Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

Ford (Rights Gone Wrong), a Stanford University law professor, delivers an intriguing history of formal and informal rules governing what people wear. He details laws against “sumptuous clothing” in medieval and Renaissance Europe, and reveals that the Catholic church established dress codes partly to “stabilize the relationship between attire, sex, and religious faith.” (In 1434, Ford notes, the Bishop of Ferrara in Northern Italy decreed that only prostitutes could wear dresses with trains.) Ford’s wide-ranging survey also discusses the toga in ancient Rome, “monstrously extravagant” trunk hose worn by men in Elizabethan England, powdered wigs in colonial America, and zoot suit–clad Latinos who were attacked by white mobs in East L.A. during WWII. Photographs and drawings illuminate both the titillating (a nun’s habit as fetish wear in Victorian England) and the mundane (the modern-day “Midtown Uniform” of an Oxford shirt, khaki pants, and Patagonia fleece vest). Among the plethora of sartorial arcana, Ford notes that in some 15th-century Italian cities, Christian women were forbidden from wearing earrings, while it was illegal for Jewish women not to wear them (and thereby “[fail] to exhibit a visible sign of her community”). Though Ford’s sprawling overview drags in some sections, he makes a convincing case that dress codes reveal much about the social order and the pursuit of individual liberty. This jam-packed history casts its subject in a new light. (Feb.)