Fashion Foundations

Dress, Body, Culture

Series Editor Joanne B. Eicher, Regents’ Professor, University of Minnesota

Books in this provocative series seek to articulate the connections between culture and
dress which is defined here in its broadest possible sense as any modification or
supplement to the body. Interdisciplinary in approach, the series highlights the dialogue
between identity and dress, cosmetics, coiffure, and body alterations as manifested in
practices as varied as plastic surgery, tattooing, and ritual scarification. The series aims,
in particular, to analyze the meaning of dress in relation to popular culture and gender
issues and will include works grounded in anthropology, sociology, history, art history,
literature, and folklore.

ISSN: 1360-466X

Previously published titles in the Series

Helen Bradley Foster, “New Raiments of Self”: African American Clothing in the
Antebellum South
Claudine Griggs, S/he: Changing Sex and Changing Clothes
Michaele Thurgood Haynes, Dressing Up Debutantes: Pageantry and Glitz in Texas
Anne Brydon and Sandra Niesson, Consuming Fashion: Adorning the Transnational
Body
Dani Cavallaro and Alexandra Warwick, Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and
the Body
Judith Perani and Norma H. Wolff, Cloth, Dress and Art Patronage in Africa
Linda B. Arthur, Religion, Dress and the Body
Paul Jobling, Fashion Spreads: Word and Image in Fashion Photography
Fadwa El-Guindi, Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance
Thomas S. Abler, Hinterland Warriors and Military Dress: European Empires and
Exotic Uniforms
Linda Welters, Folk Dress in Europe and Anatolia: Beliefs about Protection and
Fertility
Kim K. P. Johnson and Sharron J. Lennon, Appearance and Power
Barbara Burman, The Culture of Sewing
Annette Lynch, Dress, Gender and Cultural Change
Antonia Young, Women Who Become Men
David Muggleton, Inside Subculture: The Postmodern Meaning of Style
Nicola White, Reconstructing Italian Fashion: America and the Development of the
Italian Fashion Industry
Brian J. McVeigh, Wearing Ideology: The Uniformity of Self-Presentation in Japan
Shaun Cole, Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Gay Men’s Dress in the Twentieth
Century
Kate Ince, Orlan: Millennial Female
Nicola White and Ian Griffiths, The Fashion Business: Theory, Practice, Image
Ali Guy, Eileen Green and Maura Banim, Through the Wardrobe: Women’s
Relationships with their Clothes
Linda B. Arthur, Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-
Cultural Perspective
William J. F. Keenan, Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part
Joanne Entwistle and Elizabeth Wilson, Body Dressing
Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset
Paul Hodkinson, Goth: Identity, Style and Subculture
Sandra Niessen, Ann Marie Leshkowich and Carla Jones, Re-Orienting Fashion: The
Globalization of Asian Dress
DRESS, BODY, CULTURE

Fashion Foundations
Early Writings on Fashion and Dress

Edited by

Kim K. P. Johnson, Susan J. Torntore

and Joanne B. Eicher

Oxford • New York

First published in 2003 by
Berg
Editorial offices:
1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK
838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA

© Kim K. P. Johnson, Susan J. Torntore and Joanne B. Eicher 2003

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form
or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is an imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1 85973 614 9 (Cloth)

1 85973 619 X (Paper)

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants.

Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn.
 “Fashions in all our gesterings,
Fashions in our attyre,
Which (as the wise have thoughte) do cum,
And go in circled gyre.”

(A Medicinall Morall, Drant, 1566)

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 Contents
Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part 1: Dressing the Body 5

1 Origins and Motives 15

Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes
Michel de Montaigne 15
The Significance of Clothes Sylvia H. Bliss 18
Dress Alfred E. Crawley 21
Customs and Beliefs: Ceremonial
Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown 27
Dress Ruth Bendict 29
Costumes and Ideologies Hilaire Hiler
and Meyer Hiler 34

2 Physical Connections between the Body and Dress 37

The Psychology of Clothing
George Van Ness Dearborn 37
Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and His
Relation to the World Hermann Lotze 40
Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self
G. Stanley Hall 43

3 Health Issues and Dress Reform 51

Fashion in Deformity William Henry Flower 51
The Science of Dress
Ada S. Ballin 54
The Reform Dress Amelia Bloomer 59
The Development and Function of Clothing
Knight Dunlap 63
 Contents

