Dress Codes Quotes

“Whenever someone chooses her attire with care and purpose and wears it with confidence and conviction, it is a small victory for human flourishing.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Ironically, dress codes that require modesty can eroticize the boundary between permissible and illicit, encouraging lust rather than preventing it. Concealment contains the timeless allure of forbidden fruit.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Zuckerberg in his uniform of gray T-shirts embodied the ideal ethos of Silicon Valley: an unselfconscious nerd too busy obsessively designing tomorrow’s technology to worry about appearances. This has a naïve charm. But if the CEO of the company thinks he isn’t doing his job if he spends any energy on the frivolous matter of attire, then what are we to think of the employee who arrives at work wearing a sharp tailored suit or a pair of high-heeled Louboutins? Here Zuckerberg’s shift to the second person is revealing: he begins discussing his own ambitions but then insists that “making… decisions about what you wear… consumes your energy.” Purported indifference to appearance becomes a reason to judge based on appearance; a new dress code displaces an older one.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“It’s in this way that the mystique of preppy style has retained its staying power: anyone with the temerity to question it has, by his very skepticism, revealed himself as untutored, too dim to appreciate the heightened sensibilities of the blue-blooded. Preppies may feign offense at this description but they will in fact take none because their aspiration is neither stylishness nor beauty but exclusivity, which they brilliantly achieve.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“most gendered clothing doesn’t refer to human biology; instead it reflects a social convention. “Women’s clothing” isn’t clothing that is especially suited to female bodies—it is simply any clothing that women typically wear. This means that every transgression of gender norms is also a potential revision of those norms:”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“For a woman, respecting tradition isn’t an option when the tradition in question involves the exclusion of women.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Modesty is, by design, always a moving target. Any group of women—no matter how they are dressed—can and will be divided into the virtuous and the sinful, the good girls and the bad girls (and because women carry the guilt of Eve’s original sin, moralists will always find some bad ones).”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Suffrage! Right to hold office! Show us first the woman who has independence and sense and taste enough to… walk down Fifth Avenue wearing… a shoe which does not destroy both her comfort and her gait.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“High heels belong exclusively to the female sex and so demonstrate adherence to gendered conventions of female propriety. But they are also fundamentally impractical and decorative, inviting the age-old condemnation of feminine vanity. Consequently, for every dress code that requires high heels, there is at least one that condemns them as frivolous and even perverse.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“[T]he 1963 March on Washington… took 10 years of sustained movement-building to get to the point where you could even think about it and then it took six months of organizing.… [I]f you’re a person in power, you look at that, and you’re thinking, “If they can pull this off, they have logistics, they have organizational capacity, they have collective decision-making ability.…” [By contrast, in the case of more recent protests organized on social media] it came together very quickly. You know it came from a Facebook post.… [I]t’s not the same length of time and the same building of capacities as the 1963 march. While it looks the same, it’s not signaling to the powerful the same thing because digital technologies… give us springs on our feet.… [But] that means when you need to do the next thing, you don’t necessarily have the muscle.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Clothing… is… the main choice made by the hippy; in relation to the norms of the West.… Cleanliness… the most important of American values… is counteracted in spectacular fashion: dirt on the body, in the hair, on the clothes; clothes dragging along the street… but somehow it is still different from real dirtiness, different from a long-engrained poverty, from a dirtiness that deforms the body… hippy dirty is different, it has been borrowed for the holidays, sprinkled over like dust.…”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Perhaps d’Éon came to see himself as a bad boy because what it meant to be a good man had changed.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“they renounced a showy, obvious, and easily copied luxury and replaced it with the quiet, subtle, and elusive luxury we call “elegance.” The luxury of costly adornment was replaced—or at least supplemented—by the much more precious luxury of time and knowledge necessary to be “cultivated.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“the mass appeal of the hairpiece was more like that of the timepiece: portable watches began life as an exotic contrivance to be shown off at high-society galas, but became popular as tools that could be strapped to the wrists of working people engaged in practical pursuits.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Clothing expresses personality only by taking the intelligible symbols of social status and combining them in distinctive ways to suggest something beyond status: a unique individual.