Fashion & Style

Fashion is dismissed as frivolous more often than any other applied art, which tends to obscure how much money, labour and history sits behind it. This category covers the designers whose decisions still shape what hangs in ordinary wardrobes, the fabrics and where they come from, and the cities that turned clothing into a global industry. It includes the vocabulary too, since a good deal of it is untranslated French. The explanations give the context behind each innovation, which is usually a practical change in how people lived rather than a purely aesthetic one.