Fashion In Full Swing

French Women Know About Fashion And You Don’t

French women are known far and wide for being fashion minded individuals who are always in style! If you find yourself looking greedily at these women, wanting to know all their fashion secrets, look no further. With this fashion information in mind, you can begin the process of striving to create the best outfit that best represents your tastes and your body type. Look at updating your wardrobe using these French secrets of high fashion so that you will be able to seamlessly create a garment collection that seamlessly transfers from season to season.

Choosing classic pieces for your wardrobe made easy

When creating your wardrobe, look at purchasing classic pieces that will translate easily through each season. Choose pieces that are both classic in color, shape, and style. Furthermore, choose pieces to add to your wardrobe that are made of quality materials that are sure to last you many seasons of use. Investing a little more money up front will allow you to enjoy quality pieces that will last for years if cared for in the proper manner.

Accessorizing is everything

You can create any number of unique outfits simply by using a variety of accessories. Add a colorful pin as a button on a wrap shirt or sweater to add interest in a unique and unusual place. A simple silk scarf can serve as a host of accessories. Use a scarf to add interest around your neck as a choker or thread it through your belt loops to serve as a belt. Incorporate your scarf into your hairstyle and use it as a headband or use a scarf to tie back your hair into a chic ponytail. Also, use belts or jewelry to customize a look.

Mask bad hair days with a great hat – Here’s how

On those days when your hair is simply not listening to directions and chooses to stand on end, consider topping your outfit with a great hat. Whether you finish your outfit with a jaunty beret or a great fedora cocked to one side, a hat is the perfect way to showcase your personality as well as finish off an outfit.

Fashion Week

Fashion Divas

A Glimpse at Today’s Fashion

Fashion, otherwise known as trend, is the latest style in anything from clothing to electronic gadgets such as cell phones. Everyone deals a lot with fashion these days as it has become a personal statement or expression for different people. Fashion may define the differences in each person or group such as age, sex, inclination in music or books, and general lifestyle among others. Fashion preference provides a strong impression of the personality of an individual.

Fashion has evolved from the strict law of the elders of villages who decide what is right and what is wrong to today’s much free-spirited approach. People now decide what is fashionable by supporting certain styles presented by designers through popular celebrities such as actors and other media personalities. This resulted in the fast-paced existence of trends that, although forward moving, may also look back from time to time.

Fashion Capital

The place or location where fashion is very important to most of its population and where top designers live and work along with fashion models is called fashion capital. These cities influence the rest of the world when it comes to fashion. Although designers come from different parts of the world, they prefer to live and work in certain cities where they feel they can get as much inspiration from its people as possible or where the populace is mostly welcoming to new trends.

The original fashion capitals are Paris, London, New York, and Milan. Today, however, other cities such as Tokyo, Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, and Hong Kong are slowly gaining the right to this title as well. The world of fashion has even found a way to rank the fashion capitals of the world. This clearly shows that like fashion, its seat also changes with time.

A lot of countries these days have its own fashion capital as well such as Mumbai for India, Manila for Philippines and Sydney for Australia.

Fashion Media

Fashion media or fashion journalism is one of the all important parts of the fashion industry. Although fashion media has been around in the past centuries through magazines and gazettes, it has evolved to become more accessible to everyone with the help of technology. There are a huge number of channels available now where people can get updates on the latest or even get predictions of what will be hot the following season. There are abundant magazines, newspapers with fashion sections, television shows that features fashion exclusively, websites of fashion houses and designers, and, of course, fashion blogs of people who lives fashion. For the fashion conscious, these mediums have been heaven sent.

With the saturation of fashion in media, it is no wonder that there are more people that can follow the trends today than centuries before. Less and less are not aware of what is fashionable or what are obsolete. Media has also paved the way for other designers to be recognized in the industry. Most importantly, fashion media has opened the door for people to experiment and decide what trend they want to follow.a

The Importance of Fashion Trends

ashion trends come and go, but a good fashion sense stays with you forever. Different people have different tastes in fashion, and while you may not always agree with them, they own up to their fashion sense with confidence. This is what makes a big difference between a fashion sense and fashion trend.

