Fashion is a fascinating study for anyone interested in culture. For centuries individuals or societies have used clothes and other body adornment as a form of nonverbal communication to indicate occupation, rank, gender, sexual availability, locality, class, wealth. What you wear, how you wear it, and why you wear it, depends on time and place. The twentieth century, which is characterized by industrialization and urbanization, brought the rise of the women's movements for rights, winning the vote, taking the higher positions in society by women, and the transformation in the daily life of females, in general. In fact, the last century world events, such as growing of civilization, world wars, the rapidly rise of feminine equal rights caused the image of women to change profoundly.
The most clearly the differences in standards of the esthetic ideal of a body are seen in the changes of the ideal of female's beauty, from the muscular, toned, and womanly forms of 1890's to the slim, tall, thin lines preferred today. Therefore, clothes stress or hide certain parts of the body for achieving of silhouette close to the ideal of a particular time. For example, the corset was used to make woman's waist thinner in the Victorian era, when the ideal was S-shape figure. Only in the XX century mankind remembered natural lines of a woman's body and stopped the deformation of the trunk by the corset, which reflected the notion that true women were men's complementary opposites.
Technical developments (the telephone, electric lights) in the 1900's that were affecting everyday life introduced a more practical style of dress, even if slowly at first. In the fashion of the age everything was much looser and more graceful. The beautiful lady of that time had a lot of clothes for different times of the day. She was wearing shirtwaist dresses, or cotton blouse with a heavier, dark skirt, and a huge hat that looked enormous with the opulent coiffure.