Part 2: Fashioning Identity 69

4 Establishing Identity 73
On Fashion William Hazlitt 73
Let Us Have a National Costume Mary E. Fry 77
The Psychology of Woman’s Dress
William I. Thomas 81

5 Appearance Management 85
Remarks on the Psychology of Clothes
Louis W. Flaccus 85
Psychology of Dress Grace Margaret Morton 87

Part 3: The “F” Word 91

6 Fashion as Change 97
Development in Dress George H. Darwin 97
Badges and Costumes Herbert Spencer 100
Fashion Georg Simmel 104
Motivation in Fashion Elizabeth Hurlock 107
Fashion Edward Sapir 112
Some Conclusions James Laver 114

7 Predicting Fashion Change 119

On the Nature of Fashion Agnes Brooks Young 119

8 Fashion as Collective and Consumer Behavior 125

Fashion Movements Herbert Blumer 125
Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon our
Notions of Beauty and Deformity Adam Smith 127
The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress
Thorstein B. Veblen 129
Dress as an Expression of Pecuniary Culture
Thorstein B. Veblen 132
A Psychological Analysis of Fashion Motivation
Estelle de Young Barr 136

Chronological Annotated Bibliography (1575–1940) 141

Index 153

viii
 Acknowledgments
Joanne B. Eicher and Margaret P. Grindereng first developed the majority of
this material as a graduate-level course at the University of Minnesota – find-
ing readings that contributed to this present endeavor. Professor Grindereng
then taught the first offerings of the course and we thank her for her contri-
butions. Catherine Black, who was a student in one of those early courses
and who has subsequently taught the course, generously provided biograph-
ical materials for several of the authors. We also acknowledge University of
Minnesota graduate research assistants Jennifer Yurchisin and Theresa Winge
for their diligent detective work. Jennifer spent long hours tracking down
original copies of the readings to prepare the excerpts for scanning. Theresa
persistently searched for biographical information and assisted in locating
illustrations. Lori Rowell, graduate research assistant at Illinois State Uni-
versity, transposed the bibliography into American Psychological Association
style. Lois Williams, copyright administrator at the University of Minnesota’s
Copyright Office handled all of the permissions for the reading excerpts and
illustrations. Kathryn Earle and her editorial staff were instrumental in several
ways, especially in encouraging the publication idea. Samantha Jackson
deserves special thanks for her work scanning and formatting all of the orig-
inal readings without which we would not have completed the manuscript.
Sara Everett worked to help bring the manuscript to completion. Finally, we
want to acknowledge all of the University of Minnesota graduate students
who took this course and thoughtfully added suggestions for new readings
and biographical information over the years, helping to shape our final effort.
Kim Johnson and Joanne Eicher specifically want to thank Mary Ellen Roach-
Higgins, who over the years provided inspiration and several early references
regarding origins and motives from many disciplines.

Kim K. P. Johnson, St. Paul, MN

Susan J. Torntore, Normal, IL
Joanne B. Eicher, St. Paul, MN

ix
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 Introduction

Introduction
Fashion exists in many areas of life, not only in the way we dress, but also in
many other areas such as food, home furnishings, and even our ways of
thinking. Most often, however, dress becomes the focus when fashion arises
as a topic of discussion, and the discussion frequently centers on clothing.
Our view and definition of dress is one that is a more encompassing concept
than focusing on clothing alone. Dressing the body includes many acts and
products that serve as a nonverbal communication system. As we dress the
body, we manipulate, modify, and supplement it with a wide range of products
and artifacts. These acts and products allow us a means to present ourselves
to others through the development of personal, social, and cultural identities.
In this regard, we use the definition of dress developed by Eicher and Roach-
Higgins (1992, p. 5) “as an assemblage of body modifications and/or supple-
ments displayed by a person in communicating with other human beings.”
We are further interested in fashion because the word indicates that some
dress practices end and others take their place.
As scholars involved in writing and teaching about the topic of fashion in
dress, we found that current writers – whether scholars, students, or journal-
ists – believe that interest in fashion is a recent one.1 Some imply that they
have discovered fashion’s importance. The excerpts in this book illustrate,
along with the appended bibliography, that the study of fashion and dress
has been and still is widely conducted by individuals reflecting many dis-
ciplines. Consequently, in organizing and selecting excerpts for this book,
we illustrate that 1) the study of dress and study of fashion have been of
long interest and 2) authors associated with a variety of disciplines seek to
understand the phenomenon of fashion in dress. Our selected articles come
from English-language sources highlighting concepts that continue to have
relevance to readers in the twenty-first century. Our selections have dress or
fashion or both as a primary focus for analysis or argument. The authors we

1. This book spins off from a graduate level course for students interested in the study of
dress using early writings about dress. Joanne B. Eicher and Margaret P. Grindereng initiated
the course at the University of Minnesota in the early 1980s. It has been taught since then,
focusing both on the chronological development of the ideas and concepts involved.

