Fashion

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For other uses, see Fashion (disambiguation).

In Following the Fashion (1794), James Gillray caricatured a figure flattered by the short-
bodiced gowns then in fashion, contrasting it with an imitator whose figure is not flattered.

Fashion, a general term for a currently popular style or practice, especially in clothing, foot wear
or accessories. Fashion references to anything that is the current trend in look and dress up of a
person. The more technical term, costume, has become so linked in the public eye with the term
"fashion" that the more general term "costume" has in popular use mostly been relegated to
special senses like fancy dress or masquerade wear, while the term "fashion" means clothing
generally, and the study of it. For a broad cross-cultural look at clothing and its place in society,
refer to the entries for clothing, costume and fabrics. The remainder of this article deals with
clothing fashions in the Western world.[1]

Contents
[hide]

 1 Clothing fashions
 2 Fashion industry
 3 Media
 4 Intellectual property
 5 See also
 6 References
 7 Further reading
 8 External links

[edit] Clothing fashions

2008 runway show

For detailed historical articles by period, see History of Western fashion.

Early Western travelers, whether to Persia, Turkey or China frequently remark on the absence of
changes in fashion there, and observers from these other cultures comment on the unseemly pace
of Western fashion, which many felt suggested an instability and lack of order in Western
culture. The Japanese Shogun's secretary boasted (not completely accurately) to a Spanish visitor
in 1609 that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years.[2] However in Ming
China, for example, there is considerable evidence for rapidly changing fashions in Chinese
clothing.[3]

Changes in costume often took place at times of economic or social change (such as in ancient
Rome and the medieval Caliphate), but then a long period without major changes followed. This
occurred in Moorish Spain from the 8th century, when the famous musician Ziryab introduced
sophisticated clothing styles based on seasonal and daily timings from his native Baghdad and
his own inspiration to Córdoba, Spain.[4][5] Similar changes in fashion occurred in the Middle
East from the 11th century, following the arrival of the Turks who introduced clothing styles
from Central Asia and the Far East.[6]

The beginnings of the habit in Europe of continual and increasingly rapid change in clothing
styles can be fairly reliably dated to the middle of the 14th century, to which historians including
James Laver and Fernand Braudel date the start of Western fashion in clothing.[7][8] The most
dramatic manifestation was a sudden drastic shortening and tightening of the male over-garment,
from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing on the
chest to look bigger. This created the distinctive Western male outline of a tailored top worn over
leggings or trousers.
Marie Antoinette was a fashion icon

The pace of change accelerated considerably in the following century, and women and men's
fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning of the hair, became equally complex and
changing. Art historians are therefore able to use fashion in dating images with increasing
confidence and precision, often within five years in the case of 15th century images. Initially
changes in fashion led to a fragmentation of what had previously been very similar styles of
dressing across the upper classes of Europe, and the development of distinctive national styles.
These remained very different until a counter-movement in the 17th to 18th centuries imposed
similar styles once again, mostly originating from Ancien Régime France.[9] Though the rich
usually led fashion, the increasing affluence of early modern Europe led to the bourgeoisie and
even peasants following trends at a distance sometimes uncomfortably close for the elites - a
factor Braudel regards as one of the main motors of changing fashion.[10]
Albrecht Dürer's drawing contrasts a well turned out bourgeoisie from Nuremberg (left) with her
counterpart from Venice. The Venetian lady's high chopines make her taller

Ten 16th century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats,
and at this period national differences were at their most pronounced, as Albrecht Dürer recorded
in his actual or composite contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of the 15th
century (illustration, right). The "Spanish style" of the end of the century began the move back
to synchronicity among upper-class Europeans, and after a struggle in the mid 17th century,
French styles decisively took over leadership, a process completed in the 18th century.[11]

Though colors and patterns of textiles changed from year to year,[12] the cut of a gentleman's coat
and the length of his waistcoat, or the pattern to which a lady's dress was cut changed more
slowly. Men's fashions largely derived from military models, and changes in a European male
silhouette are galvanized in theatres of European war, where gentleman officers had
opportunities to make notes of foreign styles: an example is the "Steinkirk" cravat or necktie.

