evolution of fashion: lower waists
Jun. 24th, 2006 07:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anotheranonI don't often shop, but went to Target today to pick up some contact lens solution and other sundries, and took a walk through the women's department. Saw something curious:
1920s style dropped waist dresses. In modern materials, of course, and only one style but it was still surprising to me - to the best of my modern costume knowledge, this style had legs only in the 1920s and maybe a VERY brief period in the early 1960s, and even then the waist wasn't quite as low as it had been ~40 years previously.
IMHO it's not an incredibly flattering look for most women (especially as modern aesthetics dictates that narrow hips are "in", and the horizontal line of a dropped waist tends to visually "widen" that area), so I'm wondering, how did we get here?
My own informal ponderings, based on nothing more than what I see people wearing in the streets:
1) First trend: low waisted jeans. Greeted with joy by some, horror by others, specifically because if you have anything but perfect abs, they're not all that flattering. Thus precipitating:
2) Shirts with longer hems to cover up less than ideal tummies when wearing said jeans. I started seeing these last year; in particular I ordered some t-shirts last fall that looked normal in the catalog but turned out to have MUCH longer hems than I'm used to. The eye adjusts to the new proportion and:
3) Someone decides to try the same thing with dresses, completely forgetting that this has been tried before (yes, some designers do know something about fashion history; I'm not convinced that ALL of them do, or that they all care).
And I suppose it's a cute dress, if you have the ideal 1920s measurements of 30-30-30 (it WAS in the junior's department, and might look good on a slim teenager). Perhaps more evidence that every shape will be fashionable/desirable at some point in history?
Anyway, those are my musings. If anyone else has insight into the progression of this unusual trend I'd love to hear it.
1920s style dropped waist dresses. In modern materials, of course, and only one style but it was still surprising to me - to the best of my modern costume knowledge, this style had legs only in the 1920s and maybe a VERY brief period in the early 1960s, and even then the waist wasn't quite as low as it had been ~40 years previously.
IMHO it's not an incredibly flattering look for most women (especially as modern aesthetics dictates that narrow hips are "in", and the horizontal line of a dropped waist tends to visually "widen" that area), so I'm wondering, how did we get here?
My own informal ponderings, based on nothing more than what I see people wearing in the streets:
1) First trend: low waisted jeans. Greeted with joy by some, horror by others, specifically because if you have anything but perfect abs, they're not all that flattering. Thus precipitating:
2) Shirts with longer hems to cover up less than ideal tummies when wearing said jeans. I started seeing these last year; in particular I ordered some t-shirts last fall that looked normal in the catalog but turned out to have MUCH longer hems than I'm used to. The eye adjusts to the new proportion and:
3) Someone decides to try the same thing with dresses, completely forgetting that this has been tried before (yes, some designers do know something about fashion history; I'm not convinced that ALL of them do, or that they all care).
And I suppose it's a cute dress, if you have the ideal 1920s measurements of 30-30-30 (it WAS in the junior's department, and might look good on a slim teenager). Perhaps more evidence that every shape will be fashionable/desirable at some point in history?
Anyway, those are my musings. If anyone else has insight into the progression of this unusual trend I'd love to hear it.
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no subject
Date: 2006-06-25 07:51 pm (UTC)