Richard Thompson Ford
Author of Dress Codes: How the laws of fashion made history
About the Author
Richard Thompson Ford is a Professor at Stanford Law School. He has written about law, social and cultural issues, and race relations for the New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Slate, and has appeared on The Colbert Report and The Rachel Maddow Show. He is the author show more of the New York Times notable books The Race Card and Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality. He lives in San Francisco. show less
Image credit: Stanford University (faculty page)
Works by Richard Thompson Ford
Associated Works
Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (1995) — Contributor — 472 copies, 1 review
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1966-06
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Stanford University (BA | 1988)
Harvard Law School (JD | 1991) - Occupations
- lawyer
law school professor - Organizations
- Stanford University
- Short biography
- Richard Thompson Ford is the George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. An expert on civil rights and antidiscrimination law, he has distinguished himself as an insightful voice and compelling writer on questions of race and multiculturalism. His scholarship combines social criticism and legal analysis and he writes for both popular readers and for academic and legal specialists. He has written for the Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and for Slate, where he is a regular contributor, and has appeared on The Colbert Report and The Rachel Maddow Show. In 2012 ON BEING A BLACK LAWYER selected him as one of the 100 Most Influential Black Lawyers in the Nation. [from Amazon author page, retrieved 03/15/2021]
- Nationality
- USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
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Reviews
Somewhat sadly depending on one’s goals, not limited to “laws” but also covering social norms about who could wear what. Relies a lot on female historians’ accounts of specific fashions/periods; full of interesting tidbits, but at its best analyzing modern disputes over rules for fashion.
Fashion as a subject of regulation emerged only once there were enough resources and technologies around to let people express themselves through fashion. Ford suggests that “the fawning parvenu show more was ever-present, but the greater threat to the old social orders was a newly confident bourgeois class that insisted not on joining or aping the nobility but on its own distinctive place in society.” Sumptuary laws reserved certain forms of dress for certain people, but not always the most honored: e.g., “fourteenth-century Siena assigned to prostitutes the silks and platform shoes its sumptuary laws otherwise banned.” Similarly, in 1416, a Jewish woman in Ferrara (Italy) was arrested and fined ten ducats for appearing in public without her earrings, required for Jewish women. “[I]n an era when superfluous adornment was condemned as a sign of sin, Jews were required by law to wear conspicuous jewelry.” And “in the fifteenth century, Roman Jewish women were required to wear a red overskirt that prostitutes also wore; Jewish women in other parts of Italy had to wear a yellow veil—a sign of the prostitute in Italian cities from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.” But earrings proved popular enough with powerful people that they changed the rules. For example, “in 1521 Bologna’s Jewish women were limited by law to three finger rings and three gold pins—stripped, by law, of the earrings” previously required.
In 1746, the British Parliament prohibited “the Highland Dress,” in the name of assimilation. Unsurprisingly from today’s perspective, the backlash led to widespread Scottish identification with it instead—and here law has an interesting function: “Moreover, by enumerating the precise elements of Highland dress, the Tartan Act may have helped to create a more easily identified ethnic style than had existed before.” After it was repealed, the peasantry mainly stuck with trousers, but the Scottish elite “who had never worn the kilt nor, in all likelihood, a family tartan before … saw a reason to adopt them after the restrictive dress code was repealed.”
As codes of masculinity changed, men showed off opulence “through their wives, mistresses, and daughters, while maintaining enough distance from it to avoid any impression of vanity,” while certain “new, modern sartorial signs” were reserved for men, separating masculine and feminine fashions and insisting that the former weren’t fashion at all. I loved the point that, “while a gown exhibits its adornment on the outside of a draped garment, most of the intricate work in a suit is hidden in the seamwork, canvassing, and padding that give the ensemble its seemingly natural shape.”
Corsets can be classified as part of social or even scientific intervention on a disfavored body: “Corset advocates believed its structure provided necessary support for what they considered to be weak feminine bodies and deficient feminine morality alike…. Many insisted that the corset provided a necessary physical constraint on loose sexual appetites, but they nevertheless condemned tight lacing as evidence of female vanity.”
Modern fashion for men, Ford says, “has progressed in a straight and unbroken line toward ever more streamlined, formally refined, and unadorned styles—a modernizing coherence, punctuated by a few anachronistic details, such as vestigial lapels and pockets. By contrast, … women’s fashion has been marked by ambivalence: liberation in the shadow of the lofty pedestal of pure womanhood; refinement offset by superfluous opulent display; austere practicality embellished with dramatic flourishes.” This is fun, but it also “ensures that women’s fashion sends mixed messages, open to misinterpretation—hence the familiar misogynistic slurs that modern women are coquettish teases or conniving minxes.”