The pace of change picked up in the 1780s with the increased publication of French engravings
that showed the latest Paris styles; though there had been distribution of dressed dolls from
France as patterns since the 16th century, and Abraham Bosse had produced engravings of
fashion from the 1620s. By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike (or thought they
were): local variation became first a sign of provincial culture, and then a badge of the
conservative peasant.[13]

Although tailors and dressmakers were no doubt responsible for many innovations before, and
the textile industry certainly led many trends, the history of fashion design is normally taken to
date from 1858, when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the first true haute
couture house in Paris. Since then the professional designer has become a progressively more
dominant figure, despite the origins of many fashions in street fashion. For women the flapper
styles of the 1920s marked the most major alteration in styles for several centuries, with a drastic
shortening of skirt lengths, and much looser-fitting clothes; with occasional revivals of long
skirts forms of the shorter length have remained dominant ever since. The four major current
fashion capitals are acknowledged to be Milan, New York City, Paris, and London. Fashion
weeks are held in these cities, where designers exhibit their new clothing collections to
audiences, and which are all headquarters to the greatest fashion companies and are renowned
for their major influence on global fashion.

Modern Westerners have a wide choice available in the selection of their clothes. What a person
chooses to wear can reflect that person's personality or likes. When people who have cultural
status start to wear new or different clothes a fashion trend may start. People who like or respect
them may start to wear clothes of a similar style.

Fashions may vary considerably within a society according to age, social class, generation,
occupation, and geography as well as over time. If, for example, an older person dresses
according to the fashion of young people, he or she may look ridiculous in the eyes of both
young and older people. The terms 'fashionista' or fashion victim refer to someone who slavishly
follows the current fashions.

One can regard the system of sporting various fashions as a fashion language incorporating
various fashion statements using a grammar of fashion. (Compare some of the work of Roland
Barthes.)

[edit] Fashion industry

The fashion industry is a product of the modern age. Prior to the mid-19th century, most clothing
was custom made. It was handmade for individuals, either as home production or on order from
dressmakers and tailors. By the beginning of the 20th century—with the rise of new technologies
such as the sewing machine, the rise of global capitalism and the development of the factory
system of production, and the proliferation of retail outlets such as department stores—clothing
had increasingly come to be mass-produced in standard sizes and sold at fixed prices. Although
the fashion industry developed first in Europe and America, today it is an international and
highly globalized industry, with clothing often designed in one country, manufactured in another,
and sold world-wide. For example, an American fashion company might source fabric in China
and have the clothes manufactured in Vietnam, finished in Italy, and shipped to a warehouse in
the United States for distribution to retail outlets internationally. The fashion industry has long
been one of the largest employers in the United States, and it remains so in the 21st century.
However, employment declined considerably as production increasingly moved overseas,
especially to China. Because data on the fashion industry typically are reported for national
economies and expressed in terms of the industry’s many separate sectors, aggregate figures for
world production of textiles and clothing are difficult to obtain. However, by any measure, the
industry accounts for a significant share of world economic output.

The fashion industry consists of four levels: the production of raw materials, principally fibres
and textiles but also leather and fur; the production of fashion goods by designers,
manufacturers, contractors, and others; retail sales; and various forms of advertising and
promotion. These levels consist of many separate but interdependent sectors, all of which are
devoted to the goal of satisfying consumer demand for apparel under conditions that enable
participants in the industry to operate at a profit. [14]

[edit] Media

Fashion shot from 2006

An important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique, guidelines and commentary
can be found in magazines, newspapers, on television, fashion websites, social networks and in
fashion blogs.

At the beginning of the 20th century, fashion magazines began to include photographs of various
fashion designs and became even more influential on people than in the past. In cities throughout
the world these magazines were greatly sought-after and had a profound effect on public clothing
taste. Talented illustrators drew exquisite fashion plates for the publications which covered the
most recent developments in fashion and beauty. Perhaps the most famous of these magazines
was La Gazette du Bon Ton which was founded in 1912 by Lucien Vogel and regularly
published until 1925 (with the exception of the war years).

Vogue, founded in the US in 1892, has been the longest-lasting and most successful of the
hundreds of fashion magazines that have come and gone. Increasing affluence after World War
II and, most importantly, the advent of cheap colour printing in the 1960s led to a huge boost in
its sales, and heavy coverage of fashion in mainstream women's magazines - followed by men's
magazines from the 1990s. Haute couture designers followed the trend by starting the ready-to-
wear and perfume lines, heavily advertised in the magazines, that now dwarf their original
couture businesses. Television coverage began in the 1950s with small fashion features. In the
1960s and 1970s, fashion segments on various entertainment shows became more frequent, and
by the 1980s, dedicated fashion shows like Fashion-television started to appear. Despite
television and increasing internet coverage, including fashion blogs, press coverage remains the
most important form of publicity in the eyes of the fashion industry.
However, over the past several years, fashion websites have developed that merge traditional
editorial writing with user-generated content. New magazines like iFashion Network, and
Runway Magazine, led by Nole Marin from America's Next Top Model, have begun to dominate
the digital market with digital copies for computers, iPhones and iPads.

