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As the saying goes, "people rely on clothing and horses rely on saddles", clothing is almost the carrier that is easiest to highlight a person's personality, identity and taste. Fashion and Its Social Issues: Class, Gender and Identity in Clothing was recently published by Translation Forest Press, written by American cultural sociologist Diana Crane. Crane makes a comprehensive and detailed comparison of the journeys of clothing change in France, The United Kingdom and the United States, and in this way shows us how the social meaning represented by clothing has changed. Although today's trendsetters are no longer limited to the elite, inspiration is often from the general public, and most fashion trends are very short-lived, clothing is still closely related to everyone's lifestyle, gender, age and other factors.
Before the Industrial Revolution and the mechanized production of clothing, clothing was often one of the most valuable possessions in the European and American worlds. It is difficult for the poor to access new clothes, even if they have old clothes that have been passed to their hands many times. Fashion and Its Social Issues statistics found that of the 278 people arrested in and around Paris in 1780, only 28 had more than 1 set of clothes.
Because of this, the wealthy at that time regarded their large quantities of clothing as valuable property, and clothing even became an inheritance, inherited by their relatives and servants. Cloth at that time was so expensive and rare that clothing itself constituted a form of currency and could replace gold as a method of payment. When money is scarce, clothes can be pawned along with jewelry and other valuables for a good price.
Before industrial societies, clothing revealed information such as social class, gender, occupation, beliefs, and place of origin. Even in the 19th century, clothing still accounted for a large proportion of family property. In France, working-class men usually buy a suit when they get married and hope to wear it for a lifetime for important occasions such as weddings and funerals. Young women and their female relatives typically spend years preparing their dowries, an important part of her contribution to the future family, including the clothes, underwear and bedding she will use for decades. In britain, some families set up clubs to save money to buy clothes and engage in "group buying". In contrast, because of their strong financial resources, the rich have achieved "freedom of clothes", can buy new clothes at any time, and have become the leaders of the fashion of the whole society.
By the end of the 19th century, with the popularization of mechanized production technology, clothes became cheaper and cheaper, and ordinary people were easy to buy. As the first consumer product to be widely accepted, clothing is a treat for all. At the time, young women workers tended to spend most of their wages on fashion, while middle-class and upper-class women also spent a large portion of their family income on buying clothes. Fashionable styles no longer belong to a few people exclusively, and the face of the whole society has changed greatly. Costume historians have concluded that clothing was democratized in the 19th century because all social classes embraced similar types of clothing.
The historian Tocqueville once commented on the United States in 1840, "at any time, a servant can be the master." At that time, as soon as immigrants arrived in the United States, they changed their traditional costumes as a means of abandoning their old identities and establishing a new one. With the Great East-West Migration, the United States also experienced a high degree of geographic mobility, which meant that large numbers of people built new identities in new places.
Since the 20th century, with the large-scale expansion of ready-to-wear in various price levels, clothing has gradually lost its economic significance, but it has not lost its symbolic significance. Nowadays, people are more willing to buy clothing to seek or create personal styles to express their perception of identity, rather than simply imitating the trend and blindly following "authority".
The mystery in the hatBefore the 1960s, hats were the most important accessory to highlight the social differences between European and American men.
Throughout the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, all social classes in Europe and the United States were particularly fond of wearing hats. In a group of scavenger photographs taken in Paris in 1900, 20 of the 23 wore top hats or beanies. Photographs of factory workers and Boston demonstrators from the same period show that almost everyone was wearing a top hat or beanie. At that time, people would wear headdresses in situations that now seem out of place, for example, The British would wear hats in the office all day. This is because it is widely believed that "having a hat is an endorsement of the norms for entering a particular sphere of public life." ”
Fashion and Its Social Issues study found that when a new type of hat is popular, people from all social classes usually wear it intensively on their heads for a certain period of time, but it will eventually find its own "positioning" and become the exclusive symbol of a specific social class.
The top hat originated in Early 19th Century England and was originally worn by middle-class and upper-class people. The high-top hat began to spread to the public in the 1820s, probably because coachmen and police officers began to wear the hat. By the middle of the 19th century, it had spread to all social classes. In photographs taken in 1861, most British men wore the most popular casual jackets, and 7 out of 10 wore top hats.
Originating in England in 1850, the dome hat was originally a professional hat worn by game keepers and hunters, but was soon used by wealthy people for sports. It spread to cities in less than a decade and was widely accepted. Studies have pointed out: "The top hats are worn by road builders, newspaper vendors, milk sellers, knife sharpeners, rabbit sellers, juice and water sellers – all kinds of workers, who seem to regard the dome hat as a badge on the streets of the city." "After World War II, it was mainly businessmen who wore such hats.