1
 Introduction

selected, among them philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, psych-

ologists, economists, feminists, and social activists, demonstrate their concern
with fashion and its importance in understanding human behavior.
To facilitate appreciation of this material, and to be able to place it within
a context for the reader, we provide overview statements that precede each
section of the book. Our goal is to provide the reader with some context for
the reading along with identifying the thesis of each article and preparing
the reader for what is included. We choose to present a thematic organization
of the authors’ excerpts in contrast to a chronological presentation, selecting
themes that continue to intrigue contemporary writers and researchers such
as health issues, fashion change, and dress reform. We highlight some of the
current concerns about the meaning of fashion in dress in order to understand
behavior related to dressing the body. Our selections qualify as classic writings
on fashion and dress, writings that are often cited in both popular and acad-
emic literature. We also include others that have been overlooked and perhaps
with this exposure will be considered classics. Overall our selections may be
looked upon as seminal works that include some paradigm shifts and major
contributions to thinking about dress. We append a bibliography for readers
interested in additional early writings on fashion in dress. This larger list of
citations provides a brief perspective of the history of writings on dress, there-
fore, allowing some appreciation of the chronology in the development of
ideas related to fashion and dress, from Montaigne in 1575 through two
publications in 1940.
Several considerations guided our decisions about which readings to include
in this collection. One of the themes reflected in our selections is that of
defining fashion and dress. Our selections allow the reader to track through
time the view of these concepts and to assess how closely the authors’ defini-
tions fit with ours. Another concern in choosing the selections was to illustrate
the diversity of opinions about fashion in dress along with the diversity in
the authors’ backgrounds and interests. However, the selections come
primarily from a social-science orientation, not an aesthetic or environmental
orientation (among others) that could have been equally possible. The inter-
disciplinary nature of interest in the field of dress and fashion becomes clear
in perusing the selections, for they illustrate that interest in fashion and dress
has not been confined to a single discipline. Given the fact that our selections
largely straddle the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, another theme
that runs through many of the excerpts is the assumption of social Darwinism.
It has been said that no book, other than the Bible, has had a greater effect
on society than Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Menton, 1994). The
evolutionary explanations arising from Darwinism had a major impact on
the thinking of the authors who write about dress after its introduction in

2
 Introduction

the late 1800s. The feature of Darwinism most often cited by those who
attempt to justify their moral and social views with “science” (evolution), is
the concept of the “survival of the fittest.” This application of Darwinian
doctrine to human society and behavior is known as social Darwinism
(Menton). George Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, was one of the first
writers to apply evolutionary theory to dress. Another feature of these articles
is the opportunity for readers to reflect on the diversity of methods used to
study fashion and dress reflected in these readings. The selections reflect
armchair methodologies as well as early positivistic and interpretative
approaches. In addition to making note of methodological approaches our
selections allow the reader to trace the progression of the types of questions
and concerns writers had about fashion and dress. From early concerns about
origins and motives for dressing the body to concerns about health, the
concerns of contemporary writers echo the issues our early writers addressed.
We chose the year 1940 as an arbitrary endpoint for our collection of
early writings on dress. In our collection of excerpts we maintain the spelling,
formatting, and references of the original publications. We have renumbered
footnotes to facilitate reading and supplied references when authors supplied
references at the end of each reading. Also included at the end of each article
is a brief biographical note about the author(s). Much of this biographical
information was obtained from encyclopedia entries (Grolier.com and Ency-
clopediaBritannica On-line), university websites, and other publications by
the authors. We used ellipses at the beginning of an excerpt to indicate that
other material preceded the selection. Most of our collection is material in
the public domain. For those few that are not, we sought copyright permission
and where unsuccessful in our search, we are happy to acknowledge the
copyright holder when identified.