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Propaganda that tied Jews to unhealthy and unnatural sexuality made it easier for Christians to blame them for the spread of disease. For instance, according to Sennett, when Venice suffered a syphilis epidemic, the city relied on its Jewish doctors to treat the disease, but at the same time blamed them for its spread: in 1520, the Venetian surgeon and scientist Paracelsus attacked the city’s Jewish doctors who “purge [syphilitics], smear them, wash them, and perform all manner of impious deception.” Jewish doctors who treated victims of disease—syphilis, leprosy, and especially plague—often wore distinctive clothing designed to protect the doctor from the vapors thought to spread the disease—a precursor of the iconic bird-beaked plague doctor’s mask that developed in the seventeenth century. Because many doctors in Venice were Jewish—especially those called upon to treat the victims of communicable diseases—this strange costume and its associations with disease and death became associated with Jews. The resulting aversion culminated in 1516 in the physical segregation of Venetian Jews in the district after which isolated ethnic neighborhoods have been named ever since, the industrial ward named for the Italian verb “to pour,” or gettare: the ghetto.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“New dress codes stigmatized Jews using the same colorful fabric or garments that marked prostitutes. For instance, 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. In 1397, Venetian law required Jews to wear a yellow badge, and a 1416 law required prostitutes and pimps to wear a yellow scarf. In Viterbo, any Jewish woman who dared appear on the streets without her yellow veil could be stripped naked by the first person to apprehend her—the same punishment prescribed in other cities for prostitutes who strayed from the districts where they were allowed to solicit customers.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“New dress codes stigmatized Jews using the same colorful fabric or garments that marked prostitutes. For instance, 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.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“According to historian Richard Sennett, an anti-Jewish canard condemned the Jewish banker who lent money at interest as a kind of sexual deviant who “puts his money to the unnatural act of generation”—combining the sins of avarice and lust. The clergy who insisted on sectarian segregation similarly tied the lust of the bejeweled temptress to the greed of the Jew. For example, Friar Giacoma della Marca insisted that feminine vanity was both a sign and an instrument of the avaricious Jew: the lust for luxury drove Christian families into debt and ultimately forced them “to pawn to the Jew for ten [soldi] a garment he will resell for thirty… Whence Jews become rich and Christians paupers.” According to Hughes, “[T]he Jewish sign, which came to mark Jews throughout the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth century, can almost everywhere be traced” to such religious teachings that linked Jewish impurity to the corruption of cosmopolitan cities where Christian and Jew mingled promiscuously.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“In the summer of 1416, about a decade before Friar Bernardino gave his address condemning feminine vanities, a woman identified only as “Allegra, wife of Joseph” was arrested in the Italian city of Ferrara and fined ten ducats for appearing in public without her earrings. Her crime of fashion was in failing to exhibit a visible sign of her community. Allegra was a Jew and the law dictated that Jewish women wear “rings hanging from both ears… uncovered and visible to all.” The symbolism could not have been clearer: in an era when superfluous adornment was condemned as a sign of sin, Jews were required by law to wear conspicuous jewelry. The dress codes that condemned jewelry as vanity also made it a mandatory sign of Judaism.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Psychology defines the modern person—for us it is the very essence of what it is to be human. We have replaced the concept of sin with the idea of malice, the confessional booth with the therapist’s couch, the immortal soul with the immutable psyche.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Some women seek to escape the limitations of conventional femininity by rejecting compulsory feminine decorativeness in favor of a modest austerity while others reject compulsory feminine modesty in favor of a daring sexual assertiveness.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“The display of opulence characteristic of elite attire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance gave way to a new ideal of understatement: the courtly display that advertised the divine right of kings and queens yielded to a new aristocratic wardrobe. In this new political context, high social status began to be associated with industriousness, competence, and enlightened reason as opposed to noble birth and honor, and it was marked by a new understated elite style. Men still distinguished themselves through their attire, but the mark of elite status was in subtle refinements rather than conspicuous adornment. In many respects, this shift was a way of preserving elitism under the guise of attacking it: advances in manufacturing and trade along with a growing market in secondhand clothing had made many formerly rare adornments and luxuries more widely available, diluting their value as signs of exclusive privilege. The new status symbols of elegance, by contrast, required education and acculturation, which were much harder to fake.