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FASHION
THAT CHANGED
THE WORLD
Prestel
Munich · London · New York
Jennifer Croll
FASHION
THAT CHANGED
THE WORLD
Contents
6 INTRODUCTION
8 ROYAL FASHION
16 COUTURE
26 FASHION MODELS
36 FASHION MAGAZINES
46 FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY
54 MILITARY FASHION
62 SPORTS AND FASHION
72 MENSWEAR
82 FASHION SUBCULTURES
90 READY-TO-WEAR AND MASS FASHION
98 FEMINISM AND FASHION
106 FASHION AND ART
116 FASHION AND FILM
126 FASHION AND MUSIC
136 CELEBRITY FASHION
146 GAY AND LESBIAN FASHION
154 FASHION ETHICS
164 FASHION CAPITALS
172 GLOBAL FASHION
180 FASHION AND THE INTERNET
188 INDEX
191 PHOTO CREDITS
192 BIBLIOGRAPHY
7
Introduction
Two people sitting in a café or restaurant, wit-
tily speculating on the life stories of other
patrons: it’s a cinematic trope that may or
may not be a real people-watching game. But it cer-
tainly has its basis in real life—we constantly make
assumptions about who people are, what they do,
and where they’re from simply based on the way
they dress. It’s nothing new, either. Four hundred
years ago, society’s fashion biases prompted Shake-
speare to include in Hamlet this piece of advice in
Polonius’s famous speech to his son Laertes: “Costly
thy habit as thy purse can buy / But not expressed
in fancy—rich, not gaudy / For the apparel oft pro-
claims the man.” In other words: dress well, because
people are going to judge you for it.
Of course, fashion choices are dictated by more than
just the desire to look good. Our wardrobes reflect
a lot about us: what country we live in, how much
money we make, what society expects from us. In
this way, it’s easy to read history through fashion. As
time passes, situations change: the world economy
booms and busts, empires rise and fall, wars flare
up, technology advances, culture becomes more or
less conservative. All of these things affect the way
people dress. Clothing becomes more or less ornate,
uniforms turn into streetwear, trends spread at dif-
ferent speeds, hemlines rise and fall. Possibly more
than any other cultural artifact, fashion is a sensitive
measure of what’s going on in society at the time,
and a widely inclusive one, too—unlike art, which
is only pursued by a few, or even democratic voting,
which captures a disappointing percentage of public
sentiment, fashion is a system that everybody takes
part in. Everyone, after all, wears clothes.
But fashion isn’t simply about blending in with the
people around us; it’s also about self-identity, and
it’s very much about choice. Beyond simply reveal-
ing who we are, fashion allows us to declare who we
want to be. Through fashion, people rebel, challenge
assumptions about their station in life, or traverse
boundaries set by class, race, or gender, all by simply
grabbing something different from the closet in the
morning. Many fashion trends have sprung from
individualistic or rebellious sartorial choices, and
over time those trends have become the norm—giv-
ing future generations new ideals to either accept or
reject.
Fashion That Changed the World digs into a multi-
tude of social, economic, and cultural factors that
have pushed fashion this way and that over the last
few hundred years. Mostly covering the era from
the Industrial Revolution onward, when the modern
fashion industry took shape, this book considers a
wide range of influences on fashion, including wars,
sports, gender politics, media, culture, and enter-
tainment. Over twenty concise chapters, it offers
a historical snapshot of what we used to wear, and
why we choose the clothes that we do today.
9
Royal Fashion
yy
What Kate Wore is a popular blog dedicated
to analyzing the fashion choices of Kate
Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge.
Her stylish choices often mix high and low, equally
representing couture and high-street fashion, a way
of dressing that has won much public admiration. But
Middleton is a departure from the past: these days,
royals do their best to look like they’re just one of us,
but for most of history, royal fashion was beautiful,
ostentatious, and the envy of common folk.
The first real queen of style was Elizabeth I. She
crafted her look to cement her identity as the “Virgin
Queen,” with all its implications of youthful inno-
cence. And, importantly, she didn’t enforce the sump-
tuary laws barring her subjects from borrowing her
style, meaning she spawned many imitators.
