Review of Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History by Richard Thompson Ford

*Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History* by Richard Thompson Ford (2021). Published by Simon and Schuster.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world .

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

Today’s blog post is one I had half-written a bit ago, but then forgot about as I ended up starting my master’s thesis on Korean women’s literature. I went to the Fashion Institute of Technology for my undergraduate degrees, and that led to a life long fascination with fashion history and material culture. I wanted to minor in fashion history, but that didn’t happen because I graduated early during the pandemic.

Anyways, Dress Codes had been a book I wanted to read for the longest time. I finally ended up reading it when I was in graduate school, right before I was writing that thesis. It honestly came at the right time, as I was in a period where I was considering the rules of gender and the arts, and this book is literally about codes of attire.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction.

A survey on how fashion has been a method of control and order throughout history, particularly in the West.

When we often think about fashion, we think about in the moment we’re living in right now. What the trends are, how much the fabrics and clothes themselves are selling for, how exactly we’re going to accessorize the right way for the right moment. Typically, we don’t often think about the past, and how fashion is a methodology to uphold order.

Well, this is the book that explains just that. It’s largely focused on European culture and society during the Middle Ages, and pulls out specific examples from these periods to show how exactly the nobility would wear a certain kind of attire, while the peasants were marked by what they wore.

One of the interesting examples drawn out by the book is about the Jewish communities in Europe, especially Italy. If you know your Jewish history (or even World War II history), it would come as no surprise to you that the Jews during the 1400s were forced to wear certain kinds of clothes to identify them as Jewish.

Fashion back then was also very much a game of the wealthy elites. If you’re a starving peasant out in the fields, you’re not going to be worrying about the latest trends and styles. The peasants did have their own forms of fashion and industry, but it was more practical in many ways—which deserves to be studied as well!

And that’s a large heart of what the book is tapping into: who gets to decide what is in fashion, and how to they allow others to wear what’s considered that season’s vogue? Whether it’s red cloth in Medici Italy or the elaborate hair that was seen in the court of Marie Antoinette, these are also forms of power and control by denying others access to the same material culture.

The book does progress into more modern history, including the United States and what the rules of enforcement looked like for Black Americans, especially in the Jim Crowe era. As someone interested in Black history after slavery, I found this section of the book more interesting for me, even as we progressed into looking at the flappers and how their attire was banned in many spaces.

Finally, we do see how dress codes still exist today. From office workwear to the disdain for dreads and braids in certain spaces, fashion is still a litmus test of power and wealth. I never forgot in fashion school how we were taught that the wealthiest consumers never wore flashy logos, which meant that those looking to wear, for example, head to toe Gucci were new rich or people looking to signal to a different demographic.

Overall Thoughts

I think if you’ve never really considered fashion history through this lens, you’re really going to enjoy this book. I already was pretty aware of it as a concept and had studied it, so some of the information was new, but others I had not researched before and was interested to learn more about that specific moment in history.

What I’m trying to say is that maybe this book is more geared to those who aren’t entirely familiar with this concept, but I can see how those who are also would be likely to read and enjoy this book. For me, I’m glad I read it, but I don’t think I would return to it unless I need to reference its content.

I say go pick this one up if you’re interested! It’s definitely worth reading at least once.

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