Contemporary Indian dress is based upon a rich history of fashion development through 4,000 years (Ghurye 1966). The country contains one-sixth of the world’s population, divided into three language families—Sanskrit, Dravidian, and Proto-Munda—each contributing its own dress traditions. Dress varies by region, whether it is a difference in how a woman’s sari or man’s dhoti is wrapped; the cut of the design; the use of the headdress or hair dressing; or the use of temporary or permanent body markings. Caste, religious, regional, or ethnic identity of most rural dwellers and some urbanites is revealed in the design of their tattoos, jewelry, or headdress. Clothing style often communicates the same information. This entry focuses on popularly worn garments and major fashion trends of the recent era. Read the rest of this entry »
January 18th, 2012 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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An implant is the introduction of a material or object under the skin that changes the shape of the body in that area. Implants create temporary, semipermanent, and permanent body modifications that transform the volume, space, and mass of a body area. Implants require an invasive procedure or surgery, often plastic or cosmetic surgery. Read the rest of this entry »
January 18th, 2012 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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Ikat is a resist dye technique used to pattern textiles. The more common methods of resist dyeing involve covering parts of a fabric to shield the reserved areas from penetration of the dye, as in tie-dyeing, where threads are wound around the fabric, or in batik, where wax is applied to the surface of the cloth. The term “ikat” by contrast, is used for a process where prior to weaving, warp (lengthwise yarn) or weft (crosswise thread) or sometimes both are tied off with fiber knots that resist absorbing color and are then dyed. To facilitate the pattern tying, the threads are set up on a frame. They are then grouped into bunches of several threads to be tied at once; this results in the creation of knot units from which the overall pattern is built up. Resist ties are removed or new ones added for each color; their combinations create the design. After dyeing is completed, all resists are opened, and the patterned yarns are woven. Read the rest of this entry »
January 18th, 2012 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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At the start of the twenty-first century Hugo Boss AG was among the biggest companies producing menswear in Germany and, in the last decade of the twentieth century, dominated the German menswear designer market through the distribution of various lines and licenses. In 1923 Hugo Boss founded the clothing company in Metzingen, near Stuttgart in the south of Germany. At first the company specialized in the production of work clothes, overalls, raincoats, and uniforms. From 1933 onward it made uniforms for German storm troopers, Wehrmacht, and Hitler Youth. Boss brought forced laborers from Poland and France to his factory to boost output in the following years. When Boss died in 1948, the factory returned to making uniforms for postal and police workers. In 1953 it produced its first men’s suits. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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George Hoyningen-Huene (1900-1968) is remembered as one of the finest fashion photographers of the 1920s and 1930s. He was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, to a Baltic nobleman, the chief equerry to Tsar Alexander III, and an American mother whose own father had been the United States Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy Extraordinary to the Russian court. Huene’s early upbringing was one of privilege, though the revolution brought those advantages to an abrupt end: the family’s properties were confiscated, and they were forced to flee for their lives. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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HOSPITAL GOWNS. See Nonwoven Textiles.
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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HOSIERY, WOMEN’S. See Stockings, Women’s.
