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Ah, this fashion! What epithets have been used to describe it: fickle, fickle, capricious, “the wild fashion of the West,” and… we can go on and on. And it was, is and will be. Will surprise and delight, puzzle and cheer. Let’s consider what today’s youth fashion for girls and why it is so important for teenagers to follow the trends.
Fashion History
The word “fashion” has its origin in the Latin modus, which translates as measure, rule. Its roots are in Italian and French, and it means the short-lived diffusion of certain tastes in the external forms of life, especially in clothing, though not only in it. Not so long ago there was a fashion for crystal tableware behind the glass of a sideboard, then for signed editions and generally rare books on the shelves. Now the fashion for the professions of economist and lawyer and foreign cars. By defining, for example, how to dress, fashion as if imposes a ban on the use of other forms which it does not recommend. Although this prohibition is not categorical, and it can easily be broken.
Every time has its own fashion. Some researchers of this cultural phenomenon attribute its appearance to the times of Ancient Rome, when painted statuettes were sent from the capital to the provinces to demonstrate the “new trends”. Others believe that it emerged in the Middle Ages. Once it appeared, fashion did not pay much attention to the requirements of convenience, hygiene or even beauty. How many costume details can be recalled that were very uncomfortable, even distressing! The corset made of iron bars, which for centuries cruelly distorted the female body. And of recent – platform shoes, which were very difficult to walk on (I say, remembering my own experience) and which had a bad impact on the overall health of fashionable women (I read a special medical study and was glad that I did not walk for long).
The weather worried fashion even less. In thirty-degree heat men steadfastly wore pantaloons stuffed with feather and hemp (at the same time they washed very rarely, maybe once a year or did not wash at all for several years, and women until the end of the XIX century considered it impossible to cover a luxurious toilet in the cold with outerwear. Well, understandably, they preserved aesthetics. But what about the “aesthetics” of pantaloons-bouffes, which turned men’s legs into the likeness of pumpkins? Was such a spectacle a pleasure to behold?
Please don’t laugh. It’s not easy to dress you for the weather, either, especially in winter. It’s a good thing that you recognize pants and warm tights, which look good with your boots and jackets. By the way, do you know how to dress properly in winter? Under your jacket – a clean wool sweater, and under it – a cotton shirt with long sleeves. And make sure you wear something on your head, because up to 80% of the heat is lost if you’re walking around with your head uncovered.
Why follow fashion
But why, then, do people, sometimes against common sense, follow fashion? Probably because it meets their needs, and first of all the need for renewal. Psychologists argue that repeated interaction of the same stimuli leads to inhibition of nervous processes in the corresponding areas of the brain. The brain begins to require new stimuli. Dulling of the aesthetic sense, weariness from the monotonous, habitual information (bear this in mind and for future family life) makes itself felt. The need for renewal is somehow compensated by fashion, which offers new elements of clothing, household items, style of behavior. I would say that fashion gives us little holidays. After all, holidays have the same meaning – a solemn renewal of life and a psychological release.
Don’t we need it in the dynamic 21st century? Back in the twentieth century, fashion acquired an influence that it did not know in previous centuries.
Twentieth Century Fashion
A special dynamic has emerged with the development of industrial mass production of clothing and other consumer items. Experts believe that in the century that is ending, fashion is changing every two years. Although, as I’ve told you many times, nothing is only good or only bad. And so is twentieth-century fashion. Its rapid renewal can also cause a certain tension. If we speak on a high theoretical level, the man of our century experiences excessive nervous tension, facing the consequences of scientific and technological progress, living in an atmosphere saturated with novelty. After all, it is one thing to live at an accelerating pace in more or less familiar life situations, and quite another to experience the constant acceleration of life in the face of unfamiliar situations.
You, I don’t think, quite understand it yet. Adults are beginning to feel the changes more and more painfully, especially in the version of the collapsed USSR, where everything seemed to be determined unambiguously and for centuries. No, I am not crying for what has gone into oblivion. But a great many of my peers and older people find the new times hard to accept. In another particular case, fashion can be “stressful” from a financial point of view. You know, the prices these days…
As a result, following fashion is again an important social indicator. In order to follow it, one must have money, that is, not be a poor person. Of course, the material and workmanship can also be cheaper. But since the times of Ancient Greece there was a custom to focus on the higher strata of population, and since then the European fashion sticks to this orientation. Although in its modern offerings there is a lot of democratic moments. But more about that later.
