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Clothing During The Nineteenth Century

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Clothing is fibre and textile material worn to the body. Various types of clothing such as shirt, trousers, dress, pants, skirt and many others have been used since in the early days of human existence. Depending on the body type, social and cultural background, geographic considerations and gender, the way the clothes were worn are varies. Wearing clothes are mostly restricted to all human beings in almost all societies. Men and women wear clothes with many purposes including covering private parts of the body, to serve as layers of protection, to enhance safety while endeavouring every day’s activities and to improve the physical appearance. For centuries, both men and women were devoting efforts in making oneself look attractive and admirable through a single term called …show more content…

1634) and Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson, (1633) show us a brief imagery of how the aristocratic dress was defined during the sixteenth century. At that time, men and women both claimed their right in practicing beauty and decorations, thus, created many similarities of characteristic between their dresses. For example, Guise’s painting shows him wearing a profusion of lace, bright coloured fabrics, and a brimmed hat that seemed to be the same worn by Queen Maria and Sir Jeffrey in the other painting. At the end of the eighteenth century, there occurred an event where men started to abandon his right to be beautiful and completely leave more elaborate and more varied forms of ornamentations to the use of women. This event is as what Flugel called in his article, The Psychology of Clothes, (2000) as the Great Masculine Renunciation where men wears only to be useful and correctly attired while women still have the freedom in wearing any kind of dresses they desire, thus created the term simplicity and uniformity in the history of male fashion. Any interest with dress, henceforth, became a feminine trait and considered

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