Can a Government Tell You What to Wear? It Kept Trying for Centuries

The statutes specified in detail what people of each rank could and could not have, and the detail is remarkable. English laws of the fourteenth century set out which cloths, furs and colours each grade of society could wear, down to the price per yard, and prescribed how many courses could be served at a meal. Italian city laws regulated the length of trains, the number of rings and the size of sleeves. Japanese laws under the Tokugawa regulated the silk, the umbrellas and the dolls a merchant family could own. Similar laws existed in ancient Rome, in China and across the Islamic world.

Several motives were mixed together and the emphasis varied:

• •Keeping rank visible, so that status could be read at a glance
• •Preventing the newly rich from dressing like the established
• •Stopping money leaving the country on imported luxuries
• •Protecting domestic cloth industries against foreign competition
• •Moral objection to display and to waste
• •Restraining families from ruining themselves on weddings and funerals

Enforcement failed almost everywhere and the reasons are consistent. Fines were frequently cheaper than the pleasure of breaking the rules, so they functioned as a price rather than a prohibition, and in several places the fines became a reliable revenue stream that the authorities had no interest in eliminating. The people best placed to break the rules were the people who wrote and enforced them. Fashion moved faster than legislation, so statutes described garments nobody was wearing by the time they passed. And enforcement required somebody to accost a stranger in the street about their sleeves, which is socially difficult and was widely avoided. Repeated re-enactment of the same provisions is itself the clearest evidence they were ignored.

Reading the statutes closely shows that the target was frequently narrower than the general language suggests, and identifying it explains a great deal. Provisions repeatedly single out merchants and their wives, meaning people with money but without birth, which is precisely the group whose display threatened to make rank unreadable. Several bodies of law targeted religious and ethnic minorities with requirements to wear particular colours, badges or hat shapes, which is the same machinery used to mark people out rather than to restrain them. Others fell on women specifically, regulating jewellery, trains and wedding expenditure in far more detail than men's clothing. And prostitutes were frequently required to wear identifying items.

The explicit form disappeared across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, undermined by the growth of commerce and by the argument that spending supports industry rather than wasting wealth. Related ideas persisted in other forms. Taxes on luxuries do the same work through price rather than prohibition and remain everywhere. Dress codes in schools, courts, workplaces and private clubs regulate appearance by rank and setting without legislation. Uniforms mark occupation exactly as prescribed cloth once marked status. And a handful of modern laws restrict particular garments for reasons of public order or religion, which recalls the older statutes closely enough to be argued about in the same terms.

Statutes prescribing cloth, colour, fur, courses at dinner and the length of a train aimed to keep rank readable, protect home industry and restrain waste. They failed because fines worked as a price, the enforcers were the offenders, fashion outran legislation and nobody wanted to stop a stranger about their sleeves. Repeated re-enactment of identical provisions is the evidence they were ignored.