Fashion trends dictate that we wear whatever is in season otherwise we could be rudely stared at or whispered about in public, or worse, we can be cited as examples of what a fashion faux pas is. While to some extent we are compelled to follow the norms in fashion, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we lose our own sense of style in the process.

Celebrities for instance, know that they are being judged by more than half the world’s population by what they wear on what occasion, and for this reason alone, they turn to famous designers to dress them up in the latest threads in fashion. However, you will also notice that most of them incorporate their own sense of style into these fashion trends, and they are quite successful at it, too.

The Latest Fashion Trends

Nevertheless, it gives you some sort of security and peace of mind even knowing that what you are wearing is within the agreeable style of fashion for a particular season. Perhaps there is something to be said about the false sense of security that this kind of approval provides.

But on the other hand, it is actually not so much as seeking approval as the current trend really IS appealing to the public. After all, fashion trends are there not only to dictate to us what to wear but more so to show us different comfortable styles that we can choose from if we fancy wearing them.

Fashion trends take a lot of factors into consideration such as the weather, season, comfort, and lifestyle. So in reality, fashion trends are there to help people decide which one suits them best and which ones they can go without.

Create Your Style

If you go with the latest trends and use your imagination or creativity to make it your own style, you might find that there’s more to your wardrobe than only one look. You can also incorporate your mood into what you’re going to wear.

You can exude playfulness or show your sexy side on some occasions and then be a little conservative on other days. Remember that fashion trends are more of guidelines on what you can wear for whatever occasion.

For instance, if you’re stumped for ideas on what to wear to a formal event thrown by your company or you don’t know what to wear to a luau, fashion trends can help you solve this mystery. You can even ask fashion gurus who write in fashion magazines about advices on proper attires for every occasion.

After all, you wouldn’t want to be caught dead wearing flip-flops to your cousin’s wedding reception or jeans to a beach party, do you?

About Fashion

Fashion refers to styles of dress (but can also include cuisine, literature, art, architecture, and general comportment) that are popular in a culture at any given time. Such styles may change quickly, and "fashion" in the more colloquial sense refers to the latest version of these styles. Inherent in the term is the idea that the mode will change more quickly than the culture as a whole.

The terms "fashionable" and "unfashionable" are employed to describe whether someone or something fits in with the current or even not so current, popular mode of expression. The term "fashion" is frequently used in a positive sense, as a synonym for glamour, beauty and style. In this sense, fashions are a sort of communal art, through which a culture examines its notions of beauty and goodness. The term "fashion" is also sometimes used in a negative sense, as a synonym for fads and trends, and materialism. A number of cities are recognized as global fashion centers and are recognized for their fashion weeks, where designers exhibit their new clothing collections to audiences. These cities are Paris, Milan, New York City, and London. Other cities, mainly Los Angeles, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, Miami, Hong Kong, São Paulo, Sydney, Barcelona, Madrid, Montreal, Vienna, Auckland,Moscow, New Delhi and Dubai also hold fashion weeks and are better recognized every year.

Areas of fashion

Fashions are social phenomena common to many fields of human activity and thinking. The rise and fall of fashions has been especially documented and examined in the following fields:

• Architecture, interior design, and landscape design
• Arts and crafts
• Body type, clothing or costume, cosmetics, personal grooming, hairstyle, and personal adornment
• Dance and music
• Forms of address, slang, and other forms of speech
• Economics and spending choices, as studied in behavioral finance
• Entertainment, games, hobbies, sports, and other pastimes
• Etiquette
• Management, management styles and ways of organizing
• Politics and media, especially the topics of conversation encouraged by the media
• Philosophy and religion: although the doctrines of religions and philosophies change very slowly if at all, there can be rapid changes in what areas of a religion or a philosophy are seen as most important and most worth following or studying.
• Social networks and the diffusion of representations and practices
• Sociology and the meaning of clothing for identity-building
• Technology, such as the choice of computer programming techniques
• Hospitality industry such as designer uniforms custom made for a hotel, restaurant, casino, resort or club, in order to reflect a property and brand.

