Why Did Europe become fashionable?

According to Wiki and a few other sources I have read, Europeans were fairly unique in developing fashion in the 1200s or so. Prior to that date, clothing just didn't change much and was mostly functional. Certainly there were different visual designs in various cultures but the actual articles didn't change shape often. Moreover, other societies viewed the constant changes in European fashion as indicating European cultural instability and viewed that as a weakness.

So I ask: Why did other societies not develop fashion in the way Europe did, or conversely, why did Europe develop fashion? How would it have gone otherwise?

Or are my sources bunk?
 
It's certtainly an extreme simplification. Faddish appearances of certain garments, fabrics and cuts have been a feature of wealthy and urban societies since at the very least Ancient Greece. The Tang dynasty's love for all things Central Asian argues against it being a specifically European thing. Nonehteless, Europe developed a very specific style of being fashionable, one that depended on creating innovative designs and commercially distributing them in very brief intervals. That doesn't really start untzil the seventeenth century, and it hasn't stopped since. That, I suspect, is where the real birth of 'fashion' lies. It's a logical outgrowth of earlier phenomena, but different enough to be considered sui generis. A Chinese lady in Fujian might want to know what the fashionable set in Beijing were wearing, but she very likely wouldn't be presented with prints or puppets of this year's styles by her tailor the way her contemporary in Glasgow or Hannover would with the latest Paris models in 1750.

My guess: a different sense of time as a marketable and manageable thing. Fashion up to then depended on accidental creativity. Someone invents or imports something and it catches on. After the European time sense comes into it, fashion requires innovation on schedule. People will consider something out of fashion not because it has been replaced, but because it's 'last year'.
 
Well it's really a case of Europe just did it first, Human's by our nature like to be individualistic, to stand-out, so when a point is reached that we can 'customize' things, especially as important as the things we wear all the time we're going to.

It probably did help that unlike the other major centers of population Europe was disunited and full of different cultures, thus making changes in and the development of different fashions easier.
 
It must have a lot to do with rising wealth and trade contact. Europeans by the Renaissance were wealthier and more cosmopolitan than ever before. The old money in any society resisted change, so the driving force is likely the new money.

Fashion today is mostly a social economic statement. I expect it was so centuries earlier as well. When you have rapid increase of wealth sustained over a long period of time there's going to be a new rising middle class who wants to flaunt their wealth and disassociate themselves from their peasant forefathers. It might not be important if you lived in the country where everyone knew your name, where you came from, how much land you had. But in a relatively anonymous urban environment fashion became a calling card for the nouveau riche.

The exceptional variety of traditional costumes available across the Mediterranean provided fashion influences to draw on when growing trade "shrunk" the region. Exotic fashion may be a signal that you are plugged in to this new economy.
 
It must have a lot to do with rising wealth and trade contact. Europeans by the Renaissance were wealthier and more cosmopolitan than ever before. The old money in any society resisted change, so the driving force is likely the new money.

Fashion today is mostly a social economic statement. I expect it was so centuries earlier as well. When you have rapid increase of wealth sustained over a long period of time there's going to be a new rising middle class who wants to flaunt their wealth and disassociate themselves from their peasant forefathers. It might not be important if you lived in the country where everyone knew your name, where you came from, how much land you had. But in a relatively anonymous urban environment fashion became a calling card for the nouveau riche.

The exceptional variety of traditional costumes available across the Mediterranean provided fashion influences to draw on when growing trade "shrunk" the region. Exotic fashion may be a signal that you are plugged in to this new economy.

I agree, before then societies simply didn't have the spare manpower to waste on fashion. People were just too busy farming (mainly). You needed someone other than nobles and royalty to have some decent money to spend as there never were enough of them to sell many radically new designs to.
 
It also helps when European states conquered most of the planet.

Fashion was already established by that point though.

Actualy, controlling as much territory as they did, I think may have done the opposite, instead of adopting things viewed as 'exotic' from prolong contact with separate societies, they got used to them before they could be adopted to a large scale.
 
I am no fashion expert, but my mother once mentioned that after women started to make form-fitting clothes for themselves (as opposed to clothes which basically were like sacks), the medieval courtly love really started to take off. Hmmm...
 

