Cultural Dress
Ruby Henderson
Ant 101
Professor Jonathan Sharpe
July 27, 2009
Throughout the ages, society’s idea of what is appropriate dress for a proper woman has evolved dramatically. What once would have been consider risqué or provocative is now the norm in other cultural societies. Although society moral may have not change, there is one thing that has not and will never change; women’s bodies come in all shapes and sizes. There are basic rules for dressing to suit each body type in every cultural society but the main one is to accentuate the positive. Every woman that has encountered western-style of dress has learned that accentuating the positive and minimizing the negative. Styles of dress are forms of artistic expression vary from one culture to another. Most styles of dress are fashioned in the image of preexisting forms. It is clear that women’s style of dress satisfy many similar psychological needs in male species. The beautiful woven fabrics impart a sense of mysterious, unseen power from veiled (Hijab) faces Muslim women to the Japanese women in the Kimono. Muslim and Japanese women dress are communication for expressing sentiments and emotions not easily expressed in simple everyday life.
Like all other parts of culture, language of dress is constantly undergoing change. These changes are often notice at first in cultural dialect, with English being the primary universal language now in the “full range of body language… (Miller 2007, pg.317) the cultural societies, blend in dress. On the contrary, dress language conforms to rules that produce differences within the respect to the standards of ones cultural society. It is obvious that every dress language is nothing but a transformed version of an earlier dress language base on ones cultural descent.
Fashion and the history of Japanese culture span from 4th century of the first tailored clothes with encounter of western clothing in 19th century. The Kimono...