explain the idea of clothing in europe before 18 century
Answers
Dress of the eighteenth century is not without anachronisms and exoticisms of its own, but that singular, changing, revolutionizing century has become an icon in the history of fashion. The eighteenth century was a time not without memory. Its masques and remembrances of the seventeenth century were vivid, if occasionally comical. If we observe the traffic that colonialism and world markets built, we know that cultures of dress were converging and each culture was gaining from the observation, whether admitting it or not.
It is difficult to define not only the spirit of the century but also its dress. As fashion historian Aileen Ribeiro noted in Dress in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 1715–1789, most think immediately of Paris and the French court when they ponder that time, forgetting reverberations in England (
The elegant life of the eighteenth century was lived among mirrors that reflected the immediate, and some would say ephemeral, radiance of fashion. Those mirrors also constitute a metaphorical glass of history, glimpses, icons, and suggestions that persist through reflection and imagination into our own time.