dress
dress may meet practical needs such as protection against climate and labour hazards, but it has also been a powerful tool in the maintenance of hierarchy through its reflection of status, and has served to distinguish occupation and faith as well as rank. It additionally mirrors fashion and permits expression of personal taste. Sumptuous clothes are usually worn by the more privileged classes, to enforce authority, flaunt wealth, or merely dissociate themselves from menial labour: medieval and Tudor monarchs could not wear too many jewels or precious metals; outer clothing was slashed or looped to show underlying layers of expensive fabric; impractical footwear and incapacitating sleeves were signs of leisure, if not symbols of dignity. Sumptuary laws may have been framed to protect home industries by bans on foreign imports (clothes, cloth, wool) and internal trade controls, but they considerably enhanced, then maintained, class distinctions. Because of ‘the outragious and excessive apparel of divers peoples against their estate and degree’, dress for servants, handicraftsmen and yeomen, esquires and gentlemen, merchants and burgesses, knights, clerks, and ploughmen was firmly regulated in 1363 via quality of cloth and permitted embellishment. Such distinctions were perpetuated in clauses forbidding velvet caps to any below the degree of knight (8 Eliz. c. 11) or demanding the Sunday wearing of woollen ‘statute’ caps (13 Eliz. c. 19) by all save the nobility, clergy, and London company wardens. Dress, according to Lord Chesterfield in 1745, was a very foolish thing, ‘yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed, according to his rank and way of life’.
In some instances, practicality and symbolic authority merged. The periwig, adopted from French fashion after the Restoration, not only concealed baldness or reduced head-lice (since the natural hair was close-cropped or shaved) but was worn to enhance dignity. Gain in size and artificiality meant that the heavy full-bottomed wig could only be worn on formal or special occasions, or by gentlemen of leisure. Modified for general use, wigs spread slowly throughout the country despite the hazards of inflammability, contagion, moralist attack, and poor durability, but generally decreased in size through the 18th cent. until their demise. Legal wigs, however, as part of traditional professional costume, are only today being slowly abandoned. Combined practicality and authority may also be seen in doctors' white coats and policemen's helmets.
If practical considerations dictated much of working dress, particularly when it remained relatively simple, occupational distinction came through attachment of appropriate emblems (threaded needle, weaver's shuttle), cap or arm badges, apron colour, or the heraldic crest/colours of the family served, while company liveries symbolized competence in a particular skill. Custom grew out of utility, then persisted, partly to prevent workers absconding from their employers, but also from the wearers' desire to maintain their group's recognized trademark. This may be seen today in corporate uniforms (airlines, hotels), identification badges, shoulder-tabs, and arm-bands; regimental and old school ties are merely rose-tinted nostalgia for lost fraternalism. Variations within uniform can denote distinctions of rank, most readily observed within the armed forces.
A prevailing style of dress has become known as being ‘in fashion’, but fashion has been described as a tyrannically democratic force, enforcing conformity to current social or moral conventions. Attack has come from moralists (frequently men rather than women), medical critics concerned about distorted torsos or incipient pneumonia, politicians and economists, aesthetic critics, animal lovers (against fur and feathers), and caricaturists, but with little long-term effect. Individuals have challenged fashion through aggressive nonconformity—Miss Chudleigh, later countess of Bristol, appeared virtually naked as Iphigenia at a 1749 ball—only to find the shock of the new fading because of growing familiarity, and the focus of attention shifting to another part of the body. Fashionable style moved downwards quite quickly. If Thackeray's duchess of Fitzbattleaxe was emulated by Lady Croesus, then Mrs Broadcloth must follow suit; if her, then also Mrs Seedy, her landlady Miss Letsam, and finally Suky the maid. This might produce vulgarization, but it also spurred the duchess to modifications to restore her lead in fashion. Sumptuary laws had long disappeared (1643 saw the last enactment), and class distinctions had been further blurred by the growing custom for the mistress to give her cast-offs to the lady's maid—such well-dressed servants puzzled many foreign visitors whose own countries still enforced sartorial regulations.
