I used to see the paisley design as a curled leaf or feather, without thinking about its history. Paisley fabric is “patterned with distinctive, ornate, teardrop- or feather-shaped figures, based on an Indian pine cone design”, according to the dictionary. Textile experts have called it a “drooping bud” or a “Kashmir cone”. It’s also been [more...]
In the late 1600s shawl was not yet an English word, though it was beginning to turn up in travellers’ descriptions of clothing they had seen in southern Asia. In the 1700s fine cashmere shawls from Kashmir and India arrived in Western Europe. At first they were not treated as clothing, but used to ornament [more...]
Pashminas took off in the later 1990s, when draping a generous piece of woven cashmere round your shoulders was a fashion trend in Western countries. At the end of 1996 a London journalist reported that “style guru Lucia van der Post” said the pashmina was “the most chic shawl around town”. The New York Times [more...]
Coco Chanel was born on 19 August 1883 as Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, although her surname was erroneously recorded on her birth certificate as Chasnel. That mistake later made it difficult for others to trace her family history, which suited Coco as she had concocted a false story of her early years to hide the fact that [more...]
The bikini experienced a surge of popularity in the second half of the 1900s, but the two-piece swimsuit is much older than that. Two millennia previously, Latin writers and poets including Ovid and Martial mentioned bikini-clad athletes and sex workers. At least five ancient statues exist of Venus clad in a bikini, and at Piazza [more...]