The Role Of Fashion

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. Fashion is a vibrant form of visual and material culture that plays an important role in social and cultural life. Viewed as homogenizing, Fashion encourages everyone to dress in a certain way, but simultaneously about a search for individuality and expression. In the Empire of Fashion, Gilles Lipovetsky argues that fashion played a significant role in modern democracy. In France, The Old Regime was the political and social system prior to the French Revolution. Under the regime, all rights and status were divided into three estates: the Clergy, the noble and third estate, which represented the majority of people. “Members of each estate wore clothing appropriate to that estate; the force of tradition prevented the confusion of status and the usurpation of privileges of dress. (30)” There …show more content…

(30)” Members of the third estate began to adopt materials worn by nobles. “Fashion must be conceptualized as an instrument for the equality of conditions. It disrupted the principle of inequality in dress…” (31) Once fashion disseminated into the middle and lower classes, it disrupted the class distinctions it was meant to define; it generated social ambiguity and it permitted the citizen to violate the natural order. The role of fashion changed between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the fourteenth century, there were styles based on gender: fitted for men and long and close to the body for women.(20)Then there was a gradual shift in tastes and novelties. Women’s fashion shifted from one type of dress to different dresses depending on time if day. There were a variety of fabrics and laces, and then there were dresses in different lengths. Susceptibility to fashion trends was clearly rooted in gender; women fell prey to fashion and then exposed their husbands and sons.

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