• Fashion & Textile Research Journal
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.595-602
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• 2007

This study examined the aesthetic characteristics of Grecian style which is being considered as the representative classic of Western fashion and the transformations of those Grecian styles on the fashion of the twentieth century. This study used positive research method using literatures on art history and clothing history, fashion related publications, and magazines and websites to understand the trend of fashion designer's collections. The study results are as follows. The aesthetic characteristics of Grecian style was considered to be the ideal beauty combined with symmetry, the functional beauty combined with non-construction, and the sensual beauty combined with natural body. The ideal beauty combined with symmetry appears as a style that shows idealistic proportion of a body emphasizing high-waist based on the golden ratio and the body as a whole rather than details. The functional beauty combined with non-construction appears as perfect recreation a body in its original and natural form. The clothing takes a form that does not have any structural design and has simplified cutting and sewing. It uses pins and strings to fix up the form of clothing which is flexible and naturally draped. The sensual beauty combined with natural body is found in natural silhouette dress alluding naked body in connection with Rousseau' naturalism in neoclassic period. Throughout the twentieth century, the desire for Grecian style was conveyed by a single detail or through an array of allusive effects.