References

Eicher, J. B. and Roach-Higgins, M. E. (1992). Definition and classification of dress:

Implications for analysis of gender roles. In R. Barnes and J. B. Eicher (Eds). Dress
and gender: Making and meaning. Oxford & New York: Berg.
Menton, D. (1994). The religion of nature: Social Darwinism. Retrieved October 1,
2002 from www.gennet.org/metro15.htm.

3
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 Part 1
Dressing the Body
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 Dressing the Body

Dressing the Body

This part of the book is divided into three chapters to provide various writers’
views on the question of why we dress. The first chapter focuses on origins
and motives for dress. The second looks at the physical experience of dressing
the body: herein, writers begin to address the role of dress in establishing a
sense of the physical self. The third chapter presents dress reform and health
issues related to dress. Authors in this section of this book represent a range
of backgrounds such as art, anthropology, philosophy, philology, medicine,
psychology, and feminism.
In attempting to answer the question of origins, writers address what is
the source, or the beginnings of dress. In addressing motives, authors concen-
trate on answering what causes a person to act or identifying the impulse(s)
that stimulated action. In discerning the motive for the origins of dressing
the body, the question usually asked is about what causes people to dress
their bodies in a certain way. What explanations exist for why humans dressed
their bodies? We present common theories and conjectures on why humans
dress the body. In our view, writers, in asking why did the act of dress
originate, searched for motives as an explanation. In dealing with origins of
human behavior we must become involved with prehistory. Origins can’t be
known without actual archaeological, written, or oral history evidence.
Generally, we lack these types of evidence for early peoples. Therefore, we
contend that only speculations answer the questions of how dress originated
and why dress originated.
In these excerpts several writers hypothesize that some acts of dressing
the body originated with the motive of protecting the body. Our selections
indicate suppositions or extrapolations to an earlier time with many writers
basing their conjectures for the origins of dress on their contemporary views
of a civilization that is inherent in a social-evolutionary or social-Darwinist
perspective. A stated assumption of some of these authors is that we can
learn something about the origins of dress by looking at what we see today
and projecting backward. By making this a stated assumption, some of these
authors recognize that this approach may not be accurate. Other authors do
not clearly state this assumption but appear to us to be guided by it.

7
 Dressing the Body

In textile and clothing courses and early textbooks, with a focus on the
socio-cultural, historical, and socio-psychological aspects of dress, an early
exercise is to speculate on the early origins and motives of dressing the body.
Although we can continue speculating about origins and motives, as noted
earlier we take the approach of Crawley (1912, see p. 21 of this volume)
that the evidence we need in order to answer this question is lacking. What
we have are some artifacts and much descriptive material. Speculations are
more of a reflection of what we know or how we use materials than real
knowledge of the actual origins and motives. However, there is value in
acknowledging these early writers’ views because this material presents us
with the opportunity to realize that many ideas about dress and fashion are
not new.

Origins and Motives

Michel de Montaigne (1575), as one of the earliest writers to reflect on dress,

focuses on the very question of why humans wear clothing. In his essay, his
use of the term clothing seems to be consistent with our use of the term
dress. He attempts to explain why humans wear clothing, and why we have
adopted these “borrowed means” (p. 224). Montaigne stated that “the naked
state” (p. 225) is the natural condition and undressed humans, like all living
things, did not need artificial protection against the effects of the physical
environment. However, humans lost this protection when they started wearing
clothes. In his essay, he asks whether nakedness is the original custom of
human beings. Montaigne questions whether humans truly dress the body
as a form of protection. His answer proposes custom as the main explanation
for dressing the body. Montaigne’s essay, presented in its entirety, reflects his
interest in uncovering universal explanations and determining whether these
explanations derive from natural or man-made laws. He took what can be
labeled a Darwinist approach even though he wrote prior to the time of
Darwin’s theory of evolution. In questioning whether protection for environ-
mental reasons was the original motive for dressing the body, his work is an
early attempt at an explanation within a cultural perspective.
Sylvia Hortense Bliss (1916), in her attempt to construct a philosophy of
clothing, also addresses the question of why humans wear clothes. Her answer
spans two disciplinary perspectives – anthropology and psychoanalysis. She
discusses the origins and functions of clothing from her contemporary
standpoint four centuries after Montaigne. Although Bliss uses the terms cloth-
ing, costume, apparel, and dress interchangeably, she defines dress consistently
with our preferred definition.

