How Fashion Adapts to Climate Change —— During the Little Ice Age
With the opening in the center and back, the silhouette gradually shrinks.
Tulle fabric, breathable textiles and smooth drape.
In order to cope with the rapid development of climate change, some corners of the fashion industry are implementing sustainable business practices and incorporating more flexibility into their designs.
Nowadays, people may regard global warming as a modern phenomenon, but the fashion industry has a long history in dealing with global climate change.
The difference is that when we were sweating, early modern Europeans were frozen stiff.
The Little Ice Age was an unstable cooling interval, and the northern hemisphere was destroyed from14th century to19th century.
Like today's designers, Renaissance fashion designers were forced to face changeable temperatures and strange weather.
Scientists have not yet determined the main cause of the Little Ice Age, and historians are still determining its exact age parameters.
But the voice of this era describes a rapidly cooling climate.
"It's freezing at this time, and we almost froze to death in our own residence," a soldier wrote in his diary when 1640 crossed Germany.
"Besides," he continued, "three people froze to death on the road: a cavalry, a woman and a boy.
Admission begins in August, once a month. Scene: The Hunter in the Snow by Peter Bruggaier (1565).
Scholars agree that the Little Ice Age has influenced our global history in countless traceable ways.
Its unpredictable temperature fluctuation and sudden freezing destroyed the harvest, aggravated the civil strife, and caused thousands of people to starve.
It may be the inspiration for the creepy scenes in Shakespeare's King Lear and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
Darkness and clouds lingered in the sky of paintings created during this period, and the Little Ice Age also changed the history of fashion.
With the intensification of cold in the16th century, the fashion world advocated warmer styles: heavy curtains, layers and sleeves dragged on the floor became more common in visual and material records, and the oldest existing examples of gloves, hats, cloaks and coats in Europe also appeared in today's museum clothing collection.
/kloc-silk hats of the 0/6th century.
A Turk who crossed North Africa wrote in 1670: "No one in Egypt knew to wear fur before." "There is no winter. But it's very cold in winter now, and we have begun to wear fur.
This change can be observed by comparing medieval and Renaissance costumes.
In a medieval French manuscript (illustrations range from115 to 1 125), the knight's skirt is open to his hips, and his attendants' hem stops above his knees.
There are no shawls, furs or headdresses here.
Clothes are light and loose-especially compared with the clothes worn by men in full swing during the Little Ice Age 400 years later. Take Hans Khorbin 1553' s iconic oil painting "The French Ambassador" as an example. This painting depicts two courtiers of Henry VIII.
The man on the left wearing a thick dark velvet and a thick fur coat is Jean De Dinville, the French ambassador to Britain.
George Delsel, Bishop of Laval, stands on the right. In Hans holbein's The Ambassador, the priest wears a floor-to-ceiling coat commensurate with his religious status.
But it can also resist the cold very effectively.
They are both wearing fashionable hats and underwear.
The lace collar of Delserre sweatshirt stands high on his robe, while the white diagonal on DeDintville's shiny pink shirt shows his hidden layers.
Like all portraits of that era, these men's clothes left a deep impression on the people sitting there-which means that their most gorgeous clothes may be their warmest, and women's clothes must also be kept warm. During the Little Ice Age, the fluctuation range tended to get cold.
In the portrait of yekaterina in16th century, Henry VIII's sixth wives, Napal and Parr, wore headdresses and multi-layered sleeves, which was a portrait of catherine parr in about 1545.
(public domain) how many petticoats are needed to keep the skirt bell-shaped.
If you look closely, you will see that there is a thin translucent cloth covering her bare skin at the end of the neckline.
At the same time, a huge fur cloak (an essential accessory at that time) was draped over her arm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a collection of clothes from the late16th century, some of which may indicate the influence of cold on Renaissance clothes.
For example, Spanish dresses with cloaks at the top form tights, skirts and thick fabrics with sleeves.
Under this thick layered dress, the wearer also needs to wear several layers of skirts and underwear. /kloc-Spanish clothing in the late 0/6th century is characterized by thick fabrics.
16 16 British women's jackets (MoMA) may also indicate cold weather.
This kind of corset is made of linen, silk and metal, which may make the wearer feel very warm.
Early modern clothing usually featured gold thread cloth, which was made of actual thin metal strips and carefully wrapped on sewing thread.
The portraits of the Little Ice Age and the preserved clothes often have one thing in common: they are all photos or products of elites who enjoy the means of portrait production.
Their wealth is obvious in the existence of these images and the expensive clothes they wear. Knitted wool hats are very suitable for resisting cold temperatures, but the rich women of that era chose elaborate pearl-lined skirts, which are rows of veils,/kloc-the British wool hats of the 0/6th century.
Their wealth ignores the crisis of this era.
When countless farmers leave their homes and die of hunger or disease, it is dangerous for the rich to simply transition to sleeves lined with mink and mantelpiece inlaid with gold.
But the similarity with our present situation is hard to ignore.
Climate change is an imminent threat with profound social and political impact, but for many people, it is still a distant phenomenon, which is easily overlooked except for buying lighter and looser clothes.
Source: In the public domain, Ryan Eagles' article "How Fashion Adapts to Climate Change-During the Little Ice Age" was first published in Dialogue, and reprinted with permission of knowledge sharing.
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