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Fashion
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Introduction
1500-2000
The Evolution of colour in fashion and dress is briefly documented here in relation to what might be termed Cavalier versus Puritan tendencies. These are manifested, respectively, by the successive adoption and rejection of colour in fashion which can be observed to have occurred periodically over the last five centuries.
The author is influenced in the selection of these terms by the following quotation from R.H. Knapp (quoted in Deborah Sharpe (1975), The Psychology of Color and Design, Totowa, N.J.):
The Puritans, imbued with very strong achievement motivation eschewed all but the sombrest of dress and ornament, imposing fines for the wearing of bright colors, and cultivated unconditional austerity in dress and décor. They stand in dramatic contrast to the Cavaliers, with their feudal and chivalric traditions of ascribed status, colorful dress, and fondness for indulgent living.
Such an apparent polarity might alternatively be allotted such terms as ‘classical’ versus ‘romantic’, respectively, or ‘rational’ versus ‘empirical’.
A time-line might has been constructed as follows:
| Typically 'Puritan' generations |
Typically 'Cavalier' generations |
| New Puritanism c.1985 - 2015 |
Late Modernism c. 1955 - 1985 |
| Modern Classicism c. 1915 - 1955 |
Early Modernism c. 1885 - 1915 |
| Mid-Victorian c. 1845 - 1885 |
Romanticism c. 1815 - 1845 |
| Neo-Classicism c.1775 - 1815 |
Late Baroque c. 1710 - 1775 |
| Baroque Classicism c. 1650 - 1710 |
Early Baroque c. 1610 - 1650 |
| Counter-Reformation c. 1560 - 1610 |
Reformation c. 1520 - 1560 |
| General Tendencies: |
General Tendencies: |
| • Relative 'form-dominance' |
• Relative 'colour-dominance' |
| • Relative objectivity |
• Relative subjectivity |
| • Emphasis on intellect |
• Emphasis on emotion |
| • Emphasis on the conceptual |
• Emphasis on the perceptual |
| • Observation of external fact |
• Introspection and imagination |
| • Reverence for past |
• Experience of the present |
| • Adherence to dogma |
• Toelerance to liberalism |
| • Theory preceding practice |
• Practice preceding theory |
| • Geometrical form predominates |
• Organic form predominates |
The period from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s witnessed a swing from the relative liberalism of what might be termed the Late Modern period to various forms of restrictive authority or fundamentalism. In terms of colour fashions, an appetite for bright colours (generally popular throughout the 1970s) was by the 1990s replaced by uncompromising black, grey and white.
When the fad for punk dress emerged out of the minority rocker styles of the 1960s, the severity of its eccentrically cropped skin-head styles, combined with black leather-wear and body-piercing, appeared in uneasy contrast to the long-haired, colour-loving, flower-power dress of the hippy.
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Fig.1 |
Walk down almost any street in the late-1990s, and the predominant colour worn was black. The chief colour of almost all male and female clothing displayed for sale in store windows, and glossy magazines, is black. Grey has been popular also (since the mid-1980s), together with denim-blue jeans or else deep blue for formal gowns, occasionally with beige or deeper browns. Bright colours (where permitted to appear at all) are subordinated and usually confined to accessories. Padded shoulders (reintroduced in the 1990s) became a symbol of executive power-dressing, with skirts less commonly worn by women than trousers, pants or jeans. |
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In social terms, the New Puritanism in dress has gone hand in hand with the widespread adoption (or enforcement) of religious fundamentalism, from Morocco east to Pakistan, and by Coalition, Reform and Evangelist groups elsewhere. Add to this the typical obsessions of the zealot — political correctness, self-righteousness, witch-hunts and zero tolerance — and the contemporary social climate (and its fashions, as will be seen) has parallels in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century, and in the final decades of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Prominent contemporary designers include Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948), Donna Karan (b. 1948), Claude Montana (b. 1949), Bruce Oldfield (b. 1950), Christian Lacroix (b. 1951), Jean-Paul Gaultier (b. 1952), Franco Moschino (b. 1954), Stephen Jones (b. 1957), Stevie Stewart (b. 1958), David Hollah (b. 1958), Jasper Conran (b. 1959) and John Galliano (b. 1960).
RO
Copyright © 2005 Roy Osborne. All Rights Reserved. |
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