Dress codes can suit changing ideals

Dress codes can reveal social aspirations and political ideals, a new book argues.

For centuries, dress codes have had a role in maintaining specific social roles and hierarchies.

But fashion and style have also traditionally served another purpose: to express new ideals of individual liberty, rationality, and equality, according to new research by Richard Thompson Ford, professor of law at Stanford University.

Civil rights activists in 1960s America wore their “Sunday Best” at protests to demonstrate they were worthy of dignity and respect as they challenged the institutions that kept Black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Centuries earlier, during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a pared-down business suit symbolized a departure from the status-based opulence of previous aristocratic regimes. Wearing the same clothes as everyone else, regardless of one’s social status, was a way of espousing the period’s new values, such as sensibility, rationality, and even equality, says Ford.

These are just two of the many examples Ford has chronicled in his new book, Dress Code: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (Simon & Schuster, 2021), in which he argues that people have used dress codes to assert political control and social hierarchies throughout history. Sartorial style can also be wielded to challenge those norms and offer new political ideals in their stead. For example, the Black Panther movement rejected the “Sunday Best” that their civil rights predecessors wore to establish a new kind of resistance.

“It’s worth noting that the Black Panthers had a Minister of Culture, so they saw very clearly the importance of aesthetics in changing politics,” Ford says. “That developed into the ‘Black is beautiful movement’ which focused quite explicitly on the political dimensions of racial aesthetics and changed dominant norms of beauty in order to incorporate and reflect the norms of the Black community.”

The following interview, in which Ford talks about some of this research, has been edited for length and clarity:

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