"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."
Days of Future Past
So, now that we have reached the end, we must go back to the beginning, and once again ask the question: Does sex influence fashion, or does fashion influence sex? The answer is a serpent eating its own tail.
Each succeeding generation of the 20th Century spawned idols, male and female, whose sense of style both defined and was, in turn, defined by the strictures of the contemporary culture in which they lived. However, whether they choose to embrace, embody and elevate current vogues, as in the case of a Jackie Kennedy, or like punk progenitors Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, hijack, harvest, and hatch fashion anew, the end result was that trends in sex and fashion were intrinsically linked to recycling cycles of boom and bust, bust and boom, war and peace, peace and war—with a healthy helping of emerging technology to oil the wheels of progress, regress, dearth and excess along the way.
Nothing new. It’s been going on since the history of recorded civilization.
In the B.C.E., got up in the finest glad rags of her day, Cleopatra was legend at bending men to her will, but back then, the world was a smaller place. (Imagine what the Queen of the Nile could have accomplished had she access to a Facebook page.) Though eons from the Internet, in the 1880s, a solitary woman was capable of a having a worldwide impact on fashion via the available media of her day: When legendary actress, mistress and seductress Lillie Langtry made a public appearance, not only could she transform a simple black frock into a fashion statement that spoke the language of love loud and clear, she could count on telegraphing her tastes from Piccadilly to Park Avenue.
At the turn of the 20th century, artists’ model Evelyn Nesbitt—a cunning mélange of naughty and innocent, and the inspiration for the legendary Gibson Girl—epitomized the luxury of her era. Her an anatomically incredible hourglass figure would one day be refracted to greater lengths of mathematical improbability by 1940s pin-up illustrators, such as Alberto Vargas; in the ’50s and ’60s with the debut of the Barbie Doll and Russ Meyers’ DDD-list film heroines, and more recently, in the person of über-Barbie Doll-cum-MILF, Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
On the flip side, the Roaring Twenties glorified gals who were built like boys, renowned for their loose morals (and all that jazz), but girls—and guys—of more mutable gender was also a recurring 20th Century theme. In the ’40s women started to put on their pants the same way that men did—one leg at a time. In the ’60s, style once again dictated that models must be wide-eyed and rail thin. In the ’70s and ’80s, sexual identities, morphed more than all the alter-egos Sacha Baron Cohen and an entire evil planet’s worth of Transformers combined. The ’90s saw heroin chic and the Hollywood Starlet Anorexia Brigade worshipped as high priestesses of fashion.
Each succeeding generation of the 20th Century spawned idols, male and female, whose sense of style both defined and was, in turn, defined by the strictures of the contemporary culture in which they lived. However, whether they choose to embrace, embody and elevate current vogues, as in the case of a Jackie Kennedy, or like punk progenitors Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, hijack, harvest, and hatch fashion anew, the end result was that trends in sex and fashion were intrinsically linked to recycling cycles of boom and bust, bust and boom, war and peace, peace and war—with a healthy helping of emerging technology to oil the wheels of progress, regress, dearth and excess along the way.
Nothing new. It’s been going on since the history of recorded civilization.
In the B.C.E., got up in the finest glad rags of her day, Cleopatra was legend at bending men to her will, but back then, the world was a smaller place. (Imagine what the Queen of the Nile could have accomplished had she access to a Facebook page.) Though eons from the Internet, in the 1880s, a solitary woman was capable of a having a worldwide impact on fashion via the available media of her day: When legendary actress, mistress and seductress Lillie Langtry made a public appearance, not only could she transform a simple black frock into a fashion statement that spoke the language of love loud and clear, she could count on telegraphing her tastes from Piccadilly to Park Avenue.
At the turn of the 20th century, artists’ model Evelyn Nesbitt—a cunning mélange of naughty and innocent, and the inspiration for the legendary Gibson Girl—epitomized the luxury of her era. Her an anatomically incredible hourglass figure would one day be refracted to greater lengths of mathematical improbability by 1940s pin-up illustrators, such as Alberto Vargas; in the ’50s and ’60s with the debut of the Barbie Doll and Russ Meyers’ DDD-list film heroines, and more recently, in the person of über-Barbie Doll-cum-MILF, Vice Presidential candidate, Sarah Palin.
On the flip side, the Roaring Twenties glorified gals who were built like boys, renowned for their loose morals (and all that jazz), but girls—and guys—of more mutable gender was also a recurring 20th Century theme. In the ’40s women started to put on their pants the same way that men did—one leg at a time. In the ’60s, style once again dictated that models must be wide-eyed and rail thin. In the ’70s and ’80s, sexual identities, morphed more than all the alter-egos Sacha Baron Cohen and an entire evil planet’s worth of Transformers combined. The ’90s saw heroin chic and the Hollywood Starlet Anorexia Brigade worshipped as high priestesses of fashion.
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