Tips for Students: A Whirlwind History of Fashion – and Why it Matters

The following article expands on highlights and insights from one of our Expert Series events, which are exclusive for Young Scholars and their parents. 

Authored by: August Thomas

Introduction

This seminar took us on a whirlwind trip through the history of fashion, exploring how humans have always expressed ourselves by shaping and adorning our bodies.  We discovered the fascinating stories woven into our clothes, and how fashion intersects with science, technology, power, identity, and more.   We also exploded some fashion myths, comparing and contrasting fashions and standards of beauty across cultures.

Starting 100,000 years ago in with shell beads in a Moroccan cave, we examined some of the earliest archaeological traces of fashion, including the furry leggings of a 5,300-year-old hiker and the world’s oldest surviving dress. In ancient Athens, we witnessed how fashion choices (like whether or not to wear trousers) marked you as an insider or outsider, expressing deeper cultural beliefs. We saw that as far back as the Roman empire, there was a thriving international trade in luxury fabrics, including silk – and that people have long been both fascinated and shocked by the fashions of other cultures.

Moving into the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, sumptuary laws regulated who was allowed to wear certain fabrics, decorations, or even colors, reflecting the power structures, prejudices and anxieties of changing cultures.  In 16^th-century England, wearing certain fashions could even get you arrested!  Traveling to the court of Louis XIV of France, we witnessed the origins of French luxury fashion, the world’s first fashion magazine, and how luxurious, frequently changing Court dress impacted society.

Starting in the 18^th century, the industrial revolution transformed clothing from mostly individualized and handmade out of natural materials into the mass-produced, often synthetic fashions of the modern world. Some fashion-related inventions like the Jacquard Loom impacted technology far beyond fashion – even early computers!

Highlights

1. Fashion is always an invention – and many modern fashion norms are far from universal. Fashionable 18^th-century Frenchmen wore high heels, while for centuries, chic Japanese women painted their teeth black.
2. Fashion often reflects a culture’s power structures. In many cultures from Ming dynasty China to medieval Europe, strict rules regulated who was allowed to wear what – and you could even get arrested for crimes of fashion.
3. 21^st-century fashion would be impossible without the technological breakthroughs of the industrial revolution, including mechanized spinning and weaving, synthetic dyes and synthetic fabrics. But these innovations sometimes come with high costs for people or the environment.

Things Students Can do to Explore This Topic Further…

Because fashion history is often best learned through artifacts, one of the most delightful ways to explore it is through museums, either in person or online.  Many local museums will have interesting collections of historic clothes.  Two museums with lots of great free material online are the Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum in London and the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  When you study a historical period or work of literature in school, consider challenging yourself to learn more about the fashion of that era.   Modern fashion companies will also often share their histories and historical photos on their websites.

Resources

• Museum YouTube channels and websites are a great resource for fashion history! I particularly recommend the Fashion Unpicked videos from the Victoria & Albert Museum, including a video on the Silk Princess panel.   The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a wealth of information. If you are interested in the history of shoes, try the resources from the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. Ötzi the Iceman has his very own museum, with lots of interesting resources about him.  You can learn more about the Jacquard loom from the Science and Industry museum.
• Google’s We Wear Culture project has lots of articles and virtual exhibits exploring fashion history, from experts around the world.
• Students interested in the history of material culture (including but not limited to fashion) may enjoy the BBC podcast, A History of the World in 100 Objects.
• National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine both publish plenty of interesting, brief articles about fashion history.
• For students comfortable with college-level resources, The Fashion History Reader (Routledge, 2010), edited by Giorgio Riello, Peter McNeil, is a terrific compendium of brief academic essays, including some cited in the seminar, and may be available through your library. Another interesting book is Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, by Richard Thompson Ford (Simon & Schuster, 2021).

Speaker Bio:

August is a novelist and a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Association. She also analyzes companies for an investment firm, including some of the world’s biggest fashion brands. She was a Fulbright Scholar in art history and has Master’s degrees from Bogazici University in Istanbul and the University of Edinburgh. She lives in Scotland and still has the t-shirt from her first YS gathering when she was nine — which now counts as vintage fashion!

Permission Statement

This article is provided as a service of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to supporting profoundly gifted young people 18 and under. To learn more about the Davidson Institute’s programs, please visit www.DavidsonGifted.org.