For around past 30 years it's popular to wear ripped jeans. Was there anything similar in history, when ripped or otherwise heavily worn clothes were popular and considered fashionable?
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230 years, LOL, you must be a young man. Just 20 years ago everyone in white collar work in the US had to wear a suit to work, imagine that. I remember when "casual Fridays" were invented around 1995. Even faded jeans did not appear until around 2000. When the Gap started selling faded jeans I thought that was pretty funny.– Tyler DurdenCommented Feb 13, 2015 at 15:31
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3@TylerDurden Some of us still wear suits to work.– franklinCommented Feb 13, 2015 at 16:57
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3@franklin That is so passe, didn't you know you are supposed to wear ripped jeans?– Tyler DurdenCommented Feb 13, 2015 at 17:26
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3Popular among whom? The Elizabethans wore slashed/pinked doublets &c, but that was more to let underlayers show through as a statement of wealth: "I'm rich enough to wear two layers of expensive cloth!"– jamesqfCommented Feb 13, 2015 at 20:02
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1@jamesqf i think that would qualify as an answer, because most of the "ripped" jeans are now actually sold that way, and so it has become the same thing, i bought designer clothes look you can tell because their ripped. write that up with some evidence/pics and that should probably be the right answer.– HimarmCommented Feb 13, 2015 at 20:35
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2 Answers
Switzerland, and the Germanies, 1500s and 1600s in the form of the Landsknecht who were given a legal dispensation from the sumptuary (clothing) laws to be so fabulous. There is a contemporary recreation community who have some colour pictures of recreated clothes draped on people, and a wide variety of pictures online, including some colour prints from later.
From the Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsknecht
Clothes
What made the Landsknechte so conspicuous was their elaborate dress, which they adopted from the Swiss, but later took to even more dramatic excess. Maximilian I exempted them from the prevalent sumptuary laws as an acknowledgement of their "...short and brutish" lives. Doublets (German: Wams), deliberately slashed at the front, back and sleeves with shirts and other wear pulled through to form puffs of different-colored fabric, so-called puffed and slashed; particoloured hose (or Gesses); jerkins (German: Lederwams); ever-broader flat beret-type hats (German: Tellerbarrets) with tall feathers; and broad flat shoes, made them bodies of men that could not be mistaken.
answered Feb 13, 2015 at 22:45
Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly, in Du Dandysme et de Georges Brummel (The Anatomy of Dandyism, 1845) claims that French dandies of his day used to use a piece of broken glass to shave down the fabric of their coats until they were almost sheer, and might break through. If you want to believe him. I don't consider him very reliable, especially since a lined jacket isn't going to work like this.
