Clothing and Fashion

Biba has become a potent legend quite out of proportion with its relatively brief life in the mid-twentieth century. It was a shop and a label—but it was more than either or both of these: it came to stand for the “swinging chick,” the ideal, running, jumping and never-standing-still girl, the image that dominated fashion from the mid-1960s until about 1974. That one word, “Biba” calls up from memory the long-legged, zany, crop-haired Twiggy morphing into the druggy, Pre-Raphaelite hippie of 1970: from the futuristic to the retro in four short years. Read the rest of this entry »

Since their inception in the first half of the twentieth century, best-dressed lists have become a popular barometer of international style. By publishing best-dressed lists in the mainstream media, fashion editors and style arbiters have established a steady market for information about the wardrobes, grooming, and comportment of smartly dressed men and women. Read the rest of this entry »

Rose Bertin was born Marie-Jeanne Bertin (1747 – 1813) in Abbeville, a textile town in the Picardy region of France. Her family was not wealthy, and so she was apprenticed to a marchande de modes (fashion merchant) at a young age. By 1772 she had worked her way up to the exclusive rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, where she opened her own shop under the name of the Grand Mogol. She quickly won the patronage of several influential courtiers, including the duchess of Chartres, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, who introduced Bertin to the newly crowned queen, Marie Antoinette, in the summer of 1774. Read the rest of this entry »

A beret is a round, flat, visorless cap worn by both sexes over centuries. Berets are made from circular pieces of knitted, woven, or felted cloth, occasionally velvet, and drawn underneath by a string, thread band, or leather thong so as to fit around the head. They may be decorated with objects, such as ribbons, plumes, pins, tassels, jewelry, precious stones, fabrics, and cords. Read the rest of this entry »

The German writer and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) was born in Berlin, one of three children of assimilated Jewish parents. In 1912 he began his studies in philosophy, German literature, and art history at the University of Freiburg and then moved back to Berlin, where he encountered the teachings of the philosopher Georg Simmel. In 1914 he continued his studies at the universities in Munich and Bern, Switzerland. Benjamin married Dora Kellner in 1917; they had one son, Stefan, in 1918, before the marriage ended in divorce in 1930. Benjamin’s doctoral dissertation on German Romanticism was accepted by the University of Bern in 1919. In 1923 he met his closest intellectual friends, the philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and the cultural historian Siegfried Kracauer. His attempts to submit another professional dissertation to the University of Frankfurt, on the origin of German tragic drama, were not successful. The work was published in 1928 under the title Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of the German Tragic Drama). Read the rest of this entry »

A belt is any length of material that encircles and is secured around the waist. Popular materials include leather, fabric, and metal. Belts are worn by males and females to define the fashionable waist and for a variety of other functions in many world cultures. Read the rest of this entry »

In October 2003, the American newspaper Women’s Wear Daily asked, “Is Belgian Avant-Garde Out of Fashion?” Twenty years after Belgian fashion design, with Antwerp as its epicenter, had won its place on the world scene, it was time to ask how things now stood with the avant-garde character of the Belgians. The Belgian designers, who had instigated a small revolution in the early 1980s with their unexpected images and conceptual approaches, were by 2003 counted by critics among the classic designers in their field. During the intervening two decades, the perception of Belgian fashion evolved from avant-garde, edgy, and against-the-grain toward a generally accepted classic style. “Antwerp” and “Belgian” became prefixes laden with high symbolic—and in some cases financial—capital and had successfully earned themselves a secure place alongside “French,” “Italian,” “Japanese,” and “American.” Read the rest of this entry »

Geoffrey Beene was born Samuel Albert Bozeman Jr. in Haynesville, Louisiana, on 30 August 1927, into a family of doctors. He dutifully enrolled in the premed program at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1943. Three years later he dropped out of Tulane and enrolled in the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, to pursue his lifelong interest in fashion design. However, he never attended classes as he decided to accept a job working in the display department of the I. Magnin department store, and then moved to New York to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion. By 1948 Beene had moved to Paris, where he attended the École de la Syndicale d’Haute Couture, the traditional training ground for European fashion designers. He then served a two-year apprenticeship with a tailor from the couture house of Molyneux. Beene returned to New York in 1951 and worked for a series of Seventh Avenue fashion houses before being hired by Teal Traina in 1954. He remained at Teal Traina until 1963, when he decided it was time to strike out on his own, opening Geoffrey Beene, Inc., offering high-quality ready-to-wear women’s clothing. Beene’s business partner was Leo Orlandi, who had been the production manager for Teal Traina. Read the rest of this entry »

Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980) was one of the most original and prolific creative talents of the twentieth century. Born in London and educated at Harrow and Cambridge University, he worked not only as a fashion photographer but also as a writer, artist, and actor and in his primary field of interest as a stage and costume designer for ballet, opera, and theater. Beaton was a self-taught photographer: he was given a simple Kodak 3A camera for his twelfth birthday and soon was eagerly photographing his young sisters, Nancy and Barbara (”Baba”), in “period” costumes and sets he made from fish-scale tissues and pseudo-Florentine brocades, tinsel nets, and imitation leopard skins. His nanny developed his negatives in the bathtub. In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, he went to work for Vogue as a cartoonist, but he soon began freelancing as a photographer for Condé Nast Publications and Harper’s Bazaar, taking fashion shots and portraits of royalty and personalities in the arts and literature. Read the rest of this entry »

Because facial hair is strongly associated with masculinity, beards and mustaches carry powerful and complex cultural meanings. Growing a beard or mustache, or being clean-shaven, can communicate information about religion, sexual identity, and orientation, and other important aspects of cultural heritage. Read the rest of this entry »