Fashion has frequently reflected overseas influences, despite war or trade restrictions: returning crusaders introduced silks and damasks, emphasis on Germanic puffs and slashes yielded to Spanish bombast (padding) and rigid outline as that country's power advanced in the 16th cent., puritan dress had similarities with its Dutch equivalent, and French influence on taste generally was enormous after the Restoration and for most of the 18th cent. The bloomer costume, adopted by some early female emancipators, originated in mid-19th-cent. America, and in the 20th cent., Parisian couture-houses led the way, even if designs were watered down for high-street shops, and the growing trend towards informality and casual wear has lessened their importance. American influence may be seen in the proliferation of baseball caps, for young and old, and jeans for the former.
In some instances, practicality and symbolic authority merged. The periwig, adopted from French fashion after the Restoration, not only concealed baldness or reduced head-lice (since the natural hair was close-cropped or shaved) but was worn to enhance dignity. Gain in size and artificiality meant that the heavy full-bottomed wig could only be worn on formal or special occasions, or by gentlemen of leisure. Modified for general use, wigs spread slowly throughout the country despite the hazards of inflammability, contagion, moralist attack, and poor durability, but generally decreased in size through the 18th cent. until their demise. Legal wigs, however, as part of traditional professional costume, are only today being slowly abandoned. Combined practicality and authority may also be seen in doctors' white coats and policemen's helmets.
If practical considerations dictated much of working dress, particularly when it remained relatively simple, occupational distinction came through attachment of appropriate emblems (threaded needle, weaver's shuttle), cap or arm badges, apron colour, or the heraldic crest/colours of the family served, while company liveries symbolized competence in a particular skill. Custom grew out of utility, then persisted, partly to prevent workers absconding from their employers, but also from the wearers' desire to maintain their group's recognized trademark. This may be seen today in corporate uniforms (airlines, hotels), identification badges, shoulder-tabs, and arm-bands; regimental and old school ties are merely rose-tinted nostalgia for lost fraternalism. Variations within uniform can denote distinctions of rank, most readily observed within the armed forces.
A prevailing style of dress has become known as being ‘in fashion’, but fashion has been described as a tyrannically democratic force, enforcing conformity to current social or moral conventions. Attack has come from moralists (frequently men rather than women), medical critics concerned about distorted torsos or incipient pneumonia, politicians and economists, aesthetic critics, animal lovers (against fur and feathers), and caricaturists, but with little long-term effect. Individuals have challenged fashion through aggressive nonconformity—Miss Chudleigh, later countess of Bristol, appeared virtually naked as Iphigenia at a 1749 ball—only to find the shock of the new fading because of growing familiarity, and the focus of attention shifting to another part of the body. Fashionable style moved downwards quite quickly. If Thackeray's duchess of Fitzbattleaxe was emulated by Lady Croesus, then Mrs Broadcloth must follow suit; if her, then also Mrs Seedy, her landlady Miss Letsam, and finally Suky the maid. This might produce vulgarization, but it also spurred the duchess to modifications to restore her lead in fashion. Sumptuary laws had long disappeared (1643 saw the last enactment), and class distinctions had been further blurred by the growing custom for the mistress to give her cast-offs to the lady's maid—such well-dressed servants puzzled many foreign visitors whose own countries still enforced sartorial regulations.
Fashion has frequently reflected overseas influences, despite war or trade restrictions: returning crusaders introduced silks and damasks, emphasis on Germanic puffs and slashes yielded to Spanish bombast (padding) and rigid outline as that country's power advanced in the 16th cent., puritan dress had similarities with its Dutch equivalent, and French influence on taste generally was enormous after the Restoration and for most of the 18th cent. The bloomer costume, adopted by some early female emancipators, originated in mid-19th-cent. America, and in the 20th cent., Parisian couture-houses led the way, even if designs were watered down for high-street shops, and the growing trend towards informality and casual wear has lessened their importance. American influence may be seen in the proliferation of baseball caps, for young and old, and jeans for the former.
A. S. Hargreaves
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dress