Like the top hat, the duck-tongue hat with brim appeared in the early 19th century, and it was originally worn by officers. By the middle of the 19th century, the duck-tongue hat began to become "the most common headdress worn by workers". At the beginning of the 20th century, cloth hats without brims were mainly worn by young workers, while wealthy merchants only wore duck-tongue hats or cloth hats when exercising. If politicians wear cloth hats, people think that this represents a "radical tendency."
In France, there are equally different ways in which each social class wears a hat. In the mid-19th century, both the French upper class and the middle class wore top hats; in the last 25 years of the 19th century, they would wear top hats in formal occasions and dome top hats in business and informal occasions. By the end of the 19th century, they still wore high top hats and bowler hats, but chose to wear straw hats, flat-toped straw hats, and Panamanian straw hats in the summer. Statistics show that before 1875, The average French worker had 2.2 hats per person; after 1875, the average number of hats per person was 3.2 hats. On Sundays and holidays, about a quarter of these workers wear top hats.
In the United States, hats have a similar importance. In the 1860s "people without hats were not normal"; in the 1890s, hats were described as "almost always fit, even when it was too hot to wear a coat and tie". It is estimated that the average American in the 1880s bought a hat every year.
There are also regional and class differences in the style of hats chosen by Americans. In the mid-19th century, living in American cities often required the wearing of a top hat, and workers sometimes paired top hats with overalls. At this time, "low-top wide-brimmed soft felt hats" were very popular in the western States of the United States. By the 1870s, wealthy merchants preferred to wear silk-textured top hats, and soft felt hats were popular among railroad workers and farmers.
Wear in the fashion capitalIn the fashion world, Paris's position is unique. For a long time, Paris has been at the forefront of social change and modernization in Europe, and it is also a center of domestic immigration in France, so there is a strong demand for clothing.
In the fashion circle, people often mention haute couture customization, and Voss is called the "father of haute couture". Although he is British, his fashion business is carried out in France. In 1858 he founded the "House of Value" in Paris, one of the most important fashion houses of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Voss is talented in fashion design and is also good at marketing. Knowing that his designs were gorgeous and luxurious, he positioned his clients as high-society people and actively promoted them to European royalty and aristocracy.
Voss was adept at innovation, and he adapted the traditional style of dress to make it more suitable for everyday life, which is said to have been carried out at the request of his client, Empress Eugenie. Voss was also the first to replace fashion dolls with live models in order to promote his designs to clients.
Voss was both artistically and economically successful, and provided clothing for many royalty and aristocrats in Europe, French high society, and actresses, who in turn became fashion leaders and drove Voss's business. By the end of Voss's career, his fashion house had hired 1,200 people. The success of Voss greatly improved the status of the costume designer.
At that time, fashionable women in Europe and the United States had to change their clothes several times a day and devote themselves to a wide range of social activities. Statistics published in 1887 showed the huge demand for clothing in Paris: Paris had 200 first- or second-rate women's designers, 1,800 women's tailors, 500 clothing stores and 6 large department stores. Since then, French designers have designed haute couture for elite clients, leading the fashion trend in the Western world for a hundred years. Under the promotion of many fashion magazines, the influence of Parisian designers can not be underestimated to this day.
The influence of Paris as the fashion capital was gradually weakened in the 1960s, due to the increase in media exposure and the emergence of various fashion trends on the streets, and fashion was no longer defined by a few designers. For example, the hippie style has provided a formidable competitor to the fashion world in the United States and Europe and has expanded the public imagination. The prevalence of this style suggests that very different styles of dress can coexist, and strict dress rules no longer apply.
Since then, people have been more willing to freely choose their favorite type of dress from multiple possibilities. Fashion and Its Social Issues notes that television audiences expanded rapidly in the 1950s, reinforcing identity with communities based on attitudes and behaviors (cultural class) rather than socioeconomic groups.
However, the aura of the costume designer has not dimmed. After decades of exploration, fashion designers in the three fashion capitals of Paris, New York and London have gradually found a new position.
In Paris, fashion designers prefer to define themselves as artists, art practitioners, and in various occasions when clothing works are on public display, they will make full use of their artistic connections to enhance their professional prestige and thus improve their position in a fiercely competitive market.
In the United States, most fashion designers focus on an increasingly fragmented mass market, and their success depends on finding a lifestyle that resonates with the public. New York's big names are lifestyle experts who specialize in designing clothing that expresses a particular lifestyle.
In London, the older designers are mostly artisans, their clients are mostly in high society, while younger designers are excluded. Under the influence of the rebellious street culture and art school environment, young designers are more anti-traditional and rebellious. In general, London designers are closer to youth culture and pop culture, and their creative styles are more inclined to be abnormal, subversive, unrealistic, and do not blindly cater to the mainstream consumer market.
A history of clothing is a history of social change. Clothing leads fashion, and fashion is the vane of social development. After becoming more and more diversified, in what direction will clothing go? We'll see.