Turning to America specifically, South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740 announced that “many of the slaves in this Province wear clothes much above the condition of slaves” and therefore prohibited enslavers from allowing enslaved people to wear “finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes, checked cottons or Scottish plaids.” Ford points out that advertised descriptions of enslaved people who’d run away also regularly included a hard-now-to-see “light mocking touch” in describing their outfits: the “odd blendings… so different from the coordinated apparel of gentility that fugitives must often have seemed to be… mocking proper attire.”
White violence based on any violation of supremacist logics could be severe. In 1919 Georgia, a Black former soldier killed by a mob for wearing his uniform for “too long” after the end of the war. Vigilantes in 1940s Los Angeles beat up pachucos for wearing zoot suits. Understandably, many civil rights activists—especially in the 1950s and 60s—dressed formally to indicate their seriousness and worthiness. That changed with a new generation who wanted to organize, among other people, “rural laborers who lacked the signs of bourgeois respectability” and claimed that equality required respecting those who weren’t outfitted in “proper” fashion, especially when, for example, “the hairstyles that counted as proper were designed for white women. If “the ideal of respectability itself was designed for white people,” then it was a false goal. But one barrier these new activists faced was that “[m]any rural and small-town residents of every race felt that ‘anybody wearing old work clothes all the time couldn’t be about very much.’” Ragged jeans might not be so liberating if you didn’t have a choice about whether to wear them.
Obviously, race and clothing discourse continued, including legal sanctions in some cities against sagging pants (that is, the fashion of young Black men). I am precisely the kind of bourgeois who would feel extremely awkward and uncomfortable wearing sagging pants and would consider it inappropriate for settings like the classroom. Ford notes that his students at Stanford mostly grew up in “professional” households, but the few who don’t— “those from ‘underprivileged backgrounds’ and ‘underrepresented groups’ who we congratulate ourselves for recruiting and admitting” are left alone to figure out that kind of tacit knowledge. “By contrast, Morehouse, like most historically Black colleges, has made upward social mobility a central part of its institutional mission; it deliberately focuses on cultivation and socialization—things that many other schools take for granted.” He’s not completely convinced that the Morehouse dress code is good, especially its gender identity aspects, but he believes “it is not simply bigoted and elitist. It seems an honest, if imperfect, effort to spare its students, who will suffer the unavoidable disadvantages of racism, the avoidable disadvantages that come with inappropriate attire and grooming.”
Respectability politics has its reasons, and Ford points out that “Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first used the idea of respectability politics in her 1994 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, to describe a fierce, uncompromising, and dignified political activism that compelled the respect of those who witnessed it.” Likewise, dress codes—when everyone has the ability to satisfy them—diminish the ability to judge people’s taste, judgment, and character based on their clothing choices. (This is also why prison uniforms dehumanize.)
“The dress codes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whether written or unwritten, represent a clash between the familiar effort to use attire to mark status, sex, and power and the increasingly widespread and jealously guarded prerogative to express individual personality.” Dress codes for female students also “insist that certain outfits are provocative”; Ford reminds us that the foot was the “heart of all male fixations” in the nineteenth century.
Ford also discusses Elena Kagan’s unappealing choices as Solicitor General; the SG traditionally wears a morning suit to argue. But “the morning suit became professional attire because it was the formal masculine attire of its era. … An indispensable part of the symbolism of masculine attire lies in the contrast with its opposite—feminine attire—which came to symbolize much of what the Masculine Renunciation renounced: ornamentation, display, fantasy, and vanity surrounding the physical body. The morning suit itself is unmistakably masculine and as a consequence, any woman who adopts it will unavoidably come off as if dressed in provocative drag, like Marlene Dietrich in the film Morocco. The symbolism of the morning suit is unmistakably masculine by design. There can be no feminine equivalent.”
This also has implications for bans on “cross-dressing,” because women’s clothing “is simply any clothing that women typically wear.” Typical mid-20th-century bans on cross-dressing in American cities “didn’t enforce any specific type of gendered attire at all. Instead, they enforced a regime of gendered symbolism. Because the definition of gendered attire is both unclear and in flux, these cross-dressing bans were unavoidably vague.”
