IFM-EvS - Fashion Evolution

Fashion, a worldwide term for a presently popular mode or pattern, especially in clothing, foot wear or accessories. Fashion mentions to anything that is the current day trend in look and dress up of a somebody. The more technical term, costume, is getting so linked in the public eye with the term "fashion" that the more world wide term "costume" has in popular use mostly been relegated to special senses like fancy dress or masquerade wear, while the term "fashion" entails clothing in the main, and the study of it. For a wide cross cultural look at clothing and its place in society, refer to the entries for clothing, costume and fabrics. The end of this article deals with clothing styles in the Western world.

Early Western travelers, whether to Persia, Turkey or China ofttimes note on the lack of alterations in fashion at that place, and commentators from these other cultures remark on the unseemly pace of Western fashion, which large numbers of felt proposed an unbalance and want 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. However in Ming China, for example, there is considerable evidence for rapidly changing fashions in Chinese clothing. 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.

Fashions may alter substantially within a modern society in respect to age, social class, generation, occupation, and geography as well as over time. If, for instance, an older person clotheses in respect to the fashion of young people, he or she may look nonsensical in the eyes of both young and older people. Currently the terms fashionista and fashion victim refer to someone who slavishly follows current fashions. One can regard the system of sporting various fashions as a fashion language integrating assorted style assertions taking a grammar of mode.