A few days after the 2010 Fall Fashion Week in New York City came to a close, The New
Islander's Fashion Editor, Genevieve Tax, criticized the fashion industry for running on a
seasonal schedule of its own, largely at the expense of real-world consumers. "Because designers
release their fall collections in the spring and their spring collections in the fall, fashion
magazines such as Vogue always and only look forward to the upcoming season, promoting
parkas come September while issuing reviews on shorts in January," she writes. "Savvy
shoppers, consequently, have been conditioned to be extremely, perhaps impractically, farsighted
with their buying."[15]

[edit] Intellectual property

Within the fashion industry, intellectual property is not enforced as it is within the film industry
and music industry. To "take inspiration" from others' designs contributes to the fashion
industry's ability to establish clothing trends. For the past few years, WGSN has been a dominant
source of fashion news and forecasts in steering fashion brands worldwide to be "inspired" by
one another. Enticing consumers to buy clothing by establishing new trends is, some have
argued, a key component of the industry's success. Intellectual property rules that interfere with
the process of trend-making would, on this view, be counter-productive. In contrast, it is often
argued that the blatant theft of new ideas, unique designs, and design details by larger companies
is what often contributes to the failure of many smaller or independent design companies.

In 2005, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held a conference calling for
stricter intellectual property enforcement within the fashion industry to better protect small and
medium businesses and promote competitiveness within the textile and clothing industries

Fashion journalism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Journalism

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Ethics · Objectivity
Values · Attribution
Defamation
Editorial independence
 Journalism school

List of
journalism articles

Areas

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 Yellow journalism

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Category: Journalism

v • d • e

Fashion journalism is an umbrella term used to describe all aspects of published fashion media.
It includes fashion writers, fashion critics or fashion reporters. The most obvious examples of
fashion journalism are the fashion features in magazines and newspapers, but the term also
includes books about fashion, fashion related reports on television as well as online fashion
magazines, websites and blogs. Since pieces more often than not deal with "tendencies" and
"trends", which are subjective by nature, and due to a sometimes tenuous relation with facts, the
term "journalism" is used as a moniker, but does not carry the overall procedural and
deontological aspects of professional journalism.

The work of a fashion journalist can be quite varied. Typical work includes writing or editing
articles, or helping to formulate and style a fashion shoot. A fashion journalist typically spends a
lot of time researching and/or conducting interviews and it is essential that he or she has good
contacts with people in the fashion industry, including photographers, designers, and public
relations specialists.

Fashion journalists are either employed full time by a publication or are employed on a freelance
basis.
The career has grown in importance in other media with the release of films such as The Devil
Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic, and television series such as Ugly Betty.

[edit] Fashion journalism and the internet

About half a year subsequent to pioneer fashion resource named Fashion Net's launch at the
outset of 1995 came American Fashionmall and French ELLE. Fashion Live produced Internet's
first live fashion webcast of Yves Saint Laurent's runway show in 1996. CNN Style and Hint
Magazine arrived in 1998. The following year saw the rise and fall of Boo.com as the company
burned through $135 million in 18 months.[1] Style.com, the online umbrella for Vogue and W,
started in 2000. Style.com is not a journalistic website but a resource to show the complete
collections of selected fashion shows (among the most notorious brands) each season. Following
a tiff in 2007, W left Style.com making it the online home for Vogue alone. In the late 2000,
Beauty Flow magazine flourished with exclusive content for editorials, portraits and reports.

Today, fashion blogs, and other such fashion portals such as http://coutureinthecity.com,
http://glamour.com, and http://ifashionnetwork.com, are an increasing force in the fashion
industry. Against this trend in August 2006 Westfield Group the world's largest mall and
shopping centre owner has unveiled a Webzine titled What's What identifying popular fashion
trends with a view to indirectly promote the products available in their tenants stores. The
financial funding for such an undertaking is unique as it does not rely on subscriptions or
advertising but entirely on advertorials.

