Clothing and Fashion

A fastener is the essential part of a fastening system used to hold together at least two pieces of material. It is typically a single item (button) that often works in concert with another device (buttonhole). Apparel fasteners may be permanent or temporary. Permanent fastenings, such as stitching and fusing, create form and shape in tailored garments. Temporary fasteners take many forms, including basting used to hold fabrics in place before permanent machine stitching is applied. Temporary fasteners, such as hook and eye closures for bras, can adjust garment size. Zippered fly front openings in men’s trousers provide access for bodily functions. However, one most often thinks of apparel fastening as providing a method of “donning and doffing” garments for everyday dressing (Watkins 1995). Read the rest of this entry »

Fashion television has revolutionized the dissemination of fashion information to a mass audience; it has become a major marketing vehicle, helping to launch fashion trends and enhance the cult of personality surrounding fashion designers and models. With immediacy that only television can offer, following fashion has become a source of entertainment for millions. The evolution of fashion television into a distinct genre of broadcasting parallels, but is not limited to, the development of cable and satellite television. Read the rest of this entry »

The fashion show has evolved from an exclusive in-house presentation of haute couture held for a private clientele, to a biannual spectacle of both couture and ready-to-wear clothing that is seen by a vast cross-section of consumers, the mass media, and the fashion industry. A number of cultural and social forces are responsible for this evolution, including the increased consumer awareness of Parisian couture, the rise of the ready-to-wear industry after World War II, the growth of the modeling profession, and the increasing attention paid to the runway by the popular press. While the fashion show today is different from its early-twentieth-century incarnation, it does retain links to its origins in theatrical display and the couture salon shows of that period. Read the rest of this entry »

Fashion plates are small printed images, often hand-colored, of people wearing the latest fashions and depicted in conventional minimally narrative social contexts. They flourished from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and were usually distributed with fashion magazines either as integral parts of the editorial content or as supplementary plates. The poet Charles Beaudelaire, in his essay The Painter of Modern Life, described fashion plates as an image of the “ideal self and thus a reflection of the artistic, historical, moral, and aesthetic feeling of their time. He wrote in 1863, when fashion plates were reaching a peak in their development. Although the basic purpose of the fashion plate was to illustrate new styles and sell more clothes, their charm gives them an established place among the minor graphic arts. Sadly for the student, fashion plates are often removed from the magazines in which they appeared and sold as collectors’ pieces; divorced from their original context they lose much value as historic sources. Read the rest of this entry »

A fashion photograph is, simply, a photograph made specifically to show (or, in some cases, to allude to) clothing or accessories, usually with the intent of documenting or selling the fashion. Photographs of fashionable dress, in existence since the invention of photography in 1839, are not fashion photography. The distinguishing feature—and the common denominator in the enormous diversity of style, approach, and content—is the fashion photograph’s intent to convey fashion or a “fashionable” lifestyle. At the end of the twentieth century, the Calvin Klein advertisement featuring only Calvin’s portrait changed the very definition of a fashion photograph from a picture of the featured clothing to the selling of a glamorous lifestyle identified with a specific logo. Read the rest of this entry »

Fashion was first propelled onto the Internet (c. 1994) by what María Contreras refers to in Vogue España as that old refrain “adapt or die.” A decade into Web history, it has become clear the Internet is used for gathering information, communication, and entertainment. Rather than becoming a world, the Web has become an essential tool for living. Read the rest of this entry »

Clothing has been collected and exhibited by a variety of individuals and institutions. Already in the eighteenth century, Madame Tussaud of wax-museum fame, was acquiring and displaying the clothing of celebrities. Today, a wide variety of museums collect dress and textiles, including anthropological and ethnological museums, history museums, art museums, design museums, and specialized fashion and textile museums. Read the rest of this entry »

In the nineteenth century, the first living mannequins, or “manikins,” took their name from the static dummy or lay figure they were soon to replace as the principal form of display in the dressmaker’s salon. While the word “mannequin”—in French, le mannequin—described the woman, the word “model”— le modèle—designated the gown she exhibited in the salon. The model gown was a one-off that did not go into production; it was thus both an exclusive dress for sale to an individual client, and a prototype (hence the term model) sold to a fashion buyer for adaptation to the mass market. Both model gowns and model women were at the heart of the commercial development of the French couture industry and its global markets, and there was always some confusion in the terminology. The dual meaning of the word “model” also signals the ambivalent status of the earliest fashion models, hovering uneasily between subject- and object-hood. They invoked both admiration and disapproval, disconcerting their critics precisely because they wore fashionable dress in public for money rather than for its own sake. Read the rest of this entry »

The goal of fashion marketing and merchandising, for both manufacturers and retailers, is to sell merchandise at a profit. This requires careful planning and coordination. Read the rest of this entry »

Fashion magazines are an essential component of the fashion industry. They are the medium that conveys and promotes the design’s vision to the eventual purchaser. Balancing the priorities has led to the diversity of the modern periodical market. Read the rest of this entry »