Fashion has a long and colorful history, and many of the types of garments we wear today can be found in ancient civilization. Shoes were worn in China about 7,000 years ago, and that leather boots were worn there at least 4,000 years ago.
However, an archaeologist by the name of Luther Cressman, excavated Fort Rock Cave, Oregon, in 1938, and discovered dozens of shoes under a layer of volcanic ash from an eruption of the Mt. Mazama volcano. These ancient American-made shoes are around 7500 years old.
But, the phrase “there’s nothing new under the sun” may be especially true when it comes to women’s undergarments. According to archaeologist Annika Larsson a 2008 excavation of Sweden’s oldest Viking settlement, Birka, has revealed that Viking women wore bras “designed to give lift and shape”. Larsson also believes that women gave fireside bra fashion shows for other women, beating Victoria’s Secret by about 1,000 years.
And if “burning the bra” became symbolic of liberation from a restrictive, “misogynistic” culture in the 1960s, Christian priests had done pretty much the same thing a millennium earlier. That’s right, after converting to Christianity, Viking women were banned from wearing bras, as Christian priests considered them to represent decadent “pagan” culture.
There’s also evidence to suggest that Viking men wore pants (or “trousers”), though there is no evidence that these have ever been burned or banned for ideological or religious reasons. However, pants were not popular until the sixteenth century. And it was during this time that this garment got the name ‘pants’, after the character, Pantalone, who appeared as a miserly old Venetian man in Italian improvisational theatre.
Of course, Christian priests and feminist Hippies are not the only people to see fashion as part of cultural revolution. Having long been admired for their sensibilities in fashion and styles, it’s interesting to note that the lower-class revolutionaries of the French Revolution (18th century) were called sans-culottes (meaning literally ‘without knee-breeches’; culottes or knee-breeches were fashionable, knee-length pants worn by the upper-classes). Lower-class revolutionaries, by contrast, wore cheaply-made long pants. However, the soft, red hat, known as the “liberty cap”, worn by the revolutionaries became the most popular symbol of the revolution, and appeared in countless prints and numerous sculptures.
In the last few decades, of course, pretty much every fashion has been part of the newest generation’s challenge to the conventions of society. Punk, which was partly inspired by British designer Vivienne Westwood, and partly by older forms of music and fashion – such as Rock ‘n’ Roll – promoted what it called “anarchy”. The punk style of clothing often incorporated rips (which became fashionable again later on for jeans), graffiti, and – placed with great caution – safety pins.
Still popular today, however, is the highly confrontational Gangsta style Hip Hop. The style of low-hanging, baggy pants worn by Hip-Hop devotees, originated in the prisons of Los Angeles, in which inmates were not allowed to wear belts. This way of wearing pants is now popular with Hip Hop fans across the globe.
As Michael Harper of Harper Arrington says, “fashion is a huge part of culture, and it’s constantly developing.”