8
 Dressing the Body

Bliss (1916) introduces the idea of humans as incomplete and unfinished

beings compared to the rest of nature. She suggests that dress embodies and
reflects unconscious or subconscious ideals and ideas. Rather than dress
originating as custom, as both Montaigne (1575) and Crawley (1912) suggest,
Bliss argues that the history of dress is a process of humans striving for the
perfect “human costume” (p. 226). She proposes that this will be “fitting,
natural, and characteristic as the exterior of fur and feathers for animal and
bird” (p. 225). Unlike Darwin (1872), who interpreted a change in clothing
as an evolutionary process in response to changing needs and functions, Bliss
suggests that a change in clothing signifies a change in collective mental
outlook. Her notion echoes the ideas of Carl Jung’s collective unconscious1
and Henri Bergson’s creative evolution.2
Alfred E. Crawley’s (1912) work was first published as an essay in an
encyclopedia and later reprinted in a book, Dress, Drinks and Drums. In
our excerpt he is also concerned with the origins of and motives for dressing
the body. Crawley appears to use both the terms dress and clothing inter-
changeably, and in his analysis refers to a full definition of dress consistent
with ours when he says “if dress be taken to include anything worn on the
person, other than armor . . .” (p. 22). Our excerpt directly focuses on origins
and motives, summarizing the existing hypotheses. He categorizes what he
sees as the prevalent hypotheses into three distinct groups: the decorative
element, the idea of concealment as related to modesty and sexual attraction,
and the need for protection.
Crawley (1912) believes that since we have no direct evidence about the
origins of dress, the reasons for origins remain as only speculations. He sees
the main question as the process of invention, not the invention of dress.
Our excerpt also presents his ideas that dress is a means for extending the
body’s capabilities and for allowing social display. In comparing clothing to
a house in affording the same kind of environmental protection, he states
that dress is “an extension of the passive area of a person” (p. 4), a “second
skin” (p. 4) that allows people to not only to adapt their environment but to
have mastery over it. Crawley uses an evolutionary model in his discussion.
Dress comes from people adapting to their environment; he believes dress
should be treated in the same way as weapons, machines, and tools. He expands

1. Psychiatrist Carl Jung (1965) introduced the concept of collective unconscious, which
originates in the inherited structure of the brain, representing a form of the unconscious mind
common to humankind as a whole. It includes memories, impressions, and impulses shared by
all.
2. Creative evolution is a theory developed by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1911) to
bring the elements of intuition, human intelligence, and unpredictability into the mechanistic
theory of evolution. It would apply to the use of creativity in material culture settings.

9
 Dressing the Body

the biological view of evolution and uses the religious and social significance
of dress as a guide to include the psychological evolution of dress.
Crawley (1912) builds on the work of Lotze (1887), Hall (1898), and
Spencer (1896), and provides an early anthropological approach to the study
of dress. He sees dress as both an expression and extension of personality,
and in this sense, then, explains how dress extends the capabilities of the
body. Dress marks various biological and social grades in life, such as age,
gender, and status. Dress, as a social form, is a social habit and becomes a
direct affirmation of the personality and the state, expressing family, social
movement and changing social roles, and government. He also extends the
concept of dress as protection to include the psychic or psychological pro-
tection of dress used as an amulet, as protection from evil, the evil eye, and
evil spirits. Crawley’s work is an important development in the study of dress
as a form of communication, as social display, and as social currency.
Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown (1922) limits discussion of the origins and
motives of dressing the body to a narrow view of dress as personal ornament.
In this excerpt, drawn from a chapter in his book, he questions the meaning
and social function of personal ornament. Radcliffe-Brown does not use the
term dress or clothing in this discussion but discusses modifications made to
the body along with supplements such as necklaces. His focus is dress. His
hypothesis is that personal ornament is “a means by which the society acts
upon, modifies, and regulates the sense of self in the individual” (p. 315).
He provides two motives for the use of personal ornament – the desire for
protection and the desire for display. “All ornament marks the relation of
the individual to the society, and to forces/power in society to which he owes
his well-being and happiness (p. 319).” He uses numerous observations and
examples from his fieldwork as an anthropologist to talk about dress displaying
dependence on society. When dressing the body, a person uses dress to mark
and even highlight a position or place in society, making the person visible
either temporarily or permanently. In addition to the concept of dress marking
and displaying social value, Radcliffe-Brown, like Crawley (1912), believes
dress offers protection from the meta-physical as well as the physical environ-
ment.
Ruth Benedict (1931), an anthropologist writing a definition of dress for
the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, offers the view that we can know
why people clothed themselves in the past by examining the present. She
refers to this process of examining the present as conducting a comparative
study of the “divergent behavior of now existing peoples” (p. 235). She
outlines contemporary theories of origins and motives for dressing the body,
such as originating from ideas of magic and protection, as protection against
the rigors of climate, or as a means of sexual attraction. She discards one

