Garments come out of the thresholds

LThe drapes that adorn the clothes this spring add a little movement to the women’s wardrobe. In pearls, two-tones, shrugs or bare legs, they miraculously escape the caricature that has long fixed them in the 1920s or Westerns.

We must remember that before serving as a decorative element, they first had a practical function. Among the Egyptians and the Incas, they were able to stop the weaving through a clever game of knots and thus prevent the fabric from fraying. Native Americans used it as a hunting piece to bind their legs and thus free their hands.

It is also said that the curtains made it easier for the rain to wash off their clothes. Enough to inspire trappers and other cowboys who later adopted the permanent winged “suede coat” for their own use. Recently, the singer Beyoncé, promoting her new album, cowboy carter, Shamelessly peeked into the farm boy’s locker room.

From flapper girls to bikers

When they’re not synonymous with wild rides, curtains clearly invite roaring twenties and flappers. The same one who moves to the sound of a jazz band on the dance floor. and in which we find Let’s sing in the rain (1952), in a scene where an army of young women dressed in pink, yellow, or blue dresses surround a live Gene Kelly.

If cinema often captured this figure flapper girl (In adaptations with majesty the great gatsby 1974, then 2013), fashion historians like to point out that the flapper of the time didn’t wear that much flapper. If only for practical reasons: synthetic fabrics had not yet been invented, the fabrics used in the 1920s were once enriched with long threads that were cleverly intertwined in swirling nets, often very heavy, to allow elegant women to dance the night away. Fringe was then used sparingly and, because of its preciousness, was reserved for the most fortunate.

Influenced by the counterculture, fringes became the paraphernalia of rebels of all stripes a few decades later. Bikers, modern cowboys who have changed their horses into shiny bicycles, hippies whose wardrobe is directly borrowed from Native American cultures. But also rockers like Elvis Presley and his embroidered white overalls worn and moved in the 1970s.