When she says "What was fashionable in one country doesn't mean it's fashionable in another" (Bad at paraphrasing) Did anyone else think of Henry the 8th poor Germanic wife. Or how Queen Elizabeth 1 made a law that every 'unfashionable (poor)' person must wear a wool hat on sundays...No I am the only one with Tudor's on the brain ok sorry lol.
Re: wearing vintage clothes. The other reason that it wasn't common in the past was because of the habit of doing over dresses, and having a valid way to sell your clothes on. Therefore there weren't a lot of vintage clothes sitting around waiting to be bought and worn.
"No matter what women do, there would always be someone criticizing it" ^ Oh look, things that seem to stay the same forever... Love Karolina's look for this video though! You've Got It Meme Mom!
Having grown up in the 90s, I kind of disagree with the idea that people nowadays dress "historically accurate" clothes from the recent decades. I can't speak for other decades, but *I cringe* when I see kids these days saying they are dressing "grunge style" while wearing torn skinny pants and a fitted top underneath a flannel shirt. In the 90s everybody wore baggy clothes: baggy jeans, lose-fitting shirts, baggy shorts, etc. I know because I was there. I hung out with a lot of punk and skateboarding crowd, and I can tell you, there was nothing thight fitting about that fashion. Everything was big and baggy!
I was one of those 1970s vintage loving freaks. My grandmother was appalled, esp with my choice of black - the color of old age and mourning. You are a Bomblette. Warmest regards Jennie
I just never try to be fashionable. I realised my favourite outfit is a singlet with a waistcoat. Is it fashionable? No. I look like a circus employee but I love it.
The novel that you talk about "The Age of Innocence", was adapted to film by Martin Scorsese. I know nothing about historical accuracy, but the movie is beautifully done. If you haven't seen it, I truly recommend it.
The beginning of the video would be very accurate for languages too. The high status people had to learn Greek and Latin, meanwhile the rest could stick to their maternal language, there was hella lot of linguistic variety in Europe back then but from the 19th century on it became more apparent that a nation should opt for one language only. And thus we lost all of the basic pillars of language, architecture, fashion, art... Pretty much the entire culture. Sorry for interrupting tho.
Powiedziałaś, że szczególnie w XIXw. istotne było przestrzeganie etykiety. Czy to znaczy, ze wcześniej nie aż tak? Przy okazji- czy sa jakieś interesujące lektury poruszające ten temat?
I'm going to share my little knowledge about this. I'm from a small kingdom part of Spanish kingdom. Until some decades ago, what people could were was ruled by Petrucios (old people of the village). It's a very populated area, with loads of water, so there are small villages all around. Until the war (Spanish civil war 1936-1939) only burguesy and nobles wore 'á la mode' fashion, villagers and peasants wore the same thing that kind of people wore in XVI century, only with very small details changing like some accesories. In fact, their earrings were the same style as they were in medieval times, and some even older to that. It's somehow the same silhouette and paesant fashion as in all Europe (skirts tied to the waist to help the weight and to occult the pregnancy, linen and hemp shirts, wool panties, some form of stays) what make the difference was the upper graments (on my parts they used to wear a capelette crossed in the front, on top of the 'justillo', while in other parts of Europe they wore a more 'external' vest on top of the vest).
and here we are in COVID times when there is no use for fashion at all, and the last video I watched was literally titled "I put on pants today la la la" (credit to Julie Nolke). Oh and God forbid we blend in, that would spread pandemic (what was that about the tiniest speck ruining someone's life?)
Regional fashions and trends have always been fascinating and the idea of keeping regional fashion seems to be making a resurgence like the rise in “street” fashion becoming more and more trendy
My fashion style is me. A melange of so many different styles. Some days I feel goth. Some days, bohemian. Some days, chic. Other days, girl next door. And sometimes sporty. Classique. All labels labels labels. Which have no use since I don't plan to put myself in a box.
Biba brought a deco revival in the 70s with 30s and sometimes 20 and 40s clothes and Pamela Des barres and music groupies were doing vintage styles inn the 60s because they were more feminine and luxurious and delicate than the styles of the time but they also maintained a modern siliuette
Regarding wearing old stuff: it was a general trend, that whatever had been fashionable for the elite had BECOME fashionable for the commons about a generation later. For example, take the traditional clothing of the ULTRA-orthodox Jews for the past 350~400 years (or so) - ORIGINALLY, it was the dressing of the Polish nobility, the Szlachta, in around 1,600 (or so?) I think - and, a few decades afterwards, once they had already pretty much abandoned it, perhaps? (not so sure about it...), the Jews at Poland-Lithuania took it and made it their own style.