When she landed on the throne in 1558 at age twenty-
five, during a period of political instability, Eliza-
beth was conservative in her dress, getting a feel for
what would mollify the populace and what would
enchant them. During her reign her style changed:
she transitioned from simple cone-shaped skirts and
embroidered sleeves to gowns with deep, revealing
décolletage and farthingales (hoop skirts) accentuat-
ing her hips.
Elizabeth was, perhaps, the first fashionable red-
head, and the ladies of England dyed their locks to
match. She was also, by many accounts, extremely
vain, and went to great lengths to avoid looking
old. As she aged, she dyed her hair yellow or red to
thicken and brighten it. Another of her tricks was
a white makeup called “ceruse,” which masked her
wrinkles and made her appear delicately untouched
by the sun. A mix of white lead and vinegar, ceruse
certainly did give her face a fashionable pallor, but
was also extremely toxic.
Her most significant fashion PR move was requir-
ing all official portraits of her to be painted from a
pre-established pattern—which became known as
“The Mask of Youth.” It served her purposes well:
her image as a flame-haired, pale-faced young queen
remains iconic today.
Half a century after Elizabeth’s reign, Louis XIV
ascended the throne in France. His seventy-two-
year reign beginning in 1638 was known for many
things: military conquest, the consolidation of
power in the monarchy, and sheer longevity, but
left — Showcasing the queen’s iconic red hair and flawless
alabaster visage, George Gower’s The Armada Portrait of circa
1588, when Elizabeth I was fifty-five years old, is a prime ex-
ample of how the Mask of Youth kept her reputation young.
10 Royal Fashion
perhaps its longest-lasting legacies have been in
fashion.
Louis XIV believed in the divine right of kings to
power, and he dressed the part. He was a fan of
large wigs and flashy jewelry, but his most notable
achievements were in footwear. This may be partly
because he liked to flaunt his legs, which he con-
sidered an asset. But there was also Louis’s height;
though there’s no consensus, many historians sug-
gest he was around five foot five, and high heels
were an appealing choice for a diminutive monarch
with a towering presence. During Louis’s reign, he
popularized everything from mules to stacked heels.
Louis had an official shoemaker, Nicolas Lestage.
Lestage charmed the king by designing for him a cus-
tom pair of golden silk pumps; the shoes fit, and so
the relationship was born. At the time, there was a law
requiring that shoemakers stamp their shoes with the
mark of their shop—and so the brand name of Nicolas
Lestage became incredibly well known, the forerun-
ner to today’s Jimmy Choos and Manolo Blahniks.
Another of Louis’s influential decrees regarding foot-
wear was that the heels of upper-class men’s shoes
had to be red. Of course we see contemporary echoes
of that in Louboutins, a modern status marker.
Louis’s proclivity for dramatic and trend-setting
fashions wasn’t inherited by his immediate heir,
but it was taken to a new level of provocation by his
great-grandson Louis XVI’s queen, Marie Antoinette.
In 1770, at the age of fourteen, Marie Antoinette
traveled to France from Austria to marry Louis XVI.
She was taught how to style herself like a French
queen, which appeared to be quite successful—until
she found herself in a marriage with the curiously
asexual Louis XVI.
above — The king of dressing for the part, Louis XIV points a
toe and shows off his shapely gams in a pair of red-soled heels
made to enhance his reputation, and his height, in Hyacinthe
Rigaud’s Louis XIV of France of 1701.
right — Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Rococo portrait
of 1778 shows the young Marie Antoinette in dramatic full
panniers and a tall hairstyle, exemplary of the young queen’s
attention-grabbing style.
UNVERKÄUFLICHE LESEPROBE
Jennifer Croll
Fashion that Changed the World
Paperback, Flexobroschur, 192 Seiten, 19,3 x 24,0 cm160 farbige AbbildungenISBN: 978-3-7913-4789-9
Prestel
Erscheinungstermin: August 2014