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Have you been watching Pan Am? It’s a period drama on BBC 2 about the pilots and flight attendants who once made up the Pan Am (Pan American World Airways) crew. Following in the footsteps of Mad Men in regards to fashion influence, Pan Am is helping to revive our love of all things 60s and vintage.
The work that went into developing costumes for the show is fascinating. It took one month to make just one Pan Am air hostess costume for the show. Ane Crabtree, the costume designer behind the new series, wanted a very specific colour for the girls’ uniforms – a gorgeous bright blue which looks as deep as the ocean. Twenty different craftsmen were needed to create the costumes, with the hats made by a milliner in Los Angeles.
Starring Christina Ricci and Margot Robbie, the show is filmed in the same studios as twenties drama Boardwalk Empire. To keep up with demand, around half of the costumes are made especially for the show and half are brought in from costume houses. One episode required 400 extras to be dressed, and with many of the costumes being authentically made using 60s sewing techniques, sourcing from elsewhere was inevitable.
The vintage trend shows no sign of disappearing anytime soon, whether you prefer to source authentic pieces or get copy-cats from the High Street, there are plenty of options. “I like seeing the immediacy of what happens on TV and how people on the streets are eating it up," says Crabtree in The Telegraph. "You are seeing men in slim suits now. Women are wearing long pencil skirts. I get e-mails asking where the best places are to buy gloves. Men are starting to wear hats. Simple sheath dresses are back in vogue. People are really excited by this trend."
Denim has been around for quite a while - around 400 years - but it took several centuries before clothes made from this traditionally-indigo colored tough and hardy fabric became popular among the general public. As with so many other things, Hollywood had to show the way before the masses followed.
Shoes - and, no doubt, shoe fanatics - have been around a lot longer than people think, and recent archeological discoveries indicate that the first rudimentary pair of shoes may have been manufactured approximately 40,000 years ago. Scientists have speculated that the apparent weakness in the fossilized toe bones recently unearthed in China suggests that people were wearing primitive strap-sandals as far back as forty centuries ago, and they have also speculated that it was not long before these simple sandals - most probably first used to protect the foot - were transformed into something more decorative than functional. Such early sandals were made of materials like plant fibers and bearskin, but it was not long - relatively speaking - before other materials were introduced.
This was the age that the sandal came into its own, and footwear developed into something traditionally worn only by the rich and famous. Ancient Egyptian sandals greatly resembled our modern flip-flops but were made from such natural materials as papyrus strands and palm fibers. The open sandal with the pointed and curled-back peaked toe made its appearance around 1245BC - usually on the feet of the pharaohs - and yellow and red colored sandals also began to make their mark around this time.
Neanderthal Man may have been the first to realize that wearing animal furs during cold spells kept him warm, but it was Cro-Magnon Man that invented the first needle. It was also Cro-Magnon Man that fashioned the first sewn-together garments out of untanned leather and fur - the earth's climate was colder in 30,000BC - and he was also involved in creating the earliest incarnation of the hoodie.
The warmer climates saw the development of the loincloth - still worn today by some island and jungle tribes - and countries in different parts of the world began developing their very own male fashions. Egypt favored garments made out of linen, and Egyptian men - both nobles and commoners - walked around dressed in kilt-like loincloths. China, on the other hand, was extremely class-conscious, and members of the upper echelons of the Shang Dynasty (1600BC - 1000BC) made themselves at home in brightly colored long silk skirts, knee-length tunics and decorative sashes.
Although pop culture insists on telling us the earliest known form of underwear was the fig-leaf, it's highly unlikely that leaves were ever considered lingerie and extremely likely that the earliest underclothes were made of wool, tanned leather, fur or linen. Most ancient cultures espoused the 'one size fits all' doctrine, and both men and women made use of long rectangular sheets of cloth to wind around and cover up their naughty bits, and in this way the loincloth and the breastcloth were born.
There is, however, considerable question about exactly when underwear came into use. Loincloths and breastcloths were, quite possibly, in use for centuries by themselves - especially in warmer climates - but, if they were just worn by themselves, then they could hardly be considered underwear. There is, for instance, firm evidence that men wore loincloths at least 5,200 years ago - and the loincloth that the frozen Otzi the Iceman was found deep in the Tyrolean Alps after lying in state for millennia most definitely constitutes firm evidence - and loincloths have also been found buried along with the mummies in the tombs of the 18th Dynasty Egyptian Pharaohs (1550BC through 1292BC).
Jewellery is not a one-size-fits-all concept, and one of the most important ways in which each community could express its individuality was in the creation of functional and aesthetic trinkets. The handcrafting of personal ornamentation - which also sometimes served as currency - 