Of these fields, costume especially has become so linked in the public eye with the term "fashion" that the more general term "costume" has mostly been relegated to only mean fancy dress or masquerade wear, while the term "fashion" means clothing generally, and the study of it. This linguistic switch is due to the so-called fashion plates which were produced during the Industrial Revolution, showing novel ways to use new textiles. For a broad cross-cultural look at clothing and its place in society, refer to the entries for clothing, costume and fabrics. The remainder of this article deals with clothing fashions in the Western world.^[1]

Clothing

The habit of people continually changing the style of clothing worn, which is now worldwide, at least among urban populations, is generally held by historians to be a distinctively Western one.^{[dubious – discuss]} At other periods in Ancient Rome and other cultures changes in costume occurred, often at times of economic or social change, but then a long period without large changes followed. In 8th century Cordoba, Spain, Ziryab, a famous musician - a star in modern terms - is said to have introduced sophisticated clothing styles based on seasonal and daily timings from his native Baghdad and his own inspiration.

English caricature of Tippies of 1796

The beginnings of the habit in Europe of continual and increasingly rapid change in styles can be fairly clearly dated to the middle of the 14th century, to which historians including James Laver and Fernand Braudel date the start of Western fashion in clothing.^[2][3] The most dramatic manifestation was a sudden drastic shortening and tightening of the male over-garment, from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing on the chest to look bigger. This created the distinctive Western male outline of a tailored top worn over leggings or trousers which is still with us today.

The pace of change accelerated considerably in the following century, and women and men's fashion, especially in the dressing and adorning of the hair, became equally complex and changing. Art historians are therefore able to use fashion in dating images with increasing confidence and precision, often within five years in the case of 15th century images. Initially changes in fashion led to a fragmentation of what had previously been very similar styles of dressing across the upper classes of Europe, and the development of distinctive national styles, which remained very different until a counter-movement in the 17th to 18th centuries imposed similar styles once again, finally those from Ancien Régime in France.^[4] Though fashion was always led by the rich, the increasing affluence of early modern Europe led to the bourgeoisie and even peasants following trends at a distance sometimes uncomfortably close for the elites - a factor Braudel regards as one of the main motors of changing fashion.^[5]

The fashions of the West are generally unparalleled either in antiquity or in the other great civilizations of the world. Early Western travellers, whether to Persia, Turkey, Japan or China frequently remark on the absence of changes in fashion there, and observers from these other cultures comment on the unseemly pace of Western fashion, which many felt suggested an instability and lack 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.^[6] However in Ming China, for example, there is considerable evidence for rapidly changing fashions in Chinese clothing,^[7]

Albrecht Dürer's drawing contrasts a well turned out bourgeoise from Nuremberg (left) with her counterpart from Venice, in. The Venetian lady's high chopines make her taller.

Ten 16th century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen may show ten entirely different hats, and at this period national differences were at their most pronounced, as Albrecht Dürer recorded in his actual or composite contrast of Nuremberg and Venetian fashions at the close of the 15th century (illustration, right). The "Spanish style" of the end of the century began the move back to synchronicity among upper-class Europeans, and after a struggle in the mid 17th century, French styles decisively took over leadership, a process completed in the 18th century.^[8]

Though colors and patterns of textiles changed from year to year,^[9] the cut of a gentleman's coat and the length of his waistcoat, or the pattern to which a lady's dress was cut changed more slowly. Men's fashions largely derived from military models, and changes in a European male silhouette are galvanized in theatres of European war, where gentleman officers had opportunities to make notes of foreign styles: an example is the "Steinkirk" cravat or necktie.

The pace of change picked up in the 1780s with the increased publication of French engravings that showed the latest Paris styles; though there had been distribution of dressed dolls from France as patterns since the 16th century, and Abraham Bosse had produced engravings of fashion from the 1620s. By 1800, all Western Europeans were dressing alike (or thought they were): local variation became first a sign of provincial culture, and then a badge of the conservative peasant.^[10]

Although tailors and dressmakers were no doubt responsible for many innovations before, and the textile industry certainly led many trends, the history of fashion design is normally taken to date from 1858, when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the first true haute couture house in Paris. Since then the professional designer has become a progressively more dominant figure, despite the origins of many fashions in street fashion.