But Ford reminds us that other gendered regimes also seemed “natural” to their enforcers. Gendered clothing can also signal reproductive role: in other periods (and even now in some communities), “prepubescent boys were dressed in gowns similar to those worn by girls, … unmarried women wore different clothing than married women, and … older women dressed differently than women of childbearing age.” Today, Europeans are at the forefront of banning headscarves and burkas; some European cities also ban full-body bathing suits used by Muslim women: it’s wrong to show too much skin and too little.
Ford defends “the fashionable Muslim woman, when she wears her hijab along with chic clothing or with makeup” because she challenges “the idea that the hijab is designed to obscure a female body that is a source of temptation.” “[B]y complicating the stereotypical meaning of the hijab as an instrument of compulsory modesty, she insists on the primacy of its other meanings: the hijab becomes a symbol of cultural pride, a sign of post-colonial resistance or of opposition to Islamophobia” while also using it to reveal her distinctive personality. This is also a challenge to religious orthodoxy: “Once the hijab becomes fashion, no hijab can ever again be an inscrutable partition; each now inevitably reveals something of its wearer, whether the wearer wants it to be revealed or not. Each becomes a fashion statement.”
What about the dress codes of wealthy whites? Ford describes “tattered oxford cloth button-down collar shirts and ‘Nantucket red’ chinos for men; nondescript flat shoes and unimaginative pearl necklaces for women” as “the choices of the preppy precisely because they are both expensive and either bland or garish: a combination that guarantees that no one outside the tribe will wear them.”
Tech bros are tempted by another code: spend no energy on frivolous fashion. But, Ford points out, that works out differently for women. “Purported indifference to appearance becomes a reason to judge based on appearance; a new dress code displaces an older one.” And it’s also unstable given the meaning of the men’s suit in Western culture—the book’s publication predated JD Vance’s attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit in the Oval Office, but he notes that Mark Zuckerberg, who like Steve Jobs claimed to ignore fashion in order to focus on more important things, wore a suit and not a hoodie to testify before Congress, because the suit “communicates seriousness of purpose. It conveys a familiarity with and respect for conventions. Because it requires at least a modicum of effort and because its tailoring gives the impression of improved stature and posture, it suggests a physical and mental discipline. Although a well-made suit can be as comfortable as jeans and a T-shirt, to say nothing of a Patagonia fleece, its true comfort comes from its ability to project competence. When Mark Zuckerberg was on his own turf he could afford to assert his status through the subtle signals of reverse snobbery. But when he was out of his element and under attack, he needed sartorial armor. … When he had to care what other people thought—and needed them to know he cared—he put on a suit.”
Meanwhile, the “Midtown Uniform” of fleece over chinos “is more immutably masculine than the suit, which women have adapted to their needs over the decades.” Ford rightly quotes Susan Scafidi, director of Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute: “We’ve just achieved the parity of the pantsuit, and suddenly we’re told the standard pantsuit is no longer workforce attire. Women will need to find another way to achieve parity in attire.…” And a Black man in hoodie and jeans will also find it very difficult to be treated like Mark Zuckerberg in same.
Ford suggests that fashion will always engage in “cultural appropriation,” which he deems “another example of the centuries-old anxiety about the corrupting influence of fashion on symbols of group identity and social status. Fashion is ready to sacrifice any convention in the tireless quest for novelty; it is indifferent to political struggles and claims of moral prerogative. No doubt: fashion exploits and appropriates, but it doesn’t discriminate.” And he contends that complaints about cultural appropriate are “unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchy. Groups who are more secure in their social status tend to be more forgiving when outsiders borrow their fashions.”
Ford ultimately approves of some dress codes precisely because clothing matters to meaning. A dress code can shape what a group or activity is and what it means to participants: this is a particular space, and we are in agreement about its importance. Plus, “informal standards of attire can be more demanding and more treacherous than any written dress code: failure to respect conventions of good taste marks one as an ignorant and tasteless boor, but too-slavish adherence to the rules can be a sign of insecurity, and hence poor breeding. While an explicit dress code demands only simple adherence, its absence leaves one adrift, forced to navigate ineffable standards of taste, elegance, and style—many vague and unwritten or overdetermined and contested.” He wryly concludes: “since 1960—precisely when large parts of American society began to abandon explicit common norms of dress—the volume of discarded clothing has increased by 750 percent, a reflection, perhaps, of millions of frantic and ultimately failed searches for an appropriate outfit in a world free of rules but full of judgment.” show less
Fashion as a subject of regulation emerged only once there were enough resources and technologies around to let people express themselves through fashion. Ford suggests that “the fawning parvenu show more was ever-present, but the greater threat to the old social orders was a newly confident bourgeois class that insisted not on joining or aping the nobility but on its own distinctive place in society.” Sumptuary laws reserved certain forms of dress for certain people, but not always the most honored: e.g., “fourteenth-century Siena assigned to prostitutes the silks and platform shoes its sumptuary laws otherwise banned.” Similarly, in 1416, a Jewish woman in Ferrara (Italy) was arrested and fined ten ducats for appearing in public without her earrings, required for Jewish women. “[I]n an era when superfluous adornment was condemned as a sign of sin, Jews were required by law to wear conspicuous jewelry.” And “in the fifteenth century, Roman Jewish women were required to wear a red overskirt that prostitutes also wore; Jewish women in other parts of Italy had to wear a yellow veil—a sign of the prostitute in Italian cities from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.” But earrings proved popular enough with powerful people that they changed the rules. For example, “in 1521 Bologna’s Jewish women were limited by law to three finger rings and three gold pins—stripped, by law, of the earrings” previously required.
