Popular Culture and Fashion

Fashion is how you present yourself, once said a famous actress. As long as fashion has been in existence, what you wear is literally what you are. High society women wear thousand dollar fashions and one of a kind jewelry designs, while the average Jane wears jeans and a tee shirt. Fashion is a non-verbal communication with the rest of the world, through which you can express your personality, your social status, and your ideas. To choose clothes is to define and describe ourselves. [Lurie , The Language of Clothes, 1981] In all societies clothing is part of the culture. In current western society, pop culture reigns in fashion. All the way from couturiers like the Dior or de la Renta house in expensive boutiques, to designers like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, names we see in department stores like Nordstrom and Meier and Frank. Clothing has evolved through the ages, and has made most of its artistic leaps in the last century. Women’s fashion has gone from the corset and button up boots to Jennifer Lopez’s infamous and revealing, low-cut Gucci dress. But why has this happened? What brought fashion from where it was in the nineteenth century to where it is now in the twenty-first? Did social changes produce these changes in fashion, or did fashion designers and couturiers change our society’s way of thinking about fashion? This question is almost as unanswerable as, Was it the chicken or the egg? To make a better-educated hypothesis on this question one must understand the history of fashion for the past century and a half. Through that time one must look at the social events and changes occurring and link them to all fashion advances, or retreats. To begin with, what we now know as couture (literally meaning high quality sewing) has not always been around. Before the mid-19th century all dresses were made by dressmakers, who worked for families as full time staff or in a seamstress shop. They did not have the creative freedom that the couturiers and