Costume and Fashion James Laver Pdf

Costume and Fashion: A Curtailed History, 6th Edition

By James Laver

Contents

Foreword

Chapter 1

How it all Began

Chapter 2

Greeks and Romans

Affiliate 3

Early Europe

Chapter iv

The Renaissance and the Sixteenth Century

Chapter 5

The Seventeenth Century

Affiliate vi

The Eighteenth Century

Chapter 7

From 1800 to 1850

Chapter 8

From 1850 to 1900

Chapter 9

From 1900 to 1939

Chapter 10

Rationed Fashion to Pluralistic Mode

Affiliate eleven

At the Plow of the Millennium

Chapter 12

Way Since 2010

Select Bibliography

Picture Credits

Alphabetize

Chapter 1
How information technology all Began

Costume, throughout the greater office of its history, has followed two separate lines of development, resulting in 2 contrasting types of garment. The well-nigh obvious line of segmentation in modern eyes is betwixt male and female person dress: trousers and skirts. But it is by no means true that men have always worn bifurcated clothes and women non. The Greeks and Romans wore tunics, that is to say, skirts. Mountain people like the Scots and the modern Greeks wear what are, in effect, skirts. Far Eastern and About Eastern women have worn trousers, and many continue to do then. The sex activity division turns out not to be a truthful partition at all.

It is possible to contrast 'fitted' and 'draped' clothes, most modern dress falling into the first category and ancient Greek apparel, for example, into the other. History has shown many variations in this respect, and it is possible to observe intermediate types. Perhaps the virtually useful distinction is that drawn by the anthropologists betwixt 'tropical' and 'arctic' dress.

The great aboriginal civilizations arose in the fertile valleys of the Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus: all tropical areas, where protection from the cold cannot accept been the dominant motive for wearing clothes. Many such motives have been adduced, ranging from the naive idea, based on the story in Genesis, that dress were worn for reasons of modesty, to the sophisticated notion that they were worn for reasons of brandish and protective magic. The psychology of clothes, nonetheless, has been adequately dealt with elsewhere. In the nowadays report it is proposed largely to ignore these complications and to concentrate on the 2 questions of form and cloth.

The early civilizations of Arab republic of egypt and Mesopotamia are far from being the whole story. Within recent years a much more primitive documentation has get available, largely attributable to the discovery and study of cave paintings. Geologists take made us aware of a succession of Ice Ages when the climate of a large function of Europe was extremely cold. Even in the last of the Palaeolithic cultures (that is, cultures in which tools and weapons were made by chipping hard stones like flints) life was lived, as it were, on the border of the great glaciers which covered much of the continent. In such circumstances, although details of wearable may have been determined by social and psychological considerations, the primary motive in covering the torso was to continue out the cold, since nature had proved and so niggardly in providing homo sapiens with a natural coat of fur.

The animals were more fortunate, and primitive man soon realized that they could exist hunted and killed non only for their flesh simply for their pelts. In other words he began to wear furs. This presented him with two problems. Not only was the peel of a beast merely wrapped round the shoulders very hampering to his movements, but it left part of the body exposed. He therefore desired to shape it in some way, even if at outset he had no means of doing so.

The 2d problem is that the skins of animals, equally they dry out, become very hard and intractable. Some method had to exist found of making them soft and pliable; the simplest method of doing this is by a laborious mastication. The traditional Inuit method involves women spending a considerable part of their time chewing the hides which their husbands bring home from the chase. Another method consists of alternately wetting the hibernate and beating it with a mallet, having get-go scraped off any fragments of flesh which may even so exist adhering to it. Neither process is very satisfactory, however, for, if the hides become wet, the whole labour has to be repeated.

An advance was made when information technology was discovered that oil or blubber rubbed into the skin helped to go on it pliable for a longer time, that is, until the oil dried out. The next step was the discovery of tanning, and it is strange to call back that the essential techniques of this process, so archaic in their inception, are notwithstanding in use today. The bark of certain trees, notably the oak and the willow, contains tannic acid which can be extracted past soaking the bark in water. The hides are and then immersed for considerable periods in the solution and emerge from this process permanently pliable and waterproof.

Such prepared pelts could also be cut and shaped, and we at present come to 1 of the greatest technological advances in human history, comparable in importance to the invention of the bicycle and the discovery of fire: the invention of the eyed needle. Big numbers of such needles, made of mammoth ivory, the basic of the reindeer and the tusks of the walrus, accept been constitute in Palaeolithic caves, where they were deposited xl thousand years agone. Some of them are quite modest and of exquisite workmanship. This invention fabricated it possible to sew pieces of hibernate together to make them fit the torso. The result was the kind of clothing still worn by Inuit peoples.

Meanwhile, people living in somewhat more temperate climates were discovering the utilise of beast and vegetable fibres. It is likely that felting was the starting time step. In this process, developed in Central Asia past the ancestors of the Mongols, wool or hair is combed out, wetted and placed in layers on a mat. The mat is then rolled up tightly and browbeaten with a stick. The strands of hair or wool are thus matted together and the felt produced is warm, pliable and durable and can exist cut and sewn to make garments, rugs and tents.

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