Hats are head coverings with a crown and usually a brim. They are distinguished from caps that are brimless but may have a visor. Hats are important because they adorn the head, which is the seat of human rational powers, and they also frame the face. Women’s hats have often been differentiated from men’s headwear, although in modern times, many women’s hat styles have been copied from men’s. Read the rest of this entry »
Protection, status, and vanity have always been the prime reasons for wearing hats. A hat is much more than a piece of clothing; it is a cerebral fashion accessory that can mark personality, social etiquette, and lifestyle. The twenty-first century is a relatively hat-less age, with the exception of the baseball cap and modern hoods. This might be just a passing fad, but it is socially as significant as trends of the previous era, when men wore proper hats all the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Norman Hartnell (1901-1979) was Britain’s most successful and distinguished mid-twentieth-century couturier. He was the first in a wave of London-based designers to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s who offered wealthy British women an alternative to patronizing a court dressmaker or purchasing a Paris-designed model. His graceful, feminine designs, which combined dreamy nostalgia with fairy-tale glamour, appealed to English sensibilities. He excelled at making dresses for grand entrances and was equally at ease designing court-presentation dresses for debutantes and stage costumes for actresses. The latter were sophisticated and sexy as well as glamorous, but Hartnell is remembered for the romantic, quintessentially English gowns that he designed for the upper classes and the royal family. His role as dressmaker to Queen Elizabeth, consort of King George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II won him international recognition and honors. He was nominated an officier d’académie by the Institut de l’éducation nationale de France in 1939 and was given a Neiman Marcus Award for contemporary influence on fashion in 1947. In 1977 he became the first fashion designer to be knighted. Read the rest of this entry »
The category handwoven textiles encompasses a broad spectrum of woven fabrics formed by interlacing two sets of elements—warp and weft—with the aid of a loom, which is a device for maintaining tension on the warp elements. Whether the loom is primitive, mechanized, or computer-driven, it is considered a handloom if it is operated directly by the weaver. Even though various types of power looms have been developed since the industrial revolution, handweaving persists in many parts of the world as an expression of ethnic culture, as a cottage industry or small-scale artisan workshop, as an avocation, and as an art form. Read the rest of this entry »
The handbag is much more than a functional alternative to the pocket. In the course of time it has become a design object in its own right, a signature mascot for the major French couture houses (surpassing the role of perfume as a brand identity) and a powerful symbol of growing female independence. Until the late 1700s, both men and women carried bags. When the directoire fashions of 1800 streamlined the female silhouette, the need for an exterior pocket created a permanent role for the woman’s handbag. Read the rest of this entry »
The designer Roy Halston Frowick (1932—1990) was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and began his career as a milliner. He subsequently rose to become one of the most important American designers of the 1970s, whose influence was still being felt into the twenty-first century. Read the rest of this entry »
The wearing of Halloween costumes in America reaches back into the country’s cultural history. This shared American folk ritual is a window on the diverse ethnic and religious heritage of the people who settled the United States. Read the rest of this entry »
Standards of beauty have varied enormously according to time and place. Yet as long as people have ordered their social relations, hairdressing has had a role in the struggle for status and reproduction. “Humans,” writes Robin Bryer, “are unique in two aspects of their behavior: wearing clothes and having their hair cut voluntarily” (p. 9). Hairdressing is part of the human condition. Read the rest of this entry »
Hairdressers seem to appear with civilization itself. Comparatively little is known about history’s earliest coiffeurs, those who curled the beards of Sumerian princes and built the fabulous headdresses of Egyptian princesses, except that the Egyptian deities included a barber god. The market squares of ancient Greek cities included barbershops, where people could laze and gossip. Roman towns also contained hairdressing salons, visited mostly by the middle classes, while slaves dressed the heads of upper-class women. These practices survived in the Byzantine east, long after they had been destroyed in the Latin half of the empire. Read the rest of this entry »
Hair accessories are functional or ornamental objects wrapped, tied, twisted, inserted, or otherwise attached to the hair. Throughout history, types of ornamentation and the materials from which they were made indicated religious significance, social class, age group, and level of fashion awareness. Infinitely varied in shapes, sizes, and materials, examples of hair accessories include: hair rings or bands, ribbons and bows, hairpins, hair combs, barrettes, beads, thread or string, hair spikes and sticks, and other affixed miscellaneous objects (shells, jewels, coins, flowers, feathers) perceived to have aesthetic or social and cultural value. Hair accessories have been worn by people of all ages and by both genders. Read the rest of this entry »
From modest beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century, the Gucci company became one of the world’s most successful manufacturers of high-end leather goods, clothing, and other fashion products. As an immigrant in Paris and then London, working in exclusive hotels, young Guccio Gucci (1881-1953) was impressed with the luxurious luggage he saw sophisticated guests bring with them. Upon returning to his birthplace of Florence, a city distinguished for high-quality materials and skilled artisans, he established a shop in 1920 that sold fine leather goods with classic styling. Although Gucci organized his workrooms for industrial methods of production, he maintained traditional aspects of fabrication. Initially Gucci employed skilled workers in basic Florentine leather crafts, attentive to finishing. With expansion, machine stitching was a production method that supported construction. Read the rest of this entry »
