Paris, Milan, London and America are widely known to be the home and main influencers of modern day fashion. Yet there is another place that also passed on the world’s conception of beauty and fashion across thousands of generations and centuries, and that is ancient Egypt. Wherever one encounters an ancient settlement site worldwide, there is bound to be remains of jewellery and clothing. The iconic limestone bust of Nefertiti, showing her clean, smooth and structured facial features, and the imagined portraits of Cleopatra with her dark ‘kohl’ eyeliner and exquisite jewelled collar still symbolises today the main and most iconic expressions of beauty around the world. Yet some pieces of jewellery and clothing were not just worn for outer appearance, but they are believed by researchers to carry religious and symbolic significance. The use of ‘kohl’ eyeliner was also known to function as a protection from the sun, and scientific research suggests that lead-based mineral contained anti-bacterial properties. “The more I try to understand what the Egyptians themselves understood as ‘beautiful’, the more confusing it becomes, because everything seems to have a double purpose,” Egyptologist Joyce Tyldesley once said…
How Ancient Egypt Introduced Ideas of Beauty and Fashion to the World
September 29, 2018
