Why loose is foreign

At the small museum at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, I visited an exhibition of clothes influenced by 'exoticism' this week. Looking at 1970s caftans and the 1920s tunics of the aesthetic movement, it became clear to me that the inspiration of cultures foreign to the west was often for loose, comfortable, practical clothes.

Unrestrictive Asian and African 'peasant' styles have stayed on the edges of the west's perennial modern fashion, a fetish of tightness. In the 1920s, to emulate the dress of the second and third worlds was to embrace a romantic freedom, to escape from nipped-in waists and moulded busts and bottoms.

Mariano Fortuny's 'Delphos' pleated dress recalled the robes of the ancient Greeks and Diaghilev's Ballets Russes set a fashion for loose oriental and Persian costumes. Glamorous fashion stores like Liberty sold robe-like tunics, suddenly envisioning a luxury in poverty.

Again, in the 1960s and 70s, loose kaftans and folk clothing were all the rage, making me wonder if loose sizing often reasserts itself in times of social upheaval.

The history of enthusiasm for large, loose sizes is fascinating. It's always been there, often promoted by pockets of unconventional, bohemian intellectuals, but for most of the time, in Victorian England for instance, anyone bucking the trend for small, tight sizes has been mocked and vilified.

Small sizes have for centuries been a sign of wealth in the west - as we see still today, with the richest western women usually the thinnest. And while loose, 'exotic' non western influences have occasionally swum into fashion, they are seen as somehow too forgiving, too uncontrolled, a sign of dissipation, a giving into the flesh. Loose clothing has meant loose morals since Medieval times in the west.

Today, with the globalisation of the fashion industry, you'd think we would have given up the peculiarly western notion of unforgivingly tight clothes sizes, yet if anything, western values are being rolled out across the world instead of listening to many other cultures' 'big is beautiful' wisdom.