Fashion and youth
With the help of clothes, a person is trying to satisfy in some way another of his needs to establish himself. In the period of puberty, the need for separation – the need for family – a person feels his loneliness acutely. Spiritually he is no longer with his mother or father, even if he continues to live with them. There is a need to feel oneself as a member of a new community of people. More often, it is his or her own peers. Clothes, hairstyle, a means of transportation are the key to this community. There are a lot of cases in the criminal investigation about murders, robberies, which are committed by over-teenagers for the sake of possession of some thing, without which, as it seems to boys or girls, “life is not a life”. The result is a mangled fate. Colonies and prisons are not boarding houses for noble maidens.
Young people often try to combine the incompatible: to be similar to others and maintain individuality at the same time. When a person haircuts himself something unthinkable, he thinks not so much about beauty, but rather about “admission” to the group of his own, different from both boring adults and other groups. On the other hand, he just wants to stand out, to draw attention to himself. There is not yet the development of something more substantial. With clothes, the desired seems easily attainable. In the West, it’s young people from 14 to 25 who are the main consumers of fashion. It is exaggerated in the expectation of them. The older a person becomes, the fashion is more restrained.
In our time there is a new thing: people openly want to live better, richer. So here it is. In stores, where shoppers do not look at price tags, fashion follows only slightly. Expensive clothes differ from cheap clothes not in style but in the quality of fabric and impeccable execution. In really expensive clothes fashion may slightly glimpse in some little things: the trim, the length of the dress or jacket.
Woman and fashion
Another need, satisfied by fashion, exists for women. No matter how much one may resent it, a woman has always been in a disadvantaged position compared to a man. Now times are changing, but only in part. Don’t grieve, humanity has managed to achieve a lot by struggling with the disadvantages of existence, especially Europeans. So an intelligent woman would behave similarly.
So, the humiliation of women and the infringement of their rights had to be somehow compensated. And it was compensated by fashion, which gave unhappy women an opportunity to somehow get revenge on men: to dazzle, surprise, charm and… subjugate?
If it didn’t work out, you could raise your status in front of your acquaintances and be comforted by updating yourself. In addition, sewing, embroidery, and knitting are excellent soothing remedies.
If a woman did not create her outfit herself, but with the help of dressmakers, then fiddling with the choice of style, fabric and trim is also very pleasant.
It is possible to describe the way of fashion and the history of costume long and in detail. But it has long been noted that what may interest you will bore someone else. I like it, don’t you? If you want to know details, get the excellent book “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fashion,” prepared by Lyudmila Kibalova, Olga Gerbenova, and Milena Lamarova. Or other books on the history of costume. However, you can be sure that if you are not very interested in all these tourniquets and crinolines, then the youth fashion, its emergence and features cannot leave you indifferent.
What is meant by youth today
It should be known that youth fashion has not always existed. In the depths of modern civilization, young people emerged as a special social phenomenon with its own specific culture, to which fashion belongs. “How?” you ask. – Weren’t there youth in the old days?” In a biological sense, of course there was. However, the youth of our ancestors ended very early. Having passed “home universities”, a young man or a girl, who reached the age of marriage, and it varied in different nations between 11 and 16 years, passed into the category of adults. Young people started to work early. Besides, their life expectancy was much shorter than that of modern people. Therefore, “old age” came earlier. Eugene Onegin, disappointed in a long and aimless life, was 26 years old. And Tatiana’s husband, the general, “a fighter with a gray head,” whose prototype was Sergei Volkonsky, who married Maria Rayevskaya, was not even forty. In the village, if a girl does not marry before 20, it was considered an old woman, a woman who has lived to forty years was called an old woman.
This was the case in the last century. In our century, there is a revision of the very concept of youth. First of all, acceleration has puzzled. Boys and girls of thirteen or fourteen years of age have grown considerably in comparison with their peers of the last century and the beginning of this century. A problem arose: how to relate to them, outwardly grown up, already with moustaches or with rather opulent busts, but internally not at all ready for an independent life.
Also, people who had been considered middle-aged began to be counted as young people. Medical advances, increased life expectancy, improved comfort at all social levels and many other factors have pushed back the boundary of physical ageing in the most economically developed countries. People in their thirties and over thirty began to feel full of strength and energy. The famous Balzac age of 30 for the modern woman is not the end of her blossoming, but even the opposite. Try telling her about her age. In addition, a woman is as old as she looks and as old as she feels. The period of youth in our time lasts up to twenty years, and youth – up to forty. And not so long ago there was a medical opinion in the press that in the near future the age of youth will be increased to thirty and that of youth to sixty!
