時尚的歷史，1900s-10s

Hello, my name is John Knight, and I run a lovely fashion shop called Vintage 2 Versace. Now, my passion, obviously, is fashion, and I love to talk about the history of fashion. And so I'm going to present to you the history of fashion through the 20th century. This is Episode 1, The Beginning. First, what I've got here to show you is a copy of a dress that was made famous in 1894 by a society painter called John Singer Sargent. He was an American painter, and he painted in France, and he found a lovely aristocratic lady and decided to paint her. She chose a dress which has gone down in history. This dress, which is here, is one of the most beautiful dresses that's ever been painted. So, let me show you what this dress looks like on our lovely model, Elsa. Look how elegant this is. So this is turn-of-the-century, end-of-the-century dress, with a very tight bodice, an underskirt that's very long, and with a bustle, if you turn this way, there it is at the back here, sweeping down, creating a very unusual shape, with a shape which was very, very common at the end of the 19th century. Now, of course, you can't have a dress like this unless you have an army of dresses. It's already taken us about half an hour to get Elsa into this dress. And you can imagine that you would need a ladies' maid, at least one, possibly two ladies' maids, to help you into a dress like this. And that really took us from one century to another. When we moved into the next century, this style of dress took a little bit of shifting. Queen Victoria died in 1901, and her son, King Edward VII, came to the throne. He was a fun-loving king. And under his rule, everything was more relaxed, more enjoyable. And fashion started to change to be more relaxed also. Led by France, because in 1910, a wonderful designer called Paul Poiret, in France, came up with the idea of a much looser type of dress. And he and another designer called Mariano Fortuny developed ways of pleating silk so that it hung and draped beautifully. Poiret invented a wonderful dress called the lampshade dress, mainly because it started with an over-blouse with a hoop that finished around the waist, and then layers underneath that. It did look like a lampshade to us today, certainly. Now here's another dress in the style of Paul Poiret from about 1910. And it's worn by my lovely model, Myria. Have a look at this one. See how much more relaxed this dress is compared to the heavy late Victorian example that we saw earlier. It's made of fine silk, which is pleated in the Fortuny style, and cascades down to one level, then to a third level, and finally, a long train at the back. It starts from below the bust, and it holds the bust in a typical Greek look. Empire line. Basically, these dresses were called Delphos after the Greek city, and they were very, very popular from about 1910 until about 1914. Let's turn around and have a look at this. Beautiful pleated sleeves. The pleats are everywhere, and a very simple back. It's an absolutely gorgeous dress that would have been for any evening or grand occasion. Thank you, Myria. Thank you for listening and looking at this episode of The History of Fashion. And this is just a reminder to let you know that we can bring this event with my models and our dresses and myself to tell the story at an event or an occasion, or if you're an organization and you organize shows, we'd be delighted to come and be your guests and do The History of Fashion for you.