40 Interesting and Fun Facts about Fashion

1. The word ‘jeans’ comes from the cotton
pants worn by “Genes,” the local term for
Genoan sailors.
2. The average American owns 7 pairs of blue
jeans.
3. Initially, both men and women wore togas in
Rome, but after the 2nd century BC, respectable
women wore stolas and prostitutes were required
to wear a toga.
4. The Ancient Greeks exercised naked. In
fact, this is where our word “gymnasium” comes
from; γυμνός (gymnos) means naked in Ancient
and Modern Greek.
5. The four major fashion capitals of the world
are New York, London, Milan, and Paris. Each
city holds fashion shows twice, in February and
September.
6. It was not acceptable for women to wear
shorts in public until World War 2.
7. The first fashion magazine was published in
Germany in 1586.
8. American households spend about 3.8% of
their income on clothing, which equates to about
$1,700 per person. By comparison, Americans
spent 11% of their income on clothes in 1950.
9. The price of clothing has decreased by 8.5%
since 1992, even when adjusted for inflation.
10. Over a lifetime, an American woman will
spend $125,000 on clothes. 3,000 items—271
pairs of shoes, 185 dresses, and 145 bags.
11. The five most common clothing materials
are linen, cotton, polyester, and rayon.
12. Cotton is the most widely used clothing
material, but it only became common in
mid-1800s, when Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made it
easy to separate the cotton fibers from the
seeds.
13. Evidence for the first clothes dates
somewhere between 100,000 to 500,000 years
ago.
14. Simple needles made out of animal bone
first appeared about 30,000 years ago.
15. The bikini was named after the island Bikini
Atoll, where the US military was testing its
bombs in World War 2. It was so named
because its creator, Louis Réard, belived the
revealing suit would create a shock like that of
the atomic bomb.
16. Women’s nominal clothing sizes have
increased in physical size over the years in a
phenomenon known as “vanity sizing.” A size 8
dress with a 32-inch bust in 1967 is now
considered a size 0 today.
17. 10-25% of Western women don’t wear a bra,
and 75-85% of women who do wear an incorrect
size.
18. Men’s shirts button on the right, and
women’s on the left.
19. Both the pencil skirt and the A-line skirt
were designed by Frenchman Christian Dior, who
is singlehandedly credited with inspiring 1950s
fashion.
20. Children dressed identically to adults until
the mid-1800s, when the concept of children’s
clothing took off.
21. What Americans consider “tuxedos” are
called “dinner jackets” in Great Britain, as the
word tuxedo itself refers to the white version of
the suit jacket in British English.
22. Dresses and skirts are commonly seen as
women’s clothing in the West, but in other parts
of the world, men wear them as frequently as
women do.
23. More than 2 billion t-shirts are sold each
year.
24. A person’s social rank and profession in the
Medieval Ages was represented by the color of
their clothing. The nobility wore red, peasants
wore brown and gray, and merchants, bankers,
and gentry wore green.
25. In Rome, purple clothing was exclusively
reserved for emperors and magistrates.
26. The earliest known shoes are sandals that
date back to approximately 7,000 B.C. However,
bone analysis of early humans suggest humans
began wearing shoes as early as 40,000 years
ago.
27. In Arab culture, shoes are considered dirty
because they touch the ground and cover the
lowest part of the body, the foot. It is
considered offensive to show one’s shoe sole,
and throwing your shoe at someone is an
extremely grave insult.
28. The difference between two nominal
clothing sizes is approximately ten to fifteen
pounds.
29. Standard women’s clothes are designed to
fit women between 5’4 and 5’8 tall.
30. One silk cocoon produces an average of 600
to 900 meters of silk filaments, but it takes four
to eight pieces to make one strand of silk
thread. In all, it takes about 30,000 silkworms to
produce 12 pounds of raw silk.
31. Eyeliner became popular after its discovery
in King Tutankhamun’s tomb in the 1920s.
32. It was once taboo to wear black unless one
was in mourning. Victorian widows were
expected to wear black mourning clothes for two
years after their husbands’ deaths.
33. Until around the beginning of the 20th
century, Chinese culture regarded small feet as
beautiful, and it was a common practice to bind
women’s feet from an early age to keep their
feet small. This practice was limited to the
wealthy, however, as the feet of women who
underwent this procedure were so deformed that
they had difficulty walking.
34. The fashion industry generates an average
revenue of $20 billion each year.
35. A Sneakerhead is someone who collects
shoes.
36. Nowadays, kimonos are worn only in very
formal occasions in Japan except by sumo
wrestlers, who are required to wear traditional
Japanese clothes when in public.
37. For all the hoopla made about Fashion
Week, the average fashion show is only about 10
minutes long.
38. Vintage clothing refers to clothing made
between 20 and 100 years ago, and retro refers
to recently made clothing that is designed to
resemble the style of another period.
39. It became more socially acceptable for
women to wear shorts during World War 2, which
introduced fabric rationing and forced women to
take on more masculine jobs.
40. The skirt is the second oldest piece of
clothing, outdated only by the loincloth.
Posted on June 10, 2013 by scratchhard
Image: Martin LaBar, flickr —
Portrait of the children of Philip III of Spain
by Bartolomé González y Serrano, 1612
—
Oldest leather shoe, National Geographic —
Chinese lotus shoes —
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