Redbeard

Banned
I think all societies/cultures had had fashion of some degree, in some the change in fashion, and everything else, just took extremely long time.

Europe stood out as until then unseen dynamics started in the middle ages, accelerated in the renaissance and ever since. Not just in fashion but pretty much everything. If you want a concentrated example of how it works, go to China. Under Mao and earlier the culture etc. might have been refined and complicated, but certainly not that dynamic - which was quite evident in fashion - or lack of it. Then huge economical forces were set free and all kinds of dynamics started to accelerate, incl. fashion. You of course couldn't imagine Chinese yuppies doing what yuppies do dressed in Mao dress, but it wouldn't be of any help to have the central planning ministry degree what fashion was to be this year.

IMHO fashion doesn't drive anything in itself but fashion industry, but you can't imagine a dynamic society without a dynamic concept of what to wear and how (but I hope dynamics aren't destoyed by me and a few others generally being a year or two behind :) )

Regards

Steffen Redbeard
 
There is a recent book,
The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafes, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour,

that describes the phenomenon. Basically, the author suggests that it developed due to Louis XIV.
 
That, I suspect, is where the real birth of 'fashion' lies. It's a logical outgrowth of earlier phenomena, but different enough to be considered sui generis. A Chinese lady in Fujian might want to know what the fashionable set in Beijing were wearing, but she very likely wouldn't be presented with prints or puppets of this year's styles by her tailor the way her contemporary in Glasgow or Hannover would with the latest Paris models in 1750.

Gah, now I wish I had my copy of Pomeranz's The Great Divergence. But basically, fashion was picking up in the Late Ming Era; the Qing cracked down on it, in part by enforcing new sumptuary laws, but it's unclear how much that was responsible.
 
Fashion was already established by that point though.

Actualy, controlling as much territory as they did, I think may have done the opposite, instead of adopting things viewed as 'exotic' from prolong contact with separate societies, they got used to them before they could be adopted to a large scale.

I have to disagree. It did help, in generating more wealth, thus increasing the ability to specialize and spend time on fashion; which only spread due to Europe's increasingly better standard of living. Colonial empires also helped assert the dominance of European style of clothing, over indigenous areas-whether through conquest, as in Africa or the America's case of forcing one's culture on others; or take Japan, who adopted European dress to appear more advanced and equal to the dominant powers of the planet, at the time.
 
It is an expression of wealth- conspicuous consumption, if you will. Of course, I would argue about Europe being the first to change styles- I think its just where it happened to become a snowball, as Europe's wealth only increased.

I recall that one of the pieces of evidence used to argue that Ancient Harappa was a more egalitarian society than most early agricultural societies was both the lack of social division in clothing and the lack of changing trends in clothing- whereas the peoples of the Fertile Crescent showed a great variety. That shows something similar- and indicates that changes in clothing styles are seen as an example of affluence among ruling elites.

There may be some cultural trends among non-Europeans to consider- the humility in dress of Islam and the white robes of the believer, for example. But mostly, it was because Europe simply ended up with a great deal of the wealth.
 
According to Wiki and a few other sources I have read, Europeans were fairly unique in developing fashion in the 1200s or so. Prior to that date, clothing just didn't change much and was mostly functional. Certainly there were different visual designs in various cultures but the actual articles didn't change shape often. Moreover, other societies viewed the constant changes in European fashion as indicating European cultural instability and viewed that as a weakness.

So I ask: Why did other societies not develop fashion in the way Europe did, or conversely, why did Europe develop fashion? How would it have gone otherwise?

Or are my sources bunk?

Wikipedia is totally wrong. The reason why Europe developed fashion is because Europeans only know what happened in Europe, and everyone else looks the same to them.

Of course there's been fashion everywhere else - including in Europe. If you look at how a Roman dressed from 100 BC to 100 AD, you might think it looks the same, but a Roman would see a huge difference. Likewise, 1,000 years from now people will look at photos of us and think people in 1900 were dressing exactly the same as we do now - but the difference is obvious to us because we're in tune with the minute changes to fashion, which look larger to us now.
 
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