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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The term “hosiery” in contemporary usage is generally defined as stockings or socks, more specifically as tight-fitting knit goods that cover men’s feet and varying portions of the lower leg, or as knitted feet and leg coverings for women (such as pantyhose or tights). The related term “hose,” while used synonymously, is even more specifically historically defined as a man’s garment that fully covers the legs, like tights, and is tied to the doublet (a short, close-fitting jacket). The origin of the word “hose” is the Old English “hosa” or leg covering, or Middle English “hose” for stocking. A related German term, “hosen, ” is also often seen in historical use. In the history of Western dress, the term “hose” has been used to refer to a wide range of men’s leg coverings, with or without a footed portion, from early centuries C.E. through the early nineteenth century. These include the Roman lower leg wrappings called feminalia, the early northern European footed or ankle-length woven trousers, and medieval criss-crossed leg wrappings sometimes referred to as chausses. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann (1906-1999) was one of the most creative and prolific fashion photographers of the twentieth century. (He took the name of Horst P. Horst during World War II and was known professionally simply as Horst.) From the beginning of his career in 1931 until 1992, when failing eyesight forced him to abandon his work, his photographs graced the pages of American, French, British, German, Spanish, and Italian editions of Vogue, Vanity Fair, House and Garden, and a host of photography magazines, books, and catalogs. Horst came to prominence in the 1930s, by which time the power unique to the medium of photography was dramatically apparent to promoters of fashion. He is appreciated in the twenty-first century not only for the spare elegance and refined glamour of his fashion work, which produced icons of the genre, but also for his myriad portraits, male and female nudes, flower studies, and pictures of homes and gardens. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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HOOP SKIRT. See Crinoline.
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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The word “homespun” connotes both a rough fabric worn by country people and the human qualities, good or bad, associated with it. In English literature, “homespun” can mean boorish behavior or wholesome simplicity. In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, for example, Puck dismisses the comic bumpkins Bottom and Snout as “hempen homespun.” Writing a century later, John Dryden contrasted “harlot-hunting” foreigners with an “honest homespun countrey Clown” of English make. In the eighteenth century, political writers on both sides of the Atlantic adopted the personae of a wise but plainspoken countryman or -woman, signing themselves “Dorothy Distaff” or “Horatio Homespun.” In the nineteenth-century United States, poets, novelists, and preachers celebrated an idealized “age of homespun” that symbolized the virtues of self-sufficiency and egalitarian simplicity. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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In 1974, Diana Vreeland organized an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, devoted to studio designs. The exhibition’s title, Romantic and Glamorous: Hollywood Style, sums up perfectly the way in which traditional “Hollywood style” is perceived. It is seen as synonymous with glamour and opulence. Vreeland emphasized this in the exhibition’s catalog: “Everything was larger than life. The diamonds were bigger, the furs were thicker and more luxurious … silks, satins, velvets and chiffons, miles and miles of ostrich feathers … everything was an exaggeration” (p. 5). Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
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Prior to the rise of the bourgeoisie, historical revivals in dress were the preserve of the aristocratic classes, principally employed as costume either for masquerade and pageantry, portraiture or professional function (courtly and legal uniform), and always as a distinguishing mark of timelessness and status—of both power and beauty. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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In the mid-1960s, the hippies—the rebels and dropouts of the Haight-Ashbury community of San Francisco—generated one of the most influential of history’s dress reform movements. Their style was so outrageous and anomalous that it alone could have made the hippie movement impossible to ignore. As did their lifestyles, their fashion built upon San Francisco and California’s tradition of iconoclasmi; important, too, was the precedent provided by the young ready-to-wear designers of London, whose international impact began in the late 1950s. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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Hip-hop is both the voice of alienated, frustrated youth and a multibillion-dollar cultural industry packaged and marketed on a global scale. Hip-hop is also a multifaceted subculture that transcends many of the popular characterizations used to describe other music-led youth cultures. One of the important considerations about hip-hop is that since its conception in the early 1970s, hip-hop has arguably become more potent and efficient in galvanizing black social identity than the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