The dean of the uni I went was an historian and made obligatory for all degrees to have two semesters of history, one for world history and one for the history of the degree a person is specializing in. This video just reminds me of him lol
"suddenly the teenagers were fashionable and everyone else felt left behind because they didn't belong to the secret fashion club" ... *painful memories Karolina?"*
Back then the drive to update your wardrobe and adhere to current fashion trends was mainly rooted in the desire to conform to civil society and secure your place in it. In those days your appearance suggested a great deal about your character and certainly played a role in where you'd end up in the world, especially as a female. We still see these cultural attitudes echoed in modern society today.
"No matter what women did, there would be someone criticising them." Everyone felt that. Shoutout to the boys who would go "does she think she's going on a fashion show?" when I dressed nice and the boys who would chastise me like "why do you always wear so short?" when I dressed like a slob. They're the sort of people whom if I found fallen into a ditch, I would not help them up 😌
This is super helpful for me as an author/illustrator! I definitely didn’t understand the different meaning of fashion and wrote inaccurate character choices based on that. Thanks for explaining this clearly!
I think the basic imperatives of fashion are still the same. It seems to me that the biggest modern difference is that clothes are so much cheaper to make, so there are just so many options. People used to have very few sets of clothes, so they had to select very conservatively. Now it’s like, whatever dude.
@Countries To Go I agree that we should pay the people who make our clothes a livable wage and decent working hours. But I think that there are huge amounts of automation for much of the construction of clothes. Almost no one is planting, picking, cleaning, dyeing, spinning, weaving, or embroidering cotton by hand. Processing of other natural fibers is similarly automated, and synthetic fibers are even easier. Much cutting is now done automatically, and some sewing. Certainly very little sewing is done by hand - it's all done with sewing machines. Same for knitting, although it's a hobby for some. Women used to spend much or their time on many of these tasks everywhere, and produce much less.
"I love fashion history!" - me laying on my couch in leggings and a giant sweatshirt knowing that I have worn "public" clothing less than 15 times since March. Thanks COVID.
I like that Karolina is a Fashionable Historian as well as a Fashion Historian. I like that these videos ask us to think critically about the past and remove our assumptions
4:00 Karolina talking about how poor people could be fashionable AND not spend money doing so by fixing and adjusting their old dresses is one of the many reasons why I don't like the new Little Women movie. The book has entire PASSAGES about them fixing their old dresses, about Meg adjusting her plain dress to wear it for parties she would go to but noooo let's get them a new dress for every day of the week no one will notice
I am a woman. I guess I don’t really wear vintage. Or do I? Since I wear men’s vintage clothing and it’s modern for women to wear masculine clothing? I’m a bit confused lmao.
And finally here's me after the vid: yeah I'm a fool, fascinating stuff as always. There's plenty of places where you can feel the echoes of that mentality though, the corporate culture of looking sameish to everyone else but not outdated comes to mind.
Another reason for older women not bothering with fashion, according to my 80+ year old grandma: "I'm so old, who is going to dare scold me for not being fashionable?" Her entire wardrobe is baggy blouses and long, baggy pants, 100% Chinese grandma who ran out of fucks to give in her 60s and hasn't recovered them since.
this is fascinating because similarly with furniture and architecture, "trends" didn't really become super popular until the middle class gained more ground and demanded status among the aristocrats. and also similarly - furniture/interior designs looked back on notable styles such as the renaissance, grecian, rococo, etc too when manufacturing and the industrial revolution (circa mid 19th century) came around, anywho, food for thought
I think the reason older women (like me, 60), have generally tended to wear outdated fashions is that we cling to the look of the era where we feel we were at our best. Like today, it’s almost impossible to get women, say 50 and up, to try any current cut of jeans or trousers, they insist on skin-tight skinnies and nothing else. Skinnies were in style for almost 20 years, when we were in our 30s-40s. Personally, I couldn’t wait to get into the new, looser styles, but they sell out overnight! I finally got a pair of girlfriends, then I went back to order a second wash an hour later, and every color and size were sold out. But, it’s younger women who are buying them, mostly.