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“we can identify four concerns underlying the major developments in fashion: status, sex, power, and personality. Clothing is a status symbol, and history is replete with rules and laws designed to ensure that the social status of individuals is reflected in what they wear. Dress is also a sex symbol—social conventions and laws have ensured that clothing establishes whether one is male or female, sexually innocent or experienced, married or single, chaste or promiscuous. Attire is a uniform of power: it has helped define national belonging as much as any territorial border; it has differentiated ethnic groups and tribes as much as any language or cultural ritual; it has shaped religious sects as much as any scripture; and it has both established and challenged racial hierarchies. Finally, fashion is a medium for the expression of individual personality. We assemble our wardrobes and daily ensembles to reflect a distinctive point of view and confirm a distinctive sense of self.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“we can identify four concerns underlying the major developments in fashion: status, sex, power, and personality.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“The church retried Jehanne posthumously and reversed her conviction in 1456, citing Saint Thomas Aquinas who allowed an exception to the biblical ban on cross-dressing: “Nevertheless, this [cross-dressing] may at times be done without sin due to some necessity, either for the purpose of concealing oneself from enemies, or due to a lack of other clothing.…” Similarly, Saint Hildegard von Bingen had written, “Men and women should not wear each other’s clothing except in necessity. A man should never put on feminine dress or a woman use male attire… unless a man’s life or a woman’s chastity is in danger.…” The new tribunal concluded that Jehanne had worn male garb out of necessity.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“In 1429, a seventeen-year-old girl who would soon come to be renowned as Jehanne la Pucelle (“Jeanne, the maiden”) left a small town in northeast France to offer her services as a military strategist to Charles VII, the Dauphin—or heir to the throne—whose forces were losing a protracted war against English partisans threatening to displace him. At first, no one took her seriously, but Jehanne’s determination overcame initial resistance: her skill and insight helped the French develop new battle plans and her courage inspired the demoralized troops. Under Jehanne’s leadership, the French forces successfully thwarted a siege on the city of Orleans. Later she led a campaign to retake the city and cathedral of Reims, where the kings of France had been crowned ever since the Frankish tribes were united under one ruler, allowing the Dauphin to be crowned king in the ancient tradition. Jehanne’s remarkable successes seemed divinely ordained, which necessarily implied Charles’s divine right to rule France. In 1430 Jehanne was captured in battle and imprisoned. An ecclesiastical tribunal stacked with English partisans tried her for heresy. But Jehanne’s faith was beyond reproach. She showed an astonishing familiarity with the intricacies of scholastic theology, evading every effort to lure her into making a heretical statement. Unable to discredit her faith through her verbal testimony, the tribunal seized on the implicit statements made by Jehanne’s attire. In battle, she wore armor, which required linen leggings and a form-fitting tunic fastened together with straps—both traditionally masculine attire—and, like the men she fought alongside, she adopted this martial attire when off the battlefield as well. Citing the biblical proscription in Deuteronomy 22:5 (KJV) which warns, “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a women’s garment, for all who do are an abomination to the Lord your God,” the tribunal charged Jehanne with heresy. They burned her at the stake in 1431.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“This requires a bit of explanation. Of course, there have always been individuals, but the individual has not always been the focus of political and social ideals; indeed, people have not always thought of themselves, first and foremost, as individuals. Instead, they were members of groups, defined by collective enterprises and identities and by their role—or status—in such groups. The idea that we are, above all else, individuals, with personalities that transcend our social status, occupation, and family heritage, is relatively new.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“These developments allowed attire to express a much broader range of social meanings—even if these meanings were less familiar and less clear than those of older draped garments. As a consequence, meaningful attire was available for the first time to people from many different social ranks and vocations—the butcher and his wife in addition to members of the nobility and the clergy. Clothing could be a vehicle of personal expression. Some historians refer to this as the birth of fashion.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History

“Tailoring allowed for clothing that skimmed the body, emphasizing the individual morphology of the wearer—clothing that was more personal. While draped garments conveyed status through color, embellishment, and fabric, the innovation of tailoring allowed clothing to conform to the body, suggesting the form of the person underneath. Men’s clothing adopted the new mode and the once-ubiquitous draped garments became the distinctive garb of tradition-bound occupations—the clergy, academia, and the law—and of women. Later, women’s clothing began to borrow some—but never all—of the elements of tailored menswear: for instance, sleeves and bodices hugged the body but below the waist the old draped form remained. Both men’s and women’s clothing became more expressive as it became more form fitting.”
― Richard Thompson Ford, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History