Fashion is a general term for a popular style or practice, especially in clothing, footwear, accessories, makeup, body piercing, or furniture. Fashion refers to a distinctive and often habitual trend in the style in which a person dresses or to prevailing styles in behaviour. Fashion also refers to the newest creations of textile designers. The more technical term costume has become so linked to the term “fashion” that the use of the former has been relegated to special senses like fancy dress or masquerade wear, while “fashion” means clothing more generally, including the study of it. Although aspects of fashion can be feminine or masculine, some trends are androgynous.
The beginning in Europe of continual and increasingly rapid change in clothing styles can be fairly reliably dated. Historians, including James Laver and Fernand Braudel, date the start of Western fashion in clothing to the middle of the 14th century. The most dramatic early change in fashion was a sudden drastic shortening and tightening of the male over-garment from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing in the chest to make it look bigger. This created the distinctive Western outline of a tailored top worn over leggings or trousers. Continue Reading