What the 99% got to wear throughout most of European history: coarse-woven wool, brown or gray. This is even before linen undergarments were widely worn. If you bought a new dress, or “suit” of clothes for men every year, your local lord would raise your taxes or throw you in his dungeon, and your community would accuse you of getting the money for it through: witchcraft, prostitution, theft, etc. 2020 might suck, but a lot of things are better - dental anesthetics for one.
Karolina, or anyone in the know, I wonder if in past eras ‘wearing vintage’ was a thing. If you wanted to, for personal stylistic purposes, could a girl (with money, I suppose) in the 1890s, for example, choose to wear a dress from the 1860s? Or earlier? Such as how we now in the twenty first century wear vintage from past eras?
Some more detailed trivia about sumptuary laws throughout history: The earliest sumptuary laws known historically were from the 7th century BC in Greece. This code (written by Zaleucus, who was the Greek lawgiver of Epizephyrian Locri), had to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek: "A free-born woman may not be accompanied by more than one female slave, unless she is drunk; she may not leave the city during the night, unless she is planning to commit adultery; she may not wear gold jewelry or a garment with a purple border, unless she is a courtesan; and a husband may not wear a gold-studded ring or a cloak of Milesian fashion unless he is bent upon prostitution or adultery." In other words, you were not to violate these laws unless you were someone who would be considered reprehensible by the rest of society! In the early years of the Roman Empire, the "Sumptuariae Leges" forbade the wearing of silk, and the use of Tyrian Purple dye on your clothing, among other restrictions (One common misconception, when people mention that royal purple is outlawed except for the regents of a land, or in popular depictions in (relatively more) modern artwork depicting royalty, concerns what color is meant when people say "royal purple". It is frequently depicted as a true chromatic purple - ie, the same color as a violet (flower). In fact, Tyrian Purple was more a reddish purple shade. other sumptuary laws followed. Laws were passed that listed how many different colors could be worn by members of different social classes: peasants could wear one color, soldiers in the army could wear two colors, army officers could wear three colors, and members of the royal family could wear seven colors. It was not until the 1300s, when national governments had been established in France and England and city-states formed in Italy, that sumptuary laws appear in any number in the rest of Europe. In 1322 Florence forbade the wearing of silk and scarlet cloth by its citizens outside their houses. In 1366 Perugia banned the wearing of velvet, silk, and satin within its boundaries. A Statute Concerning Diet and Apparel was a sumptuary law introduced by the Parliament of England in 1363. It was enacted to was combat a growing trend among non-aristocracy, triggered by the sudden increase in personal wealth which followed the Black Death, the consolidation of property, because of the decrease in population and the rise in wages which liberated many formerly bonded labourers. In 1574 Queen Elizabeth I enforced some new Sumptuary Laws called the "Statutes of Apparel", which dictated what color and type of clothing individuals were allowed to own and wear - an easy and obvious way, of course, to identify rank and privilege. By the early 1500's France, Holland and Germany had begun growing dye plants as an industry - contributing to the "unnecessary foreign wares" Elizabeth objected to being imported to England, which was one of the reasons she gave for her Sumptuary Law. Some other words and terms she used included "excess", "superfluity", "extremity", "manifest decay", "vain devices", "unlawful acts", and "decay of the wealth of the realm". Gold, silver, scarlet, indigo, violet, black, pure white and bright yellow were only for the highest nobility, and they were allowed to wear silk, fur, velvet and lace. The lower classes could wear pale yellow, russet, orange, green, pale blue, pink, and off-white, and only in fabrics of broadcloth, linen, cotton and wool.
H... Hello, fair lady. I think your videos are amazing, have you ever talked about imperial Russia? I wonder if Deborah would be as bullied in Moscow as she is in Paris, but that´s the thing, I think the only idea of that time I have is the movie Anastasia (1997.... i apologize in advance lol)
I know there's tons of historical fiction content out there, but I really hope you're able to see The Queen's Gambit! Super lush and interesting 1950s-1960s fashion. And though my eye is not 100% trained it all seems fairly accurate and drawn directly from the period without completely falling into tropes. Plus! Repeated outfits! Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
I never really thought about how now days fashion is made by and for young people. A lot of things start to make more sense when you realize it. Great video!!!
Omfg she is polish but her accent is soooo good , like i am also from Poland but my accent is like RRRR ( if u are polish u know what i am talking about)
From what I've seen Marie Antoinette was the first fashion icon, we will never know her but she did do something if we still talk about her today Also I think givenchi? Did a fashion like inspired by her style so that adds about 30 years at least
