This lecture was about the way people use and used cloth and textile to reshape their body depending on the fashionable silhouettes of their epoch.
Waist: the waist has always been a big obsession, I feel. it is probably because it is the part of the body that if changed can make you look totally different. the manipulation of the waist dates from the ancient civilisations, the Greek goddess already used clothe to accentuate it. I the 1920's people use to paint over the negatives of the picture to appear with a thinner, slender waist.
In fashion history it is important to know the French designer
Paul Poiret who helped the women liberate from the corset; that was the beginning of the end of the extra thin waist.
Listening to the waist being reshapes to an unnatural look, Barbie come into my mind,
apparently the waist of the doll and her body proportions are unreal.
Men also had the pressure of a perfect body shape and they also use to reshape their waist.
Shoes: the shoes were also used to accentuate the body shape, the poulaines, men's shoes made them appear with extremely long feet.
Another masculine example of body exaggeration, is the zoot suit of the jazz singers and then every body, and xxxxl suits regardless of the man's size. Cab Calloway in a zoot suit
The shoulders: the shoulder pads of the 1980s, accentuated women's shoulder give a message of strength and masculinity, it was a the time women started to fight for their rights! funnily it is coming back not in an imposing way but a decorative one.
It is funny to notice that people that are thin want their body to look curvier and change their bum's shape and the people that are curvy want to look thinner and straighter by using underwear that suck the shape! The grass is always greener on the other side!
seminars notes:
The seminars are so interesting because we can just share our thoughts!
We talked about the morality of fashion today, of the image fashion give women and men of how we should look like, how influenced are we? I believe that we are extremely influenced by fashion trends, it is just everywhere and by being so it becomes natural to us, but without a lower impact on the way we want to be or look!
I personally think that I will never be happy with the way I look but by being able to say so I am suddenly much happier! as long as I am healthy and comfortable in my own skin, then I try not to care to much about the fashion trends that are thrown at us!
We also discussed about the respect of our body, in some cases "shaping the body" has come to an extreme; snake tongue, whole body tattooed and pierced or excessive plastic surgery... It is as if we are and will be eternally unsatisfied with our body, we need to improve upon nature!!!What happened?
And an obvious example is Michael Jackson, an the mystery behind his appearance, what went into his mind, how did he feel about himself, and how his change of colour has always been tabooed, never been deeply looked at!
