self-referentiality and cannibalism of post-modernism, however, makes it virtually impossible to predict which trends will take hold and when. The attached decade will make for a engrossing time in the universe of fashion.\r\n'