The term “grunge” is used to define a specific moment in twentieth-century music and fashion. Hailing from the northwest United States in the 1980s, grunge went on to have global implications for alternative bands and do-it-yourself (DIY) dressing. While grunge music and style were absorbed by a large youth following, its status as a self-conscious subculture is debatable. People who listened to grunge music did not refer to themselves as “grungers” in the same way as “punks” or “hippies.” However, like these subcultures, grunge was co-opted by the music and fashion industries through its promotion by the media. Read the rest of this entry »
Madame Alix Grès is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant couturiers of the twentieth century. She employed innovative construction techniques in the service of a classical aesthetic, creating her hallmark “Grecian” gowns as well as a wide range of simple and geometrically cut designs based on ethnic costume. Her garments are noted for their three-dimensional, sculptural quality. Read the rest of this entry »
Having emerged in the wake of punk during the 1980s, the contemporary goth scene has existed for more than two decades, as a visually spectacular form of youth culture, whose members are most immediately identified by the dark forms of glamour displayed in their appearance. Read the rest of this entry »
Godey’s Lady’s Book, first published in Philadelphia in 1830 as Godey’s Ladies’ Handbook, was the leading women’s magazine in mid-nineteenth-century America. Similar publications had been produced in Europe since the late eighteenth century and Godey’s was closely patterned after its English and French counterparts. Several variations of the periodical’s name occurred over time, including Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book, but the magazine is generally known by its most familiar title, Godey’s Lady’s Book. Read the rest of this entry »
In a certain sense, the Western economy has been “global” since the sixteenth century. After all, the African slave trade, colonialism, and the intercontinental trade in sugar and coffee made capitalism possible. But since the early 1980s, transnational corporations, cyber technology, and electronic mass media have spawned a web of tightly linked networks that cover the globe. Taken together, these forces have profoundly restructured the world economy, global culture, and individual daily lives. Nowhere are these changes more dramatic than in the ways dress and fashion are produced, marketed, sold, bought, worn, and thrown away. Read the rest of this entry »
Glazing is a textile finish that adds luster and smoothness to the surface of the fabric. Many glazed fabrics are plain-woven cotton. A specialized calender (set of metal rollers) called a friction calender, literally rubs the fabric lustrous. Glazed chintz and polished cotton are examples of glazed fabrics. Read the rest of this entry »
Hubert de Givenchy was born on 21 February 1927 in Beauvais, France. The son of a prosperous family, he attended college at Beauvais and then moved to Paris. In 1944 he took a position as an apprentice designer at the couture house of Jacques Fath while studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he took a series of jobs as an assistant designer—first with Fath, then with Lucien Lelong, Robert Piguet, and Elsa Schiaparelli. Givenchy’s years as an assistant designer encompassed the period of the New Look and perhaps instilled in him a sense of romanticism that was to characterize his work for over four decades. Read the rest of this entry »
Over time, shifts in production methods and patterns of consumption in relation to gloves have been paralleled by a shift in their primary role. Today, gloves may broadly be considered as a form of protective hand covering for use in cold weather. Within the context of fashion, gloves belong to the family of small accessories that includes fans, scarves, and hats. They are closely related to the mitten and muff. For several centuries gloves were highly symbolic garments, often worn for reasons other than protection. This changing conception illustrates the varied roles gloves have played within the discourse of fashion. Read the rest of this entry »
Mary Brooks Picken defined girdle as a “flexible, light-weight shaped corset, made partly or entirely of elastic. Worn to confine the figure, especially through the hip line.” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary offered: “A woman’s close-fitting undergarment often boned and usu. [sic] elasticized that extends from the waist to below the hips.” Neither definition does full justice to the undergarment that changed shape, materials, and functions through its six decades of prominence in women’s wardrobes, from the 1910s through the 1960s. Girdles evolved continuously to take advantage of new fibers and fabric structures and to respond to each new silhouette in women’s outerwear. Pantie girdles came on the scene when substantial numbers of women began to wear pants. Initially, girdles appealed to younger women and teen girls, but women of all ages eventually wore some type of girdle, before control-top panty hose supplanted the girdle’s functions for all but the most conservative women. Read the rest of this entry »
The designer Romeo Gigli was born in 1949 in Castelbolognese, near Faenza, Italy, into a family of antiquarian booksellers with a collection of more than twenty thousand volumes from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The region of Faenza has a rich cultural and historical heritage. It was there, in the Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna and in the rare books in his family’s library, that Gigli found the initial inspiration for his future art. Read the rest of this entry »
