FASHIONS

Fashion by MICHAEL SONES:
Fashion can be thought of as a type of art utilizing cultural materials to transform the appearance of the natural body. It communicates things like social status and sex as well as enhancing attractiveness. While it may have evolutionary links with the flamboyant displays of peacocks and other birds it is clearly a way in which humans distance themselves from the natural world. Bodily decoration such as piercing, tattooing, scarification, teeth-filing, and foot-binding are ways of fashioning the natural body-making it other than just natural and communicating information about that person. Also, people often look more desirable or attractive when dressed rather than nude. This is not simply because clothes cover up bodily defects or blemishes. However, as well as communicating information clothing and fashion can also be used to deceive about the body which they adorn.

Clothing has been worn for tens of thousands of years. Due to the decomposition of the natural materials comparatively little evidence of clothing styles and fashion from prehistoric times remains. Near the Russian city of Vladimir there is a Middle Paleolithic site from the Streletsian culture. Burials dating back 25,000 years have been uncovered there. Three of the bodies (one of a sixty year old man and the others of a thirteen year old boy and seven-nine year old girl) were found covered in thousands of beads mainly made from ivory. Due to the placement on the bodies it is thought these beads once decorated caps and other items of clothing. Experiments have shown that each bead would have taken at least 45 minutes to make suggesting that the products of such intensive labour would only have been available to people of high status. Perforated animal teeth, which may have been worn as necklaces or bracelets, have been found on sites dating back over 40,000 years.

Corsets were used by women to constrict their waists and enhance their busts in Minoan times (1800 BC). Both the Romans took great interest in their appearance and were interested in fashion and style. The poet Ovid complains about how frequently Roman women changed hair styles. The French anthropologist, Marcel Griaule, says that the Dogon people of Africa think that an ordinary looking woman can make herself more desirable than one blessed with natural beauty through dressing herself up with clothing and other accessories. For the Dogon, the idea of being clothed is intricately connected with speech in that to be naked is to be speechless and in the state of raw and dangerous nature. Note also that the word 'infant' is derived from the Latin 'infans' meaning without speech.

In psychotherapy dreams about clothing often have to do with the words-the meaning given by the psychotherapist-to the patient/clients material. It has to do with ordering, the fashioning of the natural, a way of containing and quelling our fears about the dangerous aggression and sexuality of unbridled and untamed nature.

Fashion, as we usually use the term in the sense of meaning 'trendy' or 'stylish' did not really emerge until the 1400's with the rise of a wealthier middle class. To wear certain clothes communicated status if not occupation. From the early 1400s to 1700 the female beauty ideal in Western culture was a big breasted, plump, and somewhat maternal looking figure.For instance, it was during the Renaissance that female décolletage became truly fashionable. Wet nurses fed the babies of the upper class and to have firm, upward pointing breasts instead of the sagging breasts of a wet nurse or peasant was a sign of status. The increasing preoccupation with the breast as an object of erotic attraction in the Western world coincided with a decline in breast feeding beginning about 1940 and an increase in the amount of bottle feeding. Some women don't like to breast feed because it arouses them and they find this confusing. Other women say that it makes them feel like an animal. Hundreds of thousands of women in the western world have now had breast implants.In the 1850's women's magazines arrived, including Ladies' Magazine and Godey's Lady's Book. Each issue of Godey's contained poetry, engravings, and articles. Mass manufacturing and marketing, a result of the Industrial Revolution, lead to standardized clothing sizes. Models walking down a catwalk were first employed by Charles Frederick Worth. These "live mannequins" dressed in the then current fashions. In the nineteenth century corsets were worn by women in America and England. The 'typical' Victorian woman showed off the higher social state of her husband through her fragility, paleness, and a tight, corseted waist giving the popular 'hourglass' figure. Some feminists feel that the corset, which uncomfortably distorted the natural shape of a woman, signified male control over women by restricting their mobility.

In 1863 Ellen and Ebeneezer Butterick created the first sized patterns for dressmakers. Before this creative invention patterns had all been same size. For the first three years they only designed patterns for only men and boys. In 1866 the Buttericks turned their attention to the designing of women's dresses.
In 1914 World War I began and while all the carnage was taking place Mary Phelps Jacob, in America, invented the first American brassiere, made of lace patented the "Backless Brassiere" in 1914 and bra cup sizes were instituted in the 1930s. In 1918 "Diet and Health with a Key to Calories" by Dr. Lulu Hunt Peters was a bestseller.

In the 1920's the fashion designer, Paul Poiret, developed the famous "flapper" look. The flapper threw away her constricting corset and wore short skirts and dresses that exposed arms and legs. The style had much in common with the look of French prostitutes who had provided company for many American doughboys during World War I. 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair' was a highly regarded story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about the competition for social success. It was based in part upon his advice to his younger sister Annabel: in order to be popular with the men "Cultivate deliberate physical grace." After the covering-up of the Victorian and Edwardian eras this led to a greater body consciousness and perception of other's bodies. The flapper wore her hair short, or bobbed, and used more make-up than women ever had before in Western culture.