10
 Dressing the Body

popular theory – the notion of modesty as an instinct for expression in cloth-

ing. However, she states that all other theories of the origins of dress contain
“varied amounts of truth” (p. 236). Benedict uses the terms dress and clothing
interchangeably without defining them; her use is consistent with our use of
the term dress. In addition to summarizing the theories of the origins of
clothing, Benedict makes one major distinction between the dress of earlier
civilizations and modern dress. Whereas early dress was differentiated
geographically, she sees contemporary dress as differentiated in time, claiming
that the rise of fashion is a system of change that developed during the
Renaissance. Benedict hypothesizes that “this swift succession of styles will
maintain itself as a fixed characteristic of dress as a culture trait in our
civilization” (p. 237). In other words, fashion, as change in styles, is not
only a fixed characteristic of dress but also a cultural trait.
Hilaire Hiler and Meyer Hiler (1939), in their Bibliography of Costume,
provide the reader with a classification system of all of the theories explaining
or hypothesizing why humans dress the body. In developing their classification
system, they draw from sources in various fields of interest and study, such
as the fashion industry, ethnology, history, painting, theater, advertising, and
sociology. Hiler and Hiler contend that these theories – “the psychological
and social factors underlying all costume development.” (p. iv) – explain the
development of dress around the world. Their use of the term costume relates
to Radcliffe-Brown’s (1922) conceptualization of dress as limited to personal
ornament. Hiler and Hiler use the term costume to mean “dressing up”
(p. xii) or ornamenting and adorning the body in styles distinct from what
they refer to as “habitual” (p. xiii) clothing or the garments worn to protect
the body from the environment. This use of dress and costume is clearly different
from ours.

Physical Connections between the Body and Dress

George Van Ness Dearborn (1918) attempts to contribute to what he refers

to as the new science of clothing. Echoing the approach of Montaigne (1575),
Dearborn mounts an argument with a scientific approach about discovering
the laws underlying clothing behavior. He includes two parts to his mono-
graph – a physiological psychology of clothing and what he views as the
beginnings of an applied psychology of clothing. His use of the term clothing
is limited to styles of garments and is not inclusive. Our excerpt comes from
the section on the physiological psychology of clothing. Dearborn maintains
that “one’s clothes are one of the important things that intervenes between
the individual personality and his environment and you understand that life
itself in a sense is a reaction of an individual to his environment” (p. 4).

11
 Dressing the Body

Dearborn (1918) emphasizes that humans, in order to be “both more

efficient and happy,” need to be educated in how to dress “properly” (p. 1).
The term, according to Dearborn, properly relates to how dress impacts the
functions of the physical body, such as breathing, sweating, heart rate,
movement of limbs and even digestive action, as well as to the psychological
sense of comfort and well-being of the whole person. An important aspect
of his applied psychology of clothing is his conclusion that “there can be no
‘laws’ social and much less official for scientifically clothing the population”
(p. 69). In other words, science must apply itself to suggesting how individuals
should dress rather than how an entire society should dress.
German philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1887), in his seminal essay,
credits clothing as giving human beings sensations and feelings of existence.
Dress, in contact with the surface of the physical body, can increase or
facilitate feelings of the continuation of the person. In his own words, “the
consciousness of our personal existence is prolonged into the extremities and
surfaces of this foreign body and the consequence is feeling now an expansion
of our proper self” (p. 592). In fact, dress or clothing, terms which Lotze
uses synonymously and which refer only to garments, are tools to create
self-consciousness, just as a stick held in the hand or the hands themselves
are tools that extend the body. Our excerpt is part of his major work on the
theory of knowledge and reality, in which he focused on humans and their
relation to the world. This work, which began the study of dress and aware-
ness of self, influenced several of his contemporaries including Hall (1898)
and Spencer (1896), and subsequent scholars including Crawley (1912) and
Bliss (1916), among many others.
G. Stanley Hall (1898) builds upon what he calls the concept of “Lotzean
self-feeling” (p. 366), and looks at children to determine the development of
the sense of self. He bases his presentation on data utilizing a questionnaire
distributed to teachers and focused on their observations of children. He
believes that mental growth progresses in evolutionary stages, and his present-
ation outlines those stages. His main concern in this excerpt is psychological.
His focus is on how humans develop physical self-consciousness. Using the
terms dress and clothing interchangeably, Hall contends that dress and
adornment are used to attract the attention of a child to its body. In other
words, clothes consciousness facilitates body consciousness. One of the
primary purposes of clothing for Hall is to get children on the correct develop-
mental path. Hall suggests that clothing has a moral impact on children in
that a change of dress can change a child’s attitude and behaviors. Thus,
how you dress a child is critical to the development of self. Hall offers a
critique of Lotze (1887) by saying that Lotze’s view about self-feeling as the
purpose of clothing in childhood is too extreme. Hall instead posits that

