Fashion

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Fashion takes its name from the Latin word facere, meaning "to make." That single verb hides a vast machinery: the making, mixing, and wearing of outfits that broadcast who we are. A grass stain on a pair of Gucci jeans can read as filth to one eye and as purity, freshness, and summer to another. Fashion scholar Susan B. Kaiser argues that everyone is "forced to appear," unmediated, before others. We are judged by our color, our material, our silhouette, and even whether a garment has been washed, folded, or mended. So how did a word for elegance migrate from a 13th-century French poem into a globe-spanning industry with three rival capitals? Why did Europeans once insist that China and Persia had no fashion at all? And what happens when a runway show becomes a feminist protest march, or a children's hoodie becomes a scandal?

• 2. The Trouble With Definitions

  ›

  The French word mode, meaning "fashion," dates as far back as 1482, while the English word for something "in style" reaches back only to the 16th century. Earlier still, in 12th and 13th century Old French, the idea of elegance appears in aristocratic talk of beauty and refinement. A 13th-century poem by Guillaume de Lorris coined cointerie, the art of making oneself attractive through grooming and dress, advising men that "handsome clothes and handsome accessories improve a man a great deal."

  Fashion connotes difference, as in "the new fashions of the season," yet it can also connote sameness, as when we speak of "the fashions of the 1960s." It can mean the latest trend or the return of an older one. The people who decide what counts as fashionable are often an insular, wealthy aesthetic elite, fashion houses and haute couturiers. Yet the looks they sell are frequently pulled from subcultures and social groups who are excluded from making that distinction themselves.

  The vocabulary multiplies. A trend is ephemeral, often lasting shorter than a season and marked by visual extremes. Style endures across many seasons and ties to cultural movements, as with Baroque and Rococo. Clothing, by contrast, is the bare material garment, stripped of social meaning, while costume has come to mean fancy dress. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu reduced the whole tangle to a phrase: fashion is "the latest difference."

• 3. Kairos And The Couture House

  ›

  Philosopher Giorgio Agamben drew a line between two Ancient Greek ideas of time. He linked fashion to kairos, "the right, critical, or opportune moment," and clothing to chronos, the personification of sequential time. Fashion, in his reading, is the system that activates dress as a social signifier in a particular instant.

  In France, the label haute couture is not a boast but a legal status, reserved for members of the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris. It is aspirational work, inspired by art and culture, and in most cases held for the economic elite. New York answers with its own Couture Fashion Week, which strives for a more equitable and inclusive mission.

  Philosophers have long quarreled over whether any of this matters. Immanuel Kant dismissed fashion as having "nothing to do with genuine judgements of taste," calling it a case of "unreflected and 'blind' imitation." Georg Simmel saw the opposite, a force that "helped overcome the distance between an individual and his society." The American sociologist Diana Crane placed fashion at the heart of personal and group identity, a way to express cultural, social, and political affiliations. Those affiliations would soon become weapons in a much older argument about who, exactly, gets to have fashion at all.

• 4. The Myth Of The Changeless Orient

  ›

  In 1609, the secretary of the Japanese shogun bragged inaccurately to a Spanish visitor that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years. Early Western travelers to India, Persia, Turkey, and China repeated the same claim, that fashion there simply did not move. The evidence says otherwise. Ming China shows rapidly changing styles, governed by strong sumptuary laws tied to a strict social hierarchy and ritual system.

  In imperial China, dress was expected to match a person's gender, social status, and occupation. Confucian scholars often read changing fashion as a symptom of social disorder, the fruit of rapid commercialization. Fast-shifting clothing even earned its own vocabulary, recorded in ancient texts as shiyang, "contemporary-styles," linked to fuyao, "outrageous dress," a term that carried a sour connotation. Japan shows a parallel arc across the Edo period, from 1603 to 1867, as trends moved from flashy, expensive displays of wealth toward subdued and subverted ones.

  The insistence that the East had no fashion traveled alongside Orientalism and the imperial ambitions that peaked in the 19th century. Europeans framed China in binary opposition to themselves, describing it as static, backward, and "lacking in fashion," the Other against which the West measured its own progress. One European writer admitted his contempt plainly: "I confess that the unchanging fashions of the Turks and other Eastern peoples do not attract me. It seems that their fashions tend to preserve their stupid despotism."

• 5. A Long History Beyond Europe

  ›

  In eighth-century Moorish Spain, the musician Ziryab carried sophisticated clothing styles to Cordoba, drawn from the seasonal and daily fashions of his native Baghdad and reshaped by his own inspiration. Changes in clothing tended to cluster around moments of economic or social upheaval, as in ancient Rome and the medieval Caliphate, then settle into long stretches of stillness. In the 11th-century Middle East, the arrival of the Turks introduced styles from Central Asia and the Far East.