Rudi Gernreich was born on 8 August 1922 in Vienna and died in 1985. Gernreich’s family came from the nonreligious Jewish middle class and had ties to the Social Democrats. One of his mother’s sisters ran a fashion salon in Vienna where the newest French designs were translated with high-quality craftsmanship. Read the rest of this entry »
Clothing for both men and women is culturally defined. Cultural norms and expectations are related to the meaning of being a man or woman and are closely linked to appearance. In Indonesia, parts of West Africa, and in traditional Scottish dress, men wear an article of clothing that closely resembles a Western definition of a skirt. In Indonesia, both men and women wear the sarong, a length of cloth wrapped to form a tube. The wrapper, a rectangular cloth tied at the waist, is worn by both sexes in parts of West Africa. The Scottish kilt, still worn at many social gatherings to establish a social and cultural identity, represents the height of masculinity (Kidwell and Steele 1989). In North American culture, the sarong, wrapper, or kilt would rarely be seen on men except within the theater, film, or in the context of couture or avant-garde fashion. For example, the grunge style of the early 1990s had fashions for men designed to be worn with skirts. However, there was nothing particularly feminine about these styles; rather, they were purely a fashion statement. Read the rest of this entry »
Jean-Paul Gaultier was born in 1952 in the Paris suburb of Arcueil. An autodi-dact, he discovered fashion at a very early age. In childhood and adolescence, television and fashion magazines fed his imagination; he was particularly fascinated by the fashion features in Elle. He served his apprenticeship as a designer from 1970 to 1975 in the most innovative couture houses of the time: Pierre Cardin, Jacques Esterel, Jean Patou, and Angelo Tarlazzi. He soon struck out on his own and presented his first show of women’s fashion in 1976. Read the rest of this entry »
Garments have been perhaps the most international of consumer products dating back to the late 1800s when Paris couturiers—led by the House of Worth—dictated the styles that affluent women around the world wore. Those garments were composed of rich, imported fabrics and trimmings: silks from China, woolens and velvets from England, damasks and lace from Italy. Back then, representatives from the first department stores in the United States, Chicago’s Marshall Field’s, R. H. Macy’s in New York, and John Wanamaker in Philadelphia, voyaged to Paris in order to purchase haute couture samples, that their workrooms translated into styles suitable for America’s growing consumer society. Read the rest of this entry »
John Galliano (1960- ) is widely considered one of the most innovative and influential fashion designers of the early twenty-first century. Known for a relentless stream of historical and ethnic appropriations, he mingled his references in often surprising juxtapositions to create extravagant yet intricately engineered and meticulously tailored clothes. His continual interest in presenting fashion shows as highly theatricalized spectacles, with models as characters in a drama and clothes at times verging on costumes, won him applause as well as criticism. With his respective appointments at Givenchy and Christian Dior, Galliano rose to international celebrity status as the first British designer since Charles Frederick Worth to front a French couture house. He has been a member of France’s Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture since 1993 and is the winner of many prestigious awards, most notably British Designer of the Year in 1987, 1994, 1995, and 1997, and International Designer of the Year in 1997. Read the rest of this entry »
Often hailed as one of the few American designers to rival the great French couturiers in craftsmanship and exquisite finish, James Galanos achieved his position as one of America’s premier designers through his commitment to exquisite fabrics and perfect workmanship throughout his long career. An uncompromising individualist, he established Galanos Originals in Los Angeles rather than New York’s Seventh Avenue and went on to create a successful ready-to-wear business, catering to a discerning clientele. Read the rest of this entry »
Gabardine is a tightly woven warp-faced twill weave fabric. Warp-faced fabrics have more warp or lengthwise yarns on the surface of the fabric than filling or crosswise yarns. Twill weave fabrics show a diagonal wale, or raised line, on their surface. The fine wale is closely spaced, slightly raised, distinct, and obvious only on the fabric’s face. The wale angle in gabardine is 45 or 63 degrees. Gabardine always has many more warp than filling yarns, often twice as many warp yarns as filling yarns. Fabric weights range from 7 ounces per square yard to 11 ounces per square yard. Fabric density ranges from 76 warp ends per inch (epi) by 48 filling picks per inch (ppi) to 124 epi by 76 ppi. The combination of the weave structure, yarn size, and warp to filling ratio creates the wale angle. A steep (63 degree angle) twill gabardine is often used in men’s wear while a regular (45 degree angle) twill gabardine is often used in women’s wear. In the most common interlacing patterns the warp crosses two filling yarns before going under one filling (2 x 1) or the warp crosses two fillings before going under two fillings (2 x 2) to create right-hand twills in which the wale line moves from the lower left to the upper right. Read the rest of this entry »
The G-string, or thong, a panty front with a half- to one-inch strip of fabric at the back that sits between the buttocks, became one of the most popular forms of female underwear in the early twenty-first century. Its sources are manifold; the thong bikini designed by Rudi Gernreich in 1974, launched with a matching Vidal Sassoon hairstyle, is one which in turn spawned the more popular Brazilian string bikini brief, or tanga, of the late 1970s. This tiny bikini—dubbed the fio denta, or dental floss—ensured that the buttocks achieved maximum exposure to the sun and openly displayed an erogenous zone that was a particular favorite in Latino culture. Read the rest of this entry »
Copyright © 2009. All right reserved.