Top 5 World Affairs x Fashion Moments: May 9, 2024

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Series #3: Top 5 World Affairs x Fashion Moments

What I love about fashion is how adaptable it is. The clothes we wear respond really quickly to major world happenings, which other forms of art, such as paintings and architecture find difficult.

This means that for the average person, what we put on our body is usually reflecting something that’s happening thousands of miles away - and it’s not really hard to read.

Today’s pick: Regency Fashion x the French Revolution

At this point, countless Jane Austen adaptations, Bridgerton, and The Courtship have familiarized us with Regency fashions: high waistlines, simple dresses, and light fabrics.

This clothing that we see in the Regency period (1795-1837) was a quick response to turbulent times across the continent.

POP QUIZ: what was the major European crisis taking place around 1795?

Yep, you got it right! The French Revolution.

Most of us associate the year 1789 with the French Revolution - but that was just the beginning. The Reign of Terror quickly followed, with any rich-looking person immediately sent off to the guillotine to have their head chopped off.

Problem #1: European fashion in the 1780s looked like, well, this:

Kinda hard to pretend to be poor (and save your neck) when your clothes have corsets, panniers, bows, and are made of silk.

Problem #2: The other countries were getting ideas

With the Americans winning their revolution in 1783, and the French on a rampage, the lower classes across Europe started getting ideas - you know, ideas on owning land, being able to vote, those unreasonable things.

With the rise of banking and trade, the middle class was growing too. Kings and aristocrats started biting their nails about similar revolutions taking place in their own countries.

SOLUTION: Change the optics

As a way to respond to both problems, fashions changed. It became gauche to wear anything too rich, too unwieldy, too frou-frou. New fashions needed to show you could move around, and that you weren’t restricted by your clothes.

Down with corsets and wide skirts! In with lightweight fabrics and simple lines.

Suddenly, the blatant appearance gaps between the rich and poor decreased - all an effort to have the poor think, “hey, maybe they’re not so different from us, maybe we don’t need those rights so much.”

It’s not an uncommon tactic: we’ll see this trend repeat throughout history. And we’ve seen it in our own lifetimes - stay tuned to know more!

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xoxo,

Simran