FASHION FIFTY YEARS AGO. CONCLUSION

From the crude garments of prehistory to the studied harmony of ancient costumes from the solemn dress of the Middle Ages to the fanciful and refined garb of modern times, human beings over the millennia have had at their disposal every possible form, colour, and fabric.

In the vast historical panorama available for study, three major periods of fashion emerge: in the first, clothing was impersonal and generic; in the second, personal and national; and in the third, impersonal and international.

While fashion has undergone change all over the globe, there has been a certain continuity in the development of European design. This continuity is surely due to Western society's particular facility at assimilating diverse cultural influences. Gradually, the styles of dress of the Western world have come to suit a wide range of peoples. We must investigate the effects of this "superior civilization," one of many that have dominated the history of humanity. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the standards of Western dress had been definitively formed.

In an extremely condensed and simplified form, this can be seen as the general evolution of fashion until the beginning of the twentieth century. Did World War I signal the end of an era, the end of a way of life that had, determined the premises on which fashion was based, despite all the variables? Yes, to a certain degree. But it is important to note that a half century later, World War II upset not just old habits and traditions but the foundations of civilization and the evolution that took place after the first war was transformed after the second into a kind of revolution.

Like so many facets of culture, fashion today has a split purpose: first, to accommodate human character, taking into account the traditions, sensibilities, desires, dreams of the people; and second, to adapt modern society's impersonal utilitarianism and the cold uniform nature of technology. Will fashion's artist-creators give way to a new breed of garment engineers? Most likely, the former will have to abandon some of their dreams but while the creative power of the designer may diminish, it is still individuals, with their innate need for balance, who will determine their own fashion choices.

Fashion has been a fact of daily life for centuries. People have seen clothes as a reflection of their existence and their personality for so long that fashion will never completer lose its natural elements, dependent on human sensibility, in favour of the soulless materialism of technology. Clothes will always be a refuge of personal taste an vanity.

Fifty years ago, vague visions of the future foretold the conditions and unimaginable destinies, many of which become aspects of our present reality: ways of thinking this are ambitious but often unfeasible; increasingly abstract an intellectual conceptions of art and architecture; a constant growing dominance of science and technology; a staggering materialism in ways of life; an inordinately reduced sense space; and a more and more frantic pace to daily existence.

It has become impossible to make a distinction between styles that will last, trends that will grow, and the passing fancies of a season.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 538