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The ubiquity of Tommy Hunger’s fashions, particularly among urban youth, is a testament to the marketing and image branding that has characterized contemporary American fashion. Hilfiger was born in 1952, one of nine children raised by a jeweler and nurse in upstate New York; he described his childhood in his 1997 stylebook, All American, as living in “Leave it to Beaver-land” (p. 2). In his senior year of high school Hilfiger and two friends opened People’s Place, a clothing shop in their hometown of Elmira that sold candles and bell-bottom jeans; Hilfiger enjoyed decorating the windows and designing in-store merchandise displays. People’s Place thrived for nearly eight years, with additional stores opening in other towns, until it went bankrupt in the late 1970s. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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Equating the terms hijab and “veil” is a common error. “Veil” is an easy, familiar word used when referring to Arab women’s head, face, and body covers. Hijab is not the Arabic equivalent of veil—it is a complex and multilayered phenomenon. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
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High-tech fashion uses advances in science and technology to design and produce fashion products. Methods used in high-tech fashion borrow from technologies developed in the fields of chemistry, computer science, aerospace engineering, automotive engineering, architecture, industrial textiles, and competitive athletic wear. Fashion projects an image of rapid change and forward thinking—a good environment for use of the latest technologies in production methods and materials. As technology becomes more integrated with one’s everyday life, its influence on the fashion one wears continues to increase. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
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High-heeled shoes, perhaps more than any other item of clothing, are seen as the ultimate fashion symbol of being a woman. Little girls, who raid their mother’s closets for dressing-up props, gravitate toward them. A first pair of high heels was often a rite of passage into womanhood. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
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At the U.S. Conference of Mayors on 21 May 1997, President Bill Clinton triggered a media furor on both sides of the Atlantic with his comments about the dangers of so-called heroin chic in contemporary fashion imagery. “You do not need to glamorize addiction to sell clothes,” he asserted. “The glorification of heroin is not creative, it’s destructive. It’s not beautiful, it’s ugly” (White House Briefing Room p.1). The photographs in question showed emaciated models, eyes half-closed, skin pale and clammy, heads twisted in apparent abandon against a backdrop of seedy, anonymous hotel rooms and dirty apartments. Clinton’s fears had been heightened by fashion photographer Davide Sorrenti’s death at twenty-one, from a drug overdose on 4 February 1997. The gap between image-makers’ and models’ real lives and constructed fashion photographs blurred. Since the 1970s fashion designers’ struggles with drug addiction, for example, Yves Saint Laurent and Roy Halston, had been related alongside discussions of their work and influences. In the 1990s media coverage merged actual drug abuse and fashion scenarios created to suggest decadent and nihilistic rejections of conventional notions of beauty. Clinton decried what he saw as fashion’s glam-orization of heroin use, and his words were reinforced by fashion journalists such as Amy Spindler of the New York Times, who felt that fashion insiders were irresponsible, that they ignored drug use by models and photographers, and that they made images that spoke of dark addictions in order to promote clothing and fashion ideals. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
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Although golf had existed in Scotland since the Middle Ages, as a popular game it dates to the end of the nineteenth century. The first North American golf club, founded by a Scot in Montreal in the 1870s, and soon followed by others in Quebec and Ontario, was the outcome of Scottish immigration. The earliest U.S. club was founded in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1882. From the beginning, the clothing for golf was practical fashion wear, based primarily on the new men’s sporting models appearing for use for bicycling or shooting at the time. It consisted of tweed suits with vests and, if knickers were chosen as trousers, knee-high stockings to complete the outfit. For women, who participated from the outset, a nod to practicality appeared in the slight shortening of skirts, some four to six inches off the ground, but dress for golf generally remained the clothing of the New Woman of the turn of the century: skirt, shirtwaist blouse, jacket, hat and gloves, and of course, a corset. The overall effect was conservative but comfortable for the time. It was clothing suitable for women to wear while interacting in public with men. This remained the model well into the 1920s, and indeed, given inevitable changes in design, the general tone for golf wear from that time on. Read the rest of this entry »