12
 Dressing the Body

clothing on children can function to secure the attention and interest of others,
that it is how clothing looks that counts, not how it feels. However, he does
credit Lotze with showing that clothing is an integral part of self-consciousness.

Heath Issues and Dress Reform

As a physician and surgeon, William Henry Flower (1881) calls for dress
reform but not as a women’s issue. His book presents a history of what he
calls deformities to the body in the name of fashion in both Western and non-
Western settings. Flower contends that any body modification as result of
dress, such as wearing tight corsets or fashionable shoes, deforms the natural
body and as a result is an immoral act. He uses the term dress to include such
body modifications as tattooing and corseting and is consistent with our use
of the term. According to Flower, nature should be used as the standard of
beauty, and dress reform, not fashion, is the way to preserve a civilized society.
Ada Ballin (1885) also focuses her concern on dress as it relates to health.
She takes a human ecological approach in her book, taking into account
humans and their near environment. She points out how some of the physical
aspects or needs of the body, such as maintaining body temperature or vent-
ilation, may be enhanced or inhibited by different body supplements. She
recommends prescriptions for healthy dress, and proposes a “rational dress
system” (p. 171) to maximize health and beauty. According to Ballin, this
system must be fashionable as well as healthy or else it will not be successful.
It is her objective to point out how clothing can be made healthy without
being unfashionable. She contends that “sanitarians may preach forever
without making a single convert, since women – especially women in Society
– dread, and have reason to dread, ridicule, and they would endure tortures
rather than appear unfashionable” (p. v). She uses the term dress as a synonym
for clothing without a broader definition. Ballin, an early contributor to what
she refers to as the science of dress, proposes practical applications as well
as presenting the theories behind them.
One well-known solution to the calls for women’s dress reform was the
Bloomer costume, which was based on a pair of Turkish harem pants and a
long, loose tunic. A common misconception about suffragist Amelia Bloomer’s
(1895) relationship to dress reform and the ensemble associated with her
name is that she designed it and promoted it as part of the dress reform
movement. However, as she herself explains in the excerpt taken from the
biography written by her husband, Bloomer stopped wearing it eventually
because it detracted from the real reform focus of her work, which was
women’s rights and suffrage. Bloomer wore the style of reform dress because

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 Dressing the Body

she saw it as convenient for maintaining her busy lifestyle and because it fit
within her philosophy.
Like Flower (1881) and Ballin (1885), Knight Dunlap (1928) also calls for
dress reform, albeit forty years after the time-frame of what dress historians
designate as the dress-reform movement, but his issue is not physical health.
In the section on “the psychological problem of clothing” (p. 64), Dunlap
discusses the problems of determining the motives for dressing the body. He
concludes that the origins of clothing were in the human need for protection
from “injurious and unpleasant agencies” (p. 69) such as insects. Ornaments
and fashionable dress do not offer practical protection but instead confer
status and communicate identity. While he differentiates clothing from
ornament, Dunlap restricts his use of the term clothing to mean garments.
Dunlap (1928) contends that modesty evolved only once it became possible
to indicate one’s wealth and social status through dress. He also suggests
that clothing developed along gender lines based on a practical basis of sexual
selection. Men’s clothing became practical to suit their economic needs and
strength, and women’s clothing developed along the lines of enhancing beauty.
In his view, the clothing of his time period equalized sexual competition.
Men and women of all status levels could look alike through their use of
dress. This meant that a prostitute could be mistaken for a woman of society,
and it is in this characteristic of dress that he finds a moral issue and calls
for dress reform. “When we return to the primitive basis of clothing, as a
means of protection and nothing more, we will have lost most of our problems
of sexual morality . . .” (p. 78). Dunlap takes an unusual stance in wanting
to return to the primitive state, rather than propounding the notion of social
evolution and the trend to civilization.

