london

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By the early eighteenth century,the city entered a new phase of development during which its growing confidence and urbane sophistication produced the distinctive sartorial identity that would influence world trends for the next three centuries.

Med

By the fifteenth century,London operated more as a transit point in an international fashion system, exporting primary or unfinished products like wool and metal and importing luxuries such as fur and embroideries.

18

In the 1870s, when the fashion for brocades had passed, the sewing of shirts and ready-made suits provided one of the few opportunities for employment

London fashion

In the popular imagination, which is fed by the stereotyping tendencies of fashion journalism, London has become most associated with the traditional handcrafts of tailoring, shirtmaking, hatmaking, and shoemaking that supports the image of the English gentleman

London fashion

In the twenty-first century, London ranks highly amongst the world's cities as a distinctive fashion center Its characteristic products and sense of style compete with and complement the fashion values of other global fashion capitals including Paris, New York, Milan, and Tokyo.

Med

London operated as a natural hub for trade and cultural exchange in the late medieval period Building on a heritage that stretched back to its status as an important port on the western fringes of the Roman Empire.

18

The methods of tailoring developed in Savile Row that went on to inform the design of women's wear in the capital, producing the severe "tailor-mades" of the late nineteenth century

20th

Their velvet-trimmed draped jackets, drainpipe trousers, and extravagantly combed hairstyles presaged a succession of teenage poses whose influence was felt worldwide.

20th

These London traits of tradition, innovation, and a certain sense of theatricality continued to inform the development of fashionable style in the city in the twentieth century. In the late 1940s and 1950s young men from chic Mayfair and working-class South and East London

London Fashion

These are largely phenomena that blossomed during the twentieth century London's fashion history is as old as the city itself and closely related to its economic, social, and cultural development over time.

Med

This process drew the rich and influential into London and helped to ensure that fashionable trends originated in its streets, markets, and great houses. This forced the English sense of style, which relied largely on the pattern books, fabrics, and craftsmanship

18

Through the nineteenth century the range and organization of the clothing industries in London expanded In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the French Huguenot community had woven high-quality figured silks for gowns, waistcoats, and ribbons in the upper floors of their tall Spital fields houses

Future

Various London designers have found their inspiration in this street-level creativity. In the 1960s Mary Quant, Barbara Hulanicki (of Biba), and Ossie Clarke were closely associated with the phenomenon of "Swinging London," famously promoted to America by Time magazine in 1966; while in the 1970s Zandra Rhodes and Vivienne Westwood offered a more astringent and eccentric take on contemporary mores.