December 14th, 2011 in
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The world’s most acclaimed maker and purveyor of status goods, Hermès has evolved from its days supplying harnesses to coach builders. The firm has been in family hands since it was begun in 1837, when Thierry Hermès (1801-1878), who had moved to France from Prussia in 1821, established his wholesale business near the old city wall on the rue Basse du Rempart in Paris. Read the rest of this entry »
March 1st, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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Hemp is a soft bast fiber from the stem of a plant, as are flax, jute, and ramie. Hemp plant fibers are three to twelve feet long and are made up of bundled cellular fibers. The plant itself, Cannabis sativa, is hardy and can be grown in most locations and climates around the world and requires moderate water. Its recorded use for food, shelter, and fiber dates from at least to 8000 B.C.E. Although ethnobotanists and others cannot be absolutely sure, it is thought that hemp was first grown in Asia. Read the rest of this entry »
March 1st, 2011 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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The term “hemline” entered fashion-speak in the 1930s. Prior to that time, the fashion press referred to skirt lengths and, since the 1920s, when hems first became a focus of fashion, slavishly reported on how many inches above the floor the latest season’s models were hemmed. While the press and fashionable women of the twentieth century obsessed about hemlines, throughout most of Western fashion history, skirt length was not an issue. Skirts reached the floor, except in clothing worn by members of the working class whose shortened garments facilitated their work, and, for brief periods of time during the 1780s and 1830s, when ankles were revealed. The history of the hemline is then one of twentieth-century dress, when the raising and lowering of women’s skirts made headlines, occasioned protest marches, and served as a symbol of revolution. Read the rest of this entry »
December 9th, 2010 in
Clothing and Fashion | tags:
"The New Look" collection,
1780,
1830,
1915,
1920,
1922,
1924,
1925,
1927,
1929,
1930,
1942,
1947,
1955,
1960s,
1966,
1968,
1970,
1980s,
American designers,
Bergdorf Goodman,
Carmel Snow,
Carnaby Street,
Christian Dior,
church,
conservative parties,
couturiers,
designer,
evening dress,
FADD (Fight Against Dictating Designers),
fashion designers,
fashion press,
full skirts,
GAMS (Girls Against More Skirt),
garments,
Harper's Bazaar,
hemline,
Italian designers,
L-85,
London,
Mary Quant,
maxi,
miniskirt,
Mrs. John B. Henderson,
New York Times,
Paris,
politicians,
POOFF (Preservation of Our Femininity and Finances),
religious leaders,
revolution,
short skirts,
Skirts,
The Midi,
U.S. government,
university presidents,
women of the twentieth century,
women's,
World War I,
youth culture |
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A helmet—a defensive covering for the head—is made of hard materials for resisting blows so as to protect ears, neck, eyes, and face. Helmets have been worn over centuries for military combat and ceremonies, later for hazardous occupations, and recently for sports. Helmet design fluctuated with changes in warfare and technology. Read the rest of this entry »
October 26th, 2010 in
Clothing and Fashion | tags:
helmet |
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Headdress is an elaborate, ornamental, or practical covering for the head, as differentiated from the hat, which has a crown, and includes many varieties such as the hairnet, headband, head wrap, wreath or chaplet, mantilla, turban, crown, and others. Headdresses incorporate complex meanings including religious symbolism, political power and affiliation, social status or rank, and fashion consciousness. Made of numerous materials, designs, shapes, and embellishments, headdresses can also serve practical purposes—protecting the head against natural elements, carrying objects like weapons, baskets, or water pots—and are often associated with ceremonies, particularly rites of passage. Read the rest of this entry »
October 25th, 2010 in
Clothing and Fashion | tags:
1920,
1930,
1940,
Brassempouy,
Bronze Age,
designers,
Elsa Schiaparelli,
ethnic costumes,
European and American women,
Francisco Goya,
Hairnets,
hairstyle,
hat,
headdress,
horsehair,
medieval Europe,
Renaissance styles,
Sally Victor,
snood,
thirteenth century |