References

Jung, C. G. (1965). Memories, dreams, reflections. (Rev. ed. A. Jaffé, ed.; R. & C.
Winston, Trans.). New York: Vintage.
Bergson, H. (1911). Creative evolution. (A. Mitchell, Trans.). London: Macmillan;
New York: H. Holt.

14
 Origins and Motives
1
Origins and Motives
Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes Michel de Montaigne

Whatever I may be aiming at, I am obliged to force some barrier of custom:

so carefully has she barred all our approaches I was considering within myself
in this chilly season, whether the fashion of going about quite naked, in those
lately discovered nations, is a fashion imposed by the warm temperature of
the air, as we say of the Indians and the Moors, or whether it is the original
custom of mankind. Inasmuch as all things under heaven, as the holy word

Figure 1.1 “If we had been born on condition of wearing farthingales and
galligaskins . . .” Although Montaigne despairs about the lack of clothing
worn by peasants in his countryside, in comparison, fashionable men of
1574 are no more covered in their lower extremities. From History of
British Costume (p. 338), by J.R. Planché, 1847, London: C. Cox.

15
 Dressing the Body

declares,1 are subject to the same laws, men of understanding are wont, in
considerations such as these, where we must distinguish the natural laws
from those which have been invented, to have recourse to the general polity
of the world, where there can be nothing counterfeit.
Now, all other creatures being fittingly provided with needle and thread,
to maintain their being, it is really not to be believed that we alone should
have been brought into the world in this defective and indigent state, in a
state that cannot be maintained without foreign aid. So I hold that, as plants,
trees, animals, all that lives, are by Nature equipped with sufficient covering
to protect them against the injury of the weather,

And therefore almost all Are covered either with hides, or else with shells,
Or with the horny callus, or with bark, (LUCRETIUS.)

so were we; but, like those who with artificial light extinguish the light of
day, we have extinguished our proper means with borrowed means. And it
is easy to see that it is custom that makes impossible to us, what is not so:
for among those nations that have no knowledge of clothes, there are some
that dwell in much the same climate as we do; and moreover, the most delicate
parts of us are those which are always uncovered, the eyes, the mouth, the
nose, the ears; in the case of our peasants, as with our ancestors, the pectoral
and ventral parts. If we had been born on condition of wearing farthingales
and galligaskins, I make no doubt but that Nature would have armed with a
thicker skin what she has exposed to the battery of the seasons, as she has
done the finger-ends and the soles of the feet.
Why does this seem hard to believe? Between my habit of clothing and that
of a peasant of my country-side there is a much greater distance than between
his and that of a man who is clothed only in his skin.
How many men, especially in Turkey, go naked as a matter of religion!
Somebody or other asked one of our beggars whom he saw in his shirt in the
depth of winter, as merry as a grig and feeling the cold as little as many a
man who is muffled up to the ears in sable, how he could patiently bear it.
“And you, sir, he replied, you have your face uncovered; now, I am all face.”
The Italians tell a tale of, I think, the Duke of Florence’s fool, that his master
asking him how, being so poorly clad, he could bear the cold, which he himself
was hardly able to do: “Follow my recipe, he replied, and pile on all the
garments you have, like me, and you will feel the cold no more than I do.”
King Massinissa could not be induced, even in his extreme old age, to go
with his head covered, were it ever so cold, stormy or rainy. The same is told
of the Emperor Severus.

1. Ecclesiastes ix. 2,3.

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 Origins and Motives

In the battles fought between the Egyptians and the Persians, Herodotus
says that both he and others remarked that, of those who were left dead on
the field, the skulls of the Egyptians were without comparison harder than
those of the Persians, by reason that the latter always have their heads covered,
first with biggins and afterwards with turbans, and the former are shaven
from infancy and uncovered.
And King Agesilaus observed the habit, until his decrepitude, of wearing
the same clothing in winter as in summer. Caesar, