Simon & Schuster is
publishing a book on the history of the laws of fashion.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Dress codes are as old as
clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol;
fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to
maintain political control. Merchants who dressed like princes and butchers’
wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies
structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England,
silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility and ballooning pants
called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance
era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and
dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red
cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the
day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s,
South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above
their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn
by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United
States and in the 1940s the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men
caused riots in cities from coast to coast.
Even in today’s more informal
world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our
clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long
fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and
tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a
crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still
influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts
and flip flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing
fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world and some
venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a
suit.
In Dress Codes, law professor and
cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford presents an insightful and entertaining
history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the present day, a walk
down history’s red carpet to uncover and examine the canons, mores, and customs
of clothing—rules that we often take for granted. After reading Dress Codes,
you’ll never think of fashion as superficial again—and getting dressed will
never be the same.
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 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.
More info
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