The continuous change of fashion in the West have generally been beaten either in antiquity or in other great civilizations of the world until recent decades. Early Western travelers, whether to Persia, Turkey, Japan or China frequently remark on the absence of changes in fashion there, and observers from these other cultures comment on the pace of Western fashion unbecoming, which many felt suggested an instability and lack of order in Western culture. The Japanese Shogun’s secretary boasted (not completely accurately) to a Spanish visitor in 1609 that Japanese clothing had not changed in over a thousand years. However, in Ming China, for example, there is considerable evidence of rapidly changing fashion in Chinese clothing.
Changes in the locker room were often in times of economic or social change (as in ancient Rome and the medieval Caliphate), but after a long period without large changes followed. This occurred in Muslim Spain from the eighth century, when the famous musician Ziryab introduced sophisticated styles based on seasonal clothing and times of every day of his native Baghdad and his own inspiration to Cordoba, Spain. Similar changes in fashion occurred in the Middle East from the 11th century, after the arrival of the Turks who introduced clothing styles from Central Asia and the Far East.
The beginnings of habit in Europe of continual and increasingly rapid changes in styles can be quite reliable from the mid 14th century for historians including James Laver and Fernand Braudel start date Western fashion in clothing . The most spectacular was a sudden and drastic tightening of the men on clothing, “mid-calf to barely cover the buttocks, sometimes accompanied with stuffing on the chest to look bigger. This created the distinctive Western male outline of a top as worn over leggings or pants.