In 1746, the British Parliament prohibited “the Highland Dress,” in the name of assimilation. Unsurprisingly from today’s perspective, the backlash led to widespread Scottish identification with it instead—and here law has an interesting function: “Moreover, by enumerating the precise elements of Highland dress, the Tartan Act may have helped to create a more easily identified ethnic style than had existed before.” After it was repealed, the peasantry mainly stuck with trousers, but the Scottish elite “who had never worn the kilt nor, in all likelihood, a family tartan before … saw a reason to adopt them after the restrictive dress code was repealed.”
As codes of masculinity changed, men showed off opulence “through their wives, mistresses, and daughters, while maintaining enough distance from it to avoid any impression of vanity,” while certain “new, modern sartorial signs” were reserved for men, separating masculine and feminine fashions and insisting that the former weren’t fashion at all. I loved the point that, “while a gown exhibits its adornment on the outside of a draped garment, most of the intricate work in a suit is hidden in the seamwork, canvassing, and padding that give the ensemble its seemingly natural shape.”
Corsets can be classified as part of social or even scientific intervention on a disfavored body: “Corset advocates believed its structure provided necessary support for what they considered to be weak feminine bodies and deficient feminine morality alike…. Many insisted that the corset provided a necessary physical constraint on loose sexual appetites, but they nevertheless condemned tight lacing as evidence of female vanity.”
Modern fashion for men, Ford says, “has progressed in a straight and unbroken line toward ever more streamlined, formally refined, and unadorned styles—a modernizing coherence, punctuated by a few anachronistic details, such as vestigial lapels and pockets. By contrast, … women’s fashion has been marked by ambivalence: liberation in the shadow of the lofty pedestal of pure womanhood; refinement offset by superfluous opulent display; austere practicality embellished with dramatic flourishes.” This is fun, but it also “ensures that women’s fashion sends mixed messages, open to misinterpretation—hence the familiar misogynistic slurs that modern women are coquettish teases or conniving minxes.”
Turning to America specifically, South Carolina’s Negro Act of 1740 announced that “many of the slaves in this Province wear clothes much above the condition of slaves” and therefore prohibited enslavers from allowing enslaved people to wear “finer, other or of greater value than Negro cloth, duffels, coarse kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen, or coarse garlix, or calicoes, checked cottons or Scottish plaids.” Ford points out that advertised descriptions of enslaved people who’d run away also regularly included a hard-now-to-see “light mocking touch” in describing their outfits: the “odd blendings… so different from the coordinated apparel of gentility that fugitives must often have seemed to be… mocking proper attire.”
White violence based on any violation of supremacist logics could be severe. In 1919 Georgia, a Black former soldier killed by a mob for wearing his uniform for “too long” after the end of the war. Vigilantes in 1940s Los Angeles beat up pachucos for wearing zoot suits. Understandably, many civil rights activists—especially in the 1950s and 60s—dressed formally to indicate their seriousness and worthiness. That changed with a new generation who wanted to organize, among other people, “rural laborers who lacked the signs of bourgeois respectability” and claimed that equality required respecting those who weren’t outfitted in “proper” fashion, especially when, for example, “the hairstyles that counted as proper were designed for white women. If “the ideal of respectability itself was designed for white people,” then it was a false goal. But one barrier these new activists faced was that “[m]any rural and small-town residents of every race felt that ‘anybody wearing old work clothes all the time couldn’t be about very much.’” Ragged jeans might not be so liberating if you didn’t have a choice about whether to wear them.
