The History of The Ruffle

 

Source : Refinery29

This flourish, which flies upward from the shoulders and adorns asymmetrical tops, is known as the power ruffle. It's the ideal combination of feminine and forward-thinking, and wearing one means embracing a surprisingly terrifying legacy. The ruffle was historically used by royalty and female rebels to denote strength and remarkable power.

Ruffles add movement, fluidity, and playfulness to your dress as you walk down the aisle. While ruffles are often associated with over-the-top romantic feelings, they can also appear ultra-modern when applied sparingly as accents in materials like crepe or organza. Ruffles have a lengthy and sometimes tumultuous history as a fashion accessory. It's seen as one of the most overtly feminine fashion statements – frequently, as with The Stepford Wives, in a horribly charming way. Ruffles conjure up insipid visions of Gone With the Wind-era Southern belles, 1950s debutantes, and Shirley Temple. A grown woman can sweep through the streets in a baby-pink coat or a dizzying pair of heels, but until lately, ruffles were a difficult thing to pull off without looking like a walking confection.

Ruffles were historically unisex. They first appeared in 16th-century Spain, when warriors wore multiple layers of clothes and frequently sliced their sleeve ends to expose the fabric beneath. The naturally occurring wrinkles were then hijacked by garment manufacturers, who wove flexible threads into their garments. These might be pulled tighter to create a trendy ruffled look. The Elizabethan-era ruff, a severely starched (and insanely uncomfortable-looking) accessory, was the culmination of this trend. From William Shakespeare until Queen Elizabeth I, both men and women wore the posture-correcting ruff. At their peak, they might span up to a foot wide, requiring internal wire to keep them in place. A hot iron, similar to a fireplace poker, was even devised to skillfully pleat the fabric.

                                                               

Source : AliExpress

Later, as a more pleasant version of what had come before, both men's and women's clothes featured the lace sleeve or necktie. For males, stiff cambric shirts fashioned of a material akin to linen became fashionable in the 18th century. Cambric was also used to manufacture jabots, which are extremely ruffled neckties that men wear to cover the openings of their dress shirts. Even though trouser lengths and skirt widths evolved over time, the ruffled necktie remained popular. Portraits of a variety of notable 18th-century people demonstrate how versatile the jabot may be. The ruffle was everywhere, from Marie Antoinette's regal splendor to American revolutionary Alexander Hamilton's radical fury. It went beyond and gender. 

Women's costumes in Victorian England were embellished with bustles, layers, and frills. The menswear mania for dandyism, however, must be the most remembered fad of the nineteenth century. The dandy has a stronghold on our pictures of men wearing ruffles, with his superbly fitted coats, tight pantaloons, and the intricately tied or ruffled cravat. The early nineteenth century saw the advent of the fashion-obsessed "decadent" male, from Lord Byron to Beau Brummell. It was a short-lived style that was derided as inherently effeminate and shallow. Simple, unadorned collars or neckties were the norm for males towards the end of the nineteenth century.

So it wasn't until the twentieth century that the ruffle was driven out of the scope of respectable men's clothing. After the tame war years, Christian Dior's voluminous New Look of the 1950s allowed ladies to delight in a more ornate style. The peplum waist, another variant on the ruffle, became popular in mid-century fashion. The ruffle became more overtly gendered than ever in a decade when women's duties were increasingly limited and romanticized — and synonymous with all that was feminine and lovely. Debbie Reynolds and Judy Garland, with their more wholesome personas, were ideal for the movement.