There Actually Were Fashion Police In Early European Cities, And They Dictated What People Could Wear Based On Social Status
Today, social media and fashion magazines guide the way people dress. But in most early modern European cities, there were fashion police to enforce the styles and trends of the time, according to historians.
The local laws dictated what people could and could not wear based on their group and social status.
“You can wear silk, but only in a certain number of colors—black, white, yellow, green, dark blue, red, purple, or tawny brown,” said Ana Cristina Howie, an art history scholar.
“You can wear velvet, but not if it has any kind of pattern. It’s hard to wrap your head around what’s forbidden because it’s so detailed.”
People were also allowed to wear wool in any of the colors that silk comes in. The shades of white, fawn, rose, and porcelain were acceptable as well.
These were just some of the “sumptuary” laws that the inhabitants of 16th-century Genoa were required to follow.
The point of the laws was to control the consumption of luxury clothing and discourage any “social ills” that wearing fancy garments might bring about. Fashion was a way for women to express themselves, yet the laws restricted them more than men.
Early modern Genoa was an important center of commerce. But what made them really unique was their sumptuary laws.
Other cities included birthplace, social class, and more in their sumptuary laws, but Genoa only separated the population into two categories—men and women.
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In the study, a ledger of sumptuary denouncements from 1598 in Genoa was examined. Authorities described how citizens broke the laws in more than 200 entries.
One entry detailed how the daughter of a noblewoman was stopped in Piazza San Lorenzo for wearing a yellow and mulberry silk-sleeved jacket.
In Piazza di Ponticello, a nobleman was spotted wearing an intricately embroidered taffeta cassock and breeches.
Additionally, men and women were written up for donning solid gold jewelry. The majority of the offenders were from nobility.
At the time, some dyes, like red, purple, and black, were harder to produce, so they were more expensive. Precious metals were also costly. The city wanted to limit the display of these obviously wealthy styles.
“Being overly ostentatious was seen as a vice—gluttonous appetite for material goods. And women were seen to be more easily tempted into luxuria because of weaker constitutions, which led them more easily into temptation,” Howie said.
The regulations for men did not even reach a page long. Meanwhile, the rules for women were three times as much.
The people who made up these fashion laws in Genoa were all among the same group of 1,000 ruling nobles. There was even a dedicated office to oversee the standards of luxury fashion.
Overall, the fashion police of Genoa give researchers a look into gender ideals of the time and the difference between how each gender was treated through these laws.
The details of the study were published in The Historical Journal.
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