Obviously, race and clothing discourse continued, including legal sanctions in some cities against sagging pants (that is, the fashion of young Black men). I am precisely the kind of bourgeois who would feel extremely awkward and uncomfortable wearing sagging pants and would consider it inappropriate for settings like the classroom. Ford notes that his students at Stanford mostly grew up in “professional” households, but the few who don’t— “those from ‘underprivileged backgrounds’ and ‘underrepresented groups’ who we congratulate ourselves for recruiting and admitting” are left alone to figure out that kind of tacit knowledge. “By contrast, Morehouse, like most historically Black colleges, has made upward social mobility a central part of its institutional mission; it deliberately focuses on cultivation and socialization—things that many other schools take for granted.” He’s not completely convinced that the Morehouse dress code is good, especially its gender identity aspects, but he believes “it is not simply bigoted and elitist. It seems an honest, if imperfect, effort to spare its students, who will suffer the unavoidable disadvantages of racism, the avoidable disadvantages that come with inappropriate attire and grooming.”
Respectability politics has its reasons, and Ford points out that “Harvard historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first used the idea of respectability politics in her 1994 book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, to describe a fierce, uncompromising, and dignified political activism that compelled the respect of those who witnessed it.” Likewise, dress codes—when everyone has the ability to satisfy them—diminish the ability to judge people’s taste, judgment, and character based on their clothing choices. (This is also why prison uniforms dehumanize.)
“The dress codes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, whether written or unwritten, represent a clash between the familiar effort to use attire to mark status, sex, and power and the increasingly widespread and jealously guarded prerogative to express individual personality.” Dress codes for female students also “insist that certain outfits are provocative”; Ford reminds us that the foot was the “heart of all male fixations” in the nineteenth century.
Ford also discusses Elena Kagan’s unappealing choices as Solicitor General; the SG traditionally wears a morning suit to argue. But “the morning suit became professional attire because it was the formal masculine attire of its era. … An indispensable part of the symbolism of masculine attire lies in the contrast with its opposite—feminine attire—which came to symbolize much of what the Masculine Renunciation renounced: ornamentation, display, fantasy, and vanity surrounding the physical body. The morning suit itself is unmistakably masculine and as a consequence, any woman who adopts it will unavoidably come off as if dressed in provocative drag, like Marlene Dietrich in the film Morocco. The symbolism of the morning suit is unmistakably masculine by design. There can be no feminine equivalent.”
This also has implications for bans on “cross-dressing,” because women’s clothing “is simply any clothing that women typically wear.” Typical mid-20th-century bans on cross-dressing in American cities “didn’t enforce any specific type of gendered attire at all. Instead, they enforced a regime of gendered symbolism. Because the definition of gendered attire is both unclear and in flux, these cross-dressing bans were unavoidably vague.”
But Ford reminds us that other gendered regimes also seemed “natural” to their enforcers. Gendered clothing can also signal reproductive role: in other periods (and even now in some communities), “prepubescent boys were dressed in gowns similar to those worn by girls, … unmarried women wore different clothing than married women, and … older women dressed differently than women of childbearing age.” Today, Europeans are at the forefront of banning headscarves and burkas; some European cities also ban full-body bathing suits used by Muslim women: it’s wrong to show too much skin and too little.
Ford defends “the fashionable Muslim woman, when she wears her hijab along with chic clothing or with makeup” because she challenges “the idea that the hijab is designed to obscure a female body that is a source of temptation.” “[B]y complicating the stereotypical meaning of the hijab as an instrument of compulsory modesty, she insists on the primacy of its other meanings: the hijab becomes a symbol of cultural pride, a sign of post-colonial resistance or of opposition to Islamophobia” while also using it to reveal her distinctive personality. This is also a challenge to religious orthodoxy: “Once the hijab becomes fashion, no hijab can ever again be an inscrutable partition; each now inevitably reveals something of its wearer, whether the wearer wants it to be revealed or not. Each becomes a fashion statement.”
What about the dress codes of wealthy whites? Ford describes “tattered oxford cloth button-down collar shirts and ‘Nantucket red’ chinos for men; nondescript flat shoes and unimaginative pearl necklaces for women” as “the choices of the preppy precisely because they are both expensive and either bland or garish: a combination that guarantees that no one outside the tribe will wear them.”
