On Historic Fashion: Crude and Cultured
I confess. I am one of those guys who delegates the matter of choosing clothing to his better half. That said, I think I still have something to say about what we consider to be fashionable and what is not, at least from a historical perspective.
Before the reign of Peter the Great of Russia (1682 - 1721), many in the Russian nobility and people wore robes that were more similar to the attire of the Mongol who ruled over the proto-Russian lands than their European counterparts. However, as the Mongol empire faded away and the power of Europe started to assert itself, Peter ordered the nobility and army to adopt a more European style, going as far as to instate a “beard tax” to encourage Russian men to keep a clean-shaven look akin to other Europeans. That is to say, fashion went from trying to imitate the old people in power(the Mongols) to the new ones (the Europeans).
A century later in Turkey, Sultan Mahmud II (1789 - 1839) ordered his army and later his public officials to start wearing a new head garment, known today as the Fez or the Tarboosh. The public was quick to adopt the new hat as a symbol of modernity and power. Fez factories popped up from Constantinople to North Africa and even to the Austro-Hungarian empire. A century later, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881 - 1938) wanted to modernize Turkey (again) he banned the Fez that became symbol of the East and its falling power, hoping to align Turkey more closely with the rising power of the West.
In China, the Qing dynasty (1644 to 1912) ordered the people to adopt the dynasty’s native Manchurian hairstyle known as the queue (shaved in the front and kept long and braided in the back). The order triggered resistance in Jiangnan by the ethnic Han Chinese people who saw the order to be contradictory to their Confucian tradition. One has to wonder if the Chinese would have adopted the queue on their own accord when they saw their new rulers wearing them. In the end, the queue became a symbol of the Qing dynasty, and to some extent, China in general; and continued to be worn until the Chinese revolution, at which point it disappeared virtually overnight as people saw it as a symbol of the fallen regime.
We all like to think that we have our own opinions on what we find fashionable, but history tells us that, more often than not, what we find appealing is more commonly associated with people we perceive as having power than what is purely visually appealing.