On the other hand, the scientific and technological revolution has played its part. In particular, the increasingly complex technology required and requires an increasingly long period of study for most people. As a result, young people were increasingly dependent on family or the state to pay for their education. Not always, of course. In many countries, young people try to earn their own education.
In Finland, for example, it is customary to leave home at the end of school. Not because they quarrel with their parents, but because they start an independent life, taking care of their housing, food, work, studies, and so on. At the same time, young people get more leisure time, more opportunities for development. For entertainment, too.
The psychology of young people is different from that of adults. It has always been so: unsophisticated in life situations, romantic dreams, adolescent maximalism, impatience and cruelty… But in our age are added some more features: first, the desire for the right to their own life, free from the dictates of adults, and secondly, infantilism or childishness, confident that adults must (especially here, where the famous slogan “All the best for children!” has not yet been erased from memory). Add to this the uncertainty about the coming problems of a harsh life, when, in the case of economic hardship, young people were often unable to find work or were deprived of it. We used to think that this was only possible in the Wild West. But no. Now similar problems are arising in our country as well.
But young people do not consider themselves weak. Recognizing themselves as a new phenomenon in public life and a particular force, they have wished to establish themselves in this role and to express themselves. A specific youth culture emerged, with its own preferences in music, dance, and entertainment. And the outward expression was youth fashion.
The emergence of new clothes was a rebellion, and it was associated with a genuine revolt of the student unrest of the 60s in European countries and the United States. The young were protesting against the life imposed on them by society: against unsettledness, insecurity, and the hypocrisy and sanctimony of the older generations.
Disagreement with the rules and laws of life did not arise from nothing. The forerunners in the 1950s were the “angry young men” or “beatniks,” who after World War II, seeing no new human relations, sharply criticized the vices of society. Rejecting the prosperous bourgeois existence, these people did not accept the image of the respectable bourgeois – in a suit and tie, with a neat haircut. The “beatnik” was a sullen bearded man in wrinkled corduroy pants and a coarse sweater. This image became popular, young people liked it, and you can still see it today.
The subtleties of youth fashion
Youth fashion has not invented practically anything that did not exist before. It simply drew attention to those forms of clothing that went unnoticed by “high fashion”: working clothes (the same overalls), mountaineer gear, generally sportswear, military uniforms, folklore motifs. All this was simple, comfortable, inexpensive, but most importantly original!
The king of youth fashion was jeans, the black work clothes of the last century. Beginning in the sixties of our century there is a denim boom, a denim style emerges. It featured not only fabrics, but also sportiness, lots of pockets, “zippers”, rivets, metal buttons, embossed stitching and a rational cut. The industry, which was well aware of the future, went into this style literally every item of clothing and even shoes. Girls and women who naturally didn’t want to look old wore denim pants. Appeared fashion for an athletic trim figure. Skinny mannequin Twiggy, looking like a teenager and wearing a miniskirt, completed the image that women and even “high fashion,” which until that time had worked for the elegant woman of high society, began to be guided by.
In youth fashion from time to time new trends appear, becoming the outward expression of one or another ideological, so to speak, currents. So it was with hippies, punks, rockers, Generation X and others. It seems that in the future there will be new groups with their own distinctive signs. This has already happened: some have long hair, some have very short hair, some have flowers embroidered on their pants, others have skulls drawn on them. The new factions will come up with something just as cool.
And yet, according to many fashion experts, jeans and denim style will remain immortal. There will be changes in colors, fabrics, finishes… but! “Long live jeans!” will say more than one generation. The young wear and will continue to wear a suit that is simple and comfortable. It includes pants, jacket with zipper or buttons, knitted T-shirt with drawings or inscriptions, in the cold season – a sweater, a large soft bag, sports shoes, knitted ski cap or a cap like a jockey cap. This is the “algorithm,” so to speak. And there can be a lot of variations, especially in clothing for girls.
This clothing is more colorful; it can have a mixture of styles, when, for example, a romantic white blouse with embroidery is worn with jeans; and volumes – a tight-fitting T-shirt and a wide jacket, a big sweater and a narrow skirt; and long – a long coat, and under it – a mini dress or long spacious pants with a small jacket.
Mistakes are forgivable for young people. After all, this is the time of experimentation. Mischief is also excusable. It is also understandable that there is a search for his image and play different roles. Often the way they behave, speak, dress causes a desire to restrain teenagers in place. And not every adult can pass this test of tolerance. Moreover, OUR adults, especially the elderly, are accustomed to giving their own, most often negative, evaluation to everything and everything.
Ask me a question in comments and get advice! And also watch a very interesting video on the topic!