Tech bros are tempted by another code: spend no energy on frivolous fashion. But, Ford points out, that works out differently for women. “Purported indifference to appearance becomes a reason to judge based on appearance; a new dress code displaces an older one.” And it’s also unstable given the meaning of the men’s suit in Western culture—the book’s publication predated JD Vance’s attack on Volodymyr Zelenskyy for not wearing a suit in the Oval Office, but he notes that Mark Zuckerberg, who like Steve Jobs claimed to ignore fashion in order to focus on more important things, wore a suit and not a hoodie to testify before Congress, because the suit “communicates seriousness of purpose. It conveys a familiarity with and respect for conventions. Because it requires at least a modicum of effort and because its tailoring gives the impression of improved stature and posture, it suggests a physical and mental discipline. Although a well-made suit can be as comfortable as jeans and a T-shirt, to say nothing of a Patagonia fleece, its true comfort comes from its ability to project competence. When Mark Zuckerberg was on his own turf he could afford to assert his status through the subtle signals of reverse snobbery. But when he was out of his element and under attack, he needed sartorial armor. … When he had to care what other people thought—and needed them to know he cared—he put on a suit.”
Meanwhile, the “Midtown Uniform” of fleece over chinos “is more immutably masculine than the suit, which women have adapted to their needs over the decades.” Ford rightly quotes Susan Scafidi, director of Fordham University’s Fashion Law Institute: “We’ve just achieved the parity of the pantsuit, and suddenly we’re told the standard pantsuit is no longer workforce attire. Women will need to find another way to achieve parity in attire.…” And a Black man in hoodie and jeans will also find it very difficult to be treated like Mark Zuckerberg in same.
Ford suggests that fashion will always engage in “cultural appropriation,” which he deems “another example of the centuries-old anxiety about the corrupting influence of fashion on symbols of group identity and social status. Fashion is ready to sacrifice any convention in the tireless quest for novelty; it is indifferent to political struggles and claims of moral prerogative. No doubt: fashion exploits and appropriates, but it doesn’t discriminate.” And he contends that complaints about cultural appropriate are “unique to societies marked by conspicuous racial or ethnic hierarchy. Groups who are more secure in their social status tend to be more forgiving when outsiders borrow their fashions.”
Ford ultimately approves of some dress codes precisely because clothing matters to meaning. A dress code can shape what a group or activity is and what it means to participants: this is a particular space, and we are in agreement about its importance. Plus, “informal standards of attire can be more demanding and more treacherous than any written dress code: failure to respect conventions of good taste marks one as an ignorant and tasteless boor, but too-slavish adherence to the rules can be a sign of insecurity, and hence poor breeding. While an explicit dress code demands only simple adherence, its absence leaves one adrift, forced to navigate ineffable standards of taste, elegance, and style—many vague and unwritten or overdetermined and contested.” He wryly concludes: “since 1960—precisely when large parts of American society began to abandon explicit common norms of dress—the volume of discarded clothing has increased by 750 percent, a reflection, perhaps, of millions of frantic and ultimately failed searches for an appropriate outfit in a world free of rules but full of judgment.” show less
This book was an engrossing read and has sparked a number of interesting debates in my immediate circle. This book is about society rather style. This is one of the few places that discusses the intersection of race and gender relations with clothing.
It discusses the causes behind phenomena that have long seemed mysterious to me - like, for instance, why is women's fashion so different in variety, conspicuousness and cost than men's fashion? Did you know that dressmaking and fashion was show more exclusively a male profession in the past? So, how did it become associated with women - and vacuity? This book tells the historic context for those transitions.
There is a thought-provoking section about the fashion context of the civil rights movement. The author offers his opinion in an even-keeled manner. As a woman in a male-dominated academic discipline, I was grateful for this book's perspective on women's fashion and its clash with the culture of dressing-down in academia and tech. It's been a couple of weeks since I finished this book, and it still feels like I'm reading it because it's on my mind. show less
It discusses the causes behind phenomena that have long seemed mysterious to me - like, for instance, why is women's fashion so different in variety, conspicuousness and cost than men's fashion? Did you know that dressmaking and fashion was show more exclusively a male profession in the past? So, how did it become associated with women - and vacuity? This book tells the historic context for those transitions.
There is a thought-provoking section about the fashion context of the civil rights movement. The author offers his opinion in an even-keeled manner. As a woman in a male-dominated academic discipline, I was grateful for this book's perspective on women's fashion and its clash with the culture of dressing-down in academia and tech. It's been a couple of weeks since I finished this book, and it still feels like I'm reading it because it's on my mind. show less
Fairly dense text, highly informative with many historical tidbits, good insight into the intersection of history and fashion
An interesting trend between an unwarranted claim of bias and bad law/precedence being establsihed. Legitimate claims don't seem to fare much better.
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