Twentieth-century dress changed shape roughly once a decade. Here are ten of the moments that did it.
Fashion history is usually told through designers, but the changes that stuck were often technical or circumstantial. The corset went out partly because women went into wartime factories and partly because metal was needed elsewhere. Nylon stockings appeared in 1940 and vanished almost at once into parachute production. The zip took decades to move from boots into clothing because manufacturers did not trust it. What designers did was give those shifts a shape. Chanel took a knitted fabric previously used for underwear and made daywear from it. Quant put the hem above the knee. Westwood turned the safety pin into a statement. This quiz moves through the century by silhouette, fastening and fabric rather than by label.
Every question in this quiz is listed below with its correct answer and the reasoning behind it. Play first if you would rather not see the answers — or read through as a study sheet.
Play it insteadAnswer: B. The tightly laced corset
Why: Wartime work and shortages of steel both told against it. Softer elasticated girdles and the brassiere took over the same job over the following decade.
Answer: A. A dropped waist and a straight, boyish line
Why: Hemlines reached the knee for the first time in Western dress. The shape suited the dances of the decade, which needed room at the leg.
Answer: D. Mary Quant
Why: She sold it from her King's Road shop, Bazaar. Andre Courreges in Paris was working towards a similar length at the same moment, and the credit has been argued over ever since.
Answer: C. Punk
Why: She and Malcolm McLaren ran a King's Road shop that dressed the Sex Pistols. She spent much of her later career on tailoring drawn from seventeenth and eighteenth-century cutting.
Answer: B. Yves Saint Laurent
Why: The collection appeared in 1965. The following year he put women into a dinner jacket, Le Smoking, which caused more argument than the dresses had.
Answer: A. A long draped jacket with very wide shoulders and high tapered trousers
Why: It used a great deal of cloth at a time of wartime rationing, which made wearing one a political act. In the United States it was worn most visibly by young Mexican American and African American men.
Answer: D. The zip
Why: Gideon Sundback's design made the interlocking teeth reliable enough to trust. Clothing makers were slow to take it up, and it only reached men's trousers in the 1930s.
Answer: C. The 1940s
Why: DuPont put them on sale in 1940 and wartime demand for parachute fabric cut off supply almost immediately. Until then silk had been the only fine alternative.
Answer: B. Officers' rainwear in the First World War
Why: Burberry and Aquascutum both supplied versions to the British army. The shoulder straps and metal D-rings are leftovers from military fittings that no longer carry anything.
Answer: A. Jersey, until then used mainly for underwear
Why: Jersey was cheap and available in wartime, and it moved with the body instead of constraining it. The relaxed line it allowed became the basis of her whole reputation.
A Germanic language wearing a French coat and carrying a Latin dictionary. Why English spelling is a mess with reasons.
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