A "sharp and entertaining" (The Wall Street Journal) exploration of
fashion through the ages that asks what our clothing reveals about
ourselves and our society. Dress codes are as old as clothing
itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol;
fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes,
a way to maintain political control. Merchants dressing like
princes and butchers' wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were
public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy
and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur
were reserved for the nobility, and ballooning pants called "trunk
hose" could be considered a menace to good order. The
Renaissance-era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the
power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, "One can make a
gentleman from two yards of red cloth." Dress codes evolved along
with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always
reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South
Carolina's "Negro Act" made it illegal for Black people to dress
"above their condition." In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and
form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in
workplaces throughout the United States, and in the 1940s, the
baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in
cities from coast to coast. Even in today's more informal world,
dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it--and what
our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided
hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or
refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some
cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are
no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence
opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear
t-shirts and flip-flops, setting the tone for an entire industry:
women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in
the tech world, and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in
any company run by someone wearing a suit. In Dress Codes, law
professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford presents a
"deeply informative and entertaining" (The New York Times Book
Review) history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the
present day, a walk down history's red carpet to uncover and
examine the canons, mores, and customs of clothing--rules that we
often take for granted. After reading Dress Codes, you'll never
think of fashion as superficial again--and getting dressed will
never be the same.
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