Modern Westerners have a wide choice available in the selection of their clothes. What a person chooses to wear can reflect that person's personality or likes. When people who have cultural status start to wear new or different clothes a fashion trend may start. People who like or respect them may start to wear clothes of a similar style.

Fashions may vary considerably within a society according to age, social class, generation, occupation sexual orientation, and geography as well as over time. If, for example, an older person dresses according to the fashion of young people, he or she may look ridiculous in the eyes of both young and older people. The terms "fashionista" or "fashion victim" refer to someone who slavishly follows the current fashions

One can regard the system of sporting various fashions as a fashion language incorporating various fashion statements using a grammar of fashion. (Compare some of the work of Roland Barthes.)

Changes

Fashion, by description, changes constantly. The changes may proceed more rapidly than in most other fields of human activity (language, thought, etc). For some, modern fast-paced changes in fashion embody many of the negative aspects of capitalism: it results in waste and encourages people qua consumers to buy things unnecessarily. Other people enjoy the diversity that changing fashion can apparently provide, seeing the constant change as a way to satisfy their desire to experience "new" and "interesting" things. Note too that fashion can change to enforce uniformity, as in the case where so-called Mao suits became the national uniform of mainland China.

At the same time there remains an equal or larger range designated 'out of fashion'.(These or similar fashions may cyclically come back 'into fashion' in due course, and remain 'in fashion' again for a while.)

Practically every aspect of appearance that can be changed has been changed at some time, for example skirt lengths ranging from ankle to mini to so short that it barely covers anything, etc. In the past, new discoveries and lesser-known parts of the world could provide an impetus to change fashions based on the exotic: Europe in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, for example, might favor things Turkish at one time, things Chinese at another, and things Japanese at a third. A modern version of exotic clothing includes club wear. Globalization has reduced the options of exotic novelty in more recent times, and has seen the introduction of non-Western wear into the Western world.

Fashion houses and their associated fashion designers, as well as high-status consumers (including celebrities), appear to have some role in determining the rates and directions of fashion change.

[edit] Media

An important part of fashion is fashion journalism. Editorial critique and commentary can be found in magazines, newspapers, on television, fashion websites, social networks and in fashion blogs.

At the beginning of the 20th century, fashion magazines began to include photographs and became even more influential than in the past. In cities throughout the world these magazines were greatly sought-after and had a profound effect on public taste. Talented illustrators drew exquisite fashion plates for the publications which covered the most recent developments in fashion and beauty. Perhaps the most famous of these magazines was La Gazette du Bon Ton which was founded in 1912 by Lucien Vogel and regularly published until 1925 (with the exception of the war years).

Vogue, founded in the US in 1902, has been the longest-lasting and most successful of the hundreds of fashion magazines that have come and gone. Increasing affluence after World War II and, most importantly, the advent of cheap colour printing in the 1960s led to a huge boost in its sales, and heavy coverage of fashion in mainstream women's magazines - followed by men's magazines from the 1990s. Haute couture designers followed the trend by starting the ready-to-wear and perfume lines, heavily advertised in the magazines, that now dwarf their original couture businesses. Television coverage began in the 1950s with small fashion features. In the 1960s and 1970s, fashion segments on various entertainment shows became more frequent, and by the 1980s, dedicated fashion shows like Fashion Television started to appear. Despite television and increasing internet coverage, including fashion blogs, press coverage remains the most important form of publicity in the eyes of the industry.

Fashion Editor, Brooke Kelley said, "There's a misconception in the industry that TV, magazines and blogs dictate to the consumer, what to wear. But most trends aren't released to the public before consulting the target demographic. So what you see in the media is a result of research of popular ideas among the people. Essentially, fashion is a group of people bouncing ideas off of one another, like any other form of art.