  West Africa carries its own long fashion history. As early as the 16th century, cloth served as currency in trade with the Portuguese and Dutch. Locally produced fabric and cheaper European imports were assembled into new styles to suit a growing elite class of West Africans and the resident gold and slave traders. The Oyo Empire and the lands of the Igbo people held an exceptionally strong tradition of weaving.

  China's own record refuses the myth of stillness. Tang Dynasty women, between 618 and 907, wore extravagant attire to display prosperity. Mongol men of the Yuan Dynasty, from 1279 to 1368, favored loose robes, while horsemen cut theirs shorter and added trousers and boots for the saddle. The Qing leaders, ruling from 1644 to 1911, kept Manchu dress and devised new garments for officials. Foot binding, introduced in the 10th century, was set aside, yet women were expected to wear heels that forced a ladylike walk.

• 6. The Western Acceleration

  ›

  The buttocks, oddly, mark the turning point. Historians including James Laver and Fernand Braudel date the start of Western fashion to the middle of the 14th century, and its first dramatic shift was a sudden shortening of the male over-garment from calf-length to barely covering the buttocks, sometimes padded at the chest. That move created the distinctive Western outline of a tailored top over leggings or trousers.

  In the following century the pace quickened so sharply that art historians can date 15th-century images by their clothing to within five years. National styles fragmented and multiplied. Ten 16th-century portraits of German or Italian gentlemen might show ten entirely different hats, a contrast Albrecht Durer captured in his comparison of Nuremberg and Venetian dress. The "Spanish style" of the late 16th century pulled Europe's upper classes back toward a shared look, and after a mid-17th-century struggle, French styles took the lead from Ancien Regime France.

  Men's fashions drew heavily on military models, with new cuts like the "Steinkirk" cravat noted by gentleman officers in the theaters of European war. The pace picked up again in the 1780s as French engravings spread the latest Paris styles. By 1800, all Western Europeans believed they dressed alike, and local variation became first a mark of provincial culture, then a badge of the conservative peasant. The history of fashion design itself is dated to 1858, when the English-born Charles Frederick Worth opened the first authentic haute couture house in Paris.

• 7. From Custom-Made To Mass Market

  ›

  Before the mid-19th century, nearly all clothing was custom-made, handmade for individuals at home or ordered from dressmakers and tailors. Tailoring had been controlled since medieval times by tailors' guilds, but industrialism broke their grip. By the early 20th century, the sewing machine, global trade, the factory system, and the spread of department stores pushed clothing into mass production, sold in standard sizes at fixed prices.

  The modern industry is built on four levels: the production of raw materials such as fiber, textiles, leather, and fur; the production of fashion goods by designers, manufacturers, and contractors; retail sales; and advertising and promotion. A single garment can cross the planet before it is worn. An American company might source fabric in China, manufacture in Vietnam, finish in Italy, and ship to a warehouse in the United States for international distribution.

  Three cities now sit at the summit, New York City's Manhattan, Paris, and Milan, each home to the most significant fashion companies. The annual Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is widely considered the world's apex display of fashion's power, wealth, and influence. Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles rank as second-tier centers. One study found that sheer proximity to Manhattan's Garment District mattered for taking part in the American fashion ecosystem, even as the trade migrates online and the rise of artificial intelligence loosens the grip of any single city.

• 8. Politics On The Runway

  ›

  First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy turned dressing into statecraft in the early 1960s, wearing Chanel suits, structural Givenchy shift dresses, and soft-colored Cassini coats with large buttons. Political figures have shaped fashion at least since the French king Louis XIV, whose centralized court produced an identifiable style that took his name. The looks of the French court spread through prints from the 16th century onward.

  Upheaval reaches the body quickly. In the 1960s a robust U.S. economy, a rising divorce rate, and the newly approved birth control pill fed a generational rebellion, set against the civil rights movement and the women's liberation movement. The leg-baring mini-skirt arrived in 1964 and became a white-hot trend, followed by micro-minis, trumpet sleeves, fluorescent colors, and bell-bottom jeans. Protest over the Vietnam War pushed camouflage from the battlefield into streetwear, and it has vanished and resurfaced ever since, reappearing in 1990s high fashion through Valentino, Dior, and Dolce & Gabbana.

  Designers who once stayed out of politics now court it. Mara Hoffman invited the founders of the Women's March on Washington to open a show of utilitarian wear described as "Made for a modern warrior." Prabal Gurung sent out T-shirts reading "The Future is Female" and "Nevertheless She Persisted," with proceeds to the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and his own Shikshya Foundation Nepal. At the 76th Cannes Film Festival, Iranian model Mahlagha Jaberi wore a gown by Jila Saber with a halter neckline shaped like a noose and the words "Stop Executions," though security stopped her from showing it on the red carpet.