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Edith Head (1897-1981) was born in San Bernardino, California. In 1923, after a brief career as a schoolteacher, Head answered an advertisement for a sketch artist at Famous Players-Lasky (soon to be renamed Paramount Studios). Although she had very little artistic training, her versatility impressed Howard Greer, the chief costume designer, who hired her immediately. When Greer left Paramount in 1927, he was replaced by his assistant designer, Travis Banton. As chief designer, Banton costumed the stars at Paramount, while Head, who had been promoted to assistant designer, costumed the B-movie players and extras. When Banton left the studio in 1938, Paramount named Edith Head chief designer; she remained at the studio in this capacity until 1967. That same year she received a contract with Universal Studios, where she worked until her death in 1981. From the 1950s on, Head became a media personality through her regular appearances on the television show Art Linkletter’s House Party. She also published two books: The Dress Doctor (1959) and How to Dress for Success (1967). Read the rest of this entry »
October 25th, 2010 in
Clothing and Fashion | tags:
1923,
1927,
1938,
1944,
1949,
1950s,
1959,
1967,
1981,
A Place in the Sun (1951),
Academy Award for costume design,
Alfred Hitchcock,
assistant designer,
Barbara Stanwyck,
bolero jackets,
California,
costume,
costume design,
designer,
Dorothy Lamour,
Double Indemnity (1944),
Edith Head,
Edith Head Bibliography,
Elizabeth Taylor,
Famous Players-Lasky,
history of fashion,
Hollywood studio,
How to Dress for Success,
Howard Greer,
Latin American styles,
Mae West film She Done Him Wrong (1933),
o Catch a Thief (1955),
Oscar nominations,
Paramount Studios,
Rear Window (1954),
San Bernardino,
show Art Linkletter's House Party,
Sophia Loren,
Sunset Boulevard (1950),
The Dress Doctor,
The Heiress (1949),
The Jungle Princess (1936),
The Lady Eve (1941),
Travis Banton,
Universal Studios,
Vertigo (1958) |
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Elizabeth Hawes (1901-1971) belonged to the first generation of American designers who succeeded in making a name for themselves as individuals outside the sphere of the Parisian couture. In 1925 Hawes graduated from Vassar College, where she was an economics major sympathetic to socialism, but she pursued an interest in fashion by participating in school theatricals and making her own clothes. By graduation she had decided to go to Paris and learn fashion design. Hawes spent the next three years in various positions within the couture business: as a design copyist, journalist, and assistant designer. During this time she wrote a fashion column for The New Yorker, using the pen name “Parisite.” She also worked briefly for Nicole Groult, the sister of the designer Paul Poiret. Her life in Paris was divided between socializing with her wealthy Vassar friends and engaging in the bohemian life; she spent much of her time with an artistic crowd, including the sculptors Alexander Calder and Isamo Noguchi. Read the rest of this entry »
October 25th, 2010 in
Clothing and Fashion | tags:
designers |
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Hawaii’s aloha shirt has become a visible manifestation of the state’s multicultural population, and in Hawaii, wearing these shirts represents both an attitude and Hawaiian identity. The style lines and design motifs of the aloha shirt developed from the interaction of several of Hawaii’s immigrant groups. The aloha shirt took its shape from the shirts worn by the first Caucasian men to appear in the islands—British and American sailors. In addition, the looseness of the shirts worn by Filipino men, the barong tagalong, was incorporated as a key element of the aloha shirt as an adaptation to Hawaii’s tropical environment. The early aloha shirts (1920s-1930s) were made of Japanese kimono fabric by Chinese tailors, and the early customers were haole (Caucasian) residents and tourists, or hapa haole (part Caucasian) residents of Hawaii. It was not until World War II that the local population embraced the wearing of aloha shirts. Read the rest of this entry »
October 25th, 2010 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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Historically, aristocratic and upper-class women’s fashionable Western dress was created by an intimate negotiation between the client and her dressmaker. The investment in the design was principally in the cost of the luxurious textile itself, not in its fabrication. The origins of the haute couture system were laid by the late seventeenth century as France became the European center for richly produced and innovative luxury silk textiles. Thus the preeminent position of France’s luxury textile industry served as basis and direct link to the development of its haute couture system. The prestigious social and economic value of an identifiable couturier, or designer’s name, is a development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Read the rest of this entry »
October 25th, 2010 in
Clothing and Fashion |
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