Intro to Blog

            Your alarm rings. Groggily you slump out of bed, completely unprepared to start your day. Sound familiar? Most people need at least an hour or two (or a strong cup of Starbucks) to be productive in any sense, but at least nowadays we can get dressed and ready while still half asleep. Realize how easy it is to get dressed. Grab some jeans, a tee shirt, and your favorite pair of beat-up converse and run out the door. Getting ready was never as easy as it is now. If you follow any fashion magazines, you’ll know that styles and fads are incredibly mercurial; they change simply from season to season, so we won’t even mention how drastically different they become over decades and centuries. For women in particular, wearing anything but long gowns every day was utterly unacceptable until the late 20th Century, but we are going to go much farther back than that. Imagine waking up and having to endure the task of getting dressed if you were a wealthy or royal woman during the Rococo age (1690-1760) of France- a time period of Enlightenment or “late Baroque” that was drenched with ornate, playful, and florid styles in not only the architecture and art, but also the prodigious fashions. Think about having to layer at least nine articles of clothing to complete your outfit and having a hairstyle that was four feet high. Sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, in this blog I’m going to explain the history of just how and why the frivolous apparel of the early 18th Century came to be, and also exactly what went into getting dressed for the poor women who lived it. Keep reading to find out why you should be thanking your lucky stars that you can get away with wearing sweats to class