Ornamentalism

by Anne Anlin Cheng

Here “legal cloth” signals more than a rhetorical flourish and articulates the very logic of civil rights as a form of extra adornment. What makes a theoretically blank body come to emit meaning and visibility (whether the visibility of legitimacy or otherwise) turns on this external overlay. In Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form, Gary Watt traces the long etymological connection between law and dress; we often speak of “the cloak of justice,” “vested interests,” “to pin a crime on someone,” and so forth.29 But where Watt posits law and dress as cultural equivalents (in that both the judicial and the sartorial aim to regulate and order the body, which is why his study focuses on the regulation of uniforms, judicial robes, etc.), I suggest that the relationship is not simply analogous but structural.