LThe fringes that adorn clothes this spring are bringing a little movement to the women’s wardrobe. In pearls, two-tone, skimming the shoulders or revealing the legs, they miraculously escape the caricature that, for a long time, fixed them in the 1920s or in westerns.
It is worth remembering that, before serving as a decorative element, they first had a practical function. Among the Egyptians and the Incas, they made it possible, through a clever play of knots, to stop weaving and therefore prevent the fabric from fraying. The Native Americans used it to tie the legs of their hunting catch and thus keep their hands free.
It is also said that the fringes made it easier for the rain to run off their clothes. Enough to inspire trappers and other cowboys, who subsequently took up the timeless fringed “suede jacket” for their own use. And, more recently, the singer Beyoncé, promoting her new album, Cowboy Carter, shamelessly rummaged through the farm boy’s locker room.
From the “flapper girl” to the bikers
When they are not synonymous with wild rides, fringes obviously evoke the Roaring Twenties and flappers. The same ones who move on the dance floor to the sound of a jazz group. And which we find in Let’s sing in the rain (1952), in the scene where an army of young women in pink, yellow or blue dresses surround the lively Gene Kelly.
If cinema has often seized on this figure of flapper girl (in majesty in the adaptations of Gatsby the magnificent, in 1974 then in 2013), fashion historians like to point out that the flapper of the time did not wear as many fringes. If only for practical reasons: synthetic fabrics having not yet been invented, those used in the 1920s were, once enriched with long threads cleverly intertwined into twirling cords, often far too heavy to allow elegant women to dance until the end of the night. The fringe was then used sparingly and, due to its preciousness, reserved for the most fortunate.
Under the influence of the counterculture, fringes became, a few decades later, the attribute of rebels of all stripes. The bikers, modern cowboys who have swapped their horses for shiny bikes, the hippies, whose wardrobe borrows directly from Native American cultures. But also rockers, like Elvis Presley and his white jumpsuit embroidered with pearls, worn and carried over during the 1970s. We can bet that, this season, the rebels will be nothing other than enlightened fashion lovers.