My Fashion-Ethiopia’s New Fashion and Life

Style Magazine
By arefe

Take a look at the newly launched Ethiopia’s life style magazine, My Fashion, and you’ll come
across as diverse issues as tons of fashionable pictures, helpful hints on modern hair dressing and
eliminating body odor, interview with Ethiopian young music sensation, Zeritu Kebede, a
Ferenj’s observation on Ethiopian’s way of eating with hands and even what the Chief Executive
Officer (CEO) of Ethiopian Airlines day look like The stark contrasts between pictures of
scantily clad dressed young women and a number of articles by serious writers seem odd, but
purposeful. It is intended to be inclusive of and welcoming to all people.

‘It is not all about clothes; it’s got a whole lot about other stuff that is not just about image. It’s
got issues on human relations, diet and fitness, sports and IT tips. So it’s got something for
everybody. There’s something for the fashion conscious, there’s something for the serious
minded’ Selome Lagesse, Magazine’s Managing Director told this writer.

Selome, who states she is neither a model nor a fashion designer, had an all-time yearning to
establish a fashion magazine. ‘While I was around 14 attending high school in American
Mission, I had developed a passion for fashion. The senior girls used to bring various magazines
like Vogue and I used to enjoy looking at the glossy pages. So My Fashion is a dream come
true.’

Written in English, on all-color out and glossy paper My Fashion is aimed at a relatively
privileged Addis Women and men and it already proved to have tremendous appeal to such
audience. Their debut issues managed to have 5,000 copies sales.

While western fashion magazines such as Vogue and Cosmopolitan are available in Addis, they
are expensive and sometimes hard for Ethiopia women to identify with.

Selome says that My Fashion is an entertaining Magazine aimed at showcasing Ethiopian

fashion and brining Ethiopian women close to the world without losing their cultural heritage.

Asked if there is anything called Ethiopia fashion, Selome shot back smilingly, ‘Why not? We
have beautiful tilet, dresses, traditional fabric and embroidery. Ethiopia is one of the few
countries in touch with its handcrafted techniques, unique hair styling and diverse cultural
heritage.’

The magazine captures the flavor of a middle class Addisers and uses models from that setting to
give the fashion spread an authentic feel and a distinctive look.

‘We want to feature many designers in each edition, so that we would appeal to the test of
everybody. In the first issue we used the shops like Miki’s, Lady Shop that bring in stylish
clothes, in the second issue we have decided to give local designers, the Ras Africa brand
designer, Osman and the Dohann brand designer Hanna their chance. So just in that respect,
readers will have a very rich sense of fashion that can appeal to different people in the country.’
says Selome.

Asked what some of the challenges involved in doing a magazine like My Fashion, she said that
the first challenge the cost associated with printing. “Printing a glossy and art-paper magazine is
very expensive, especially when it is printed abroad. While the production cost is around 38 Birr,
we are selling it only with 10 Birr. So we are putting high investment. But advertisement will
come as people get to know it and be confident in the quality or print, content and quality of
editorial.

Asked what people’s reaction was, the Managing Director says ‘ People loved the magazines.
The replies we have received so far are heartening. It is something that I’m taking just in my
stride because it’s a lot of hard work and I feel very privileged to do it. We would improve by
collecting people’s feedback. We would be more resilient in whatever circumstances.’

Selome has ambitious plans to change people’s negative attitude towards models and to start a
model institute so that Ethiopian models can be trained and then go on to take advantage of the
business opportunities.’

Some of the people we have approached to tell us what they think of the magazine have mixed
reactions.
Hikmu Nuru, a hijab wearing young Muslim, who works in a bookshop, says she liked that
magazine and added, ‘I am glad now we have our fashion magazines. It is full of fashion items.
The clothes are sometimes ugly. The movie and the music review are informative and fun.’

Samson Wondimu, a young man who works for Save the Children, was critical and wondered if
Ethiopia is becoming like India, where they have a version of everything western. It seems an
imitation of the worst type ‘, he insisted.

Meron Belay, a secretary in a private firm was taken aback by the content. “I saw the magazine, I
felt a little bit uncomfortable in looking at it, and I was expecting it to be a little bit more
conservative”.

Selome says they respect and accept all the comments they get from the public and strives hard
to make s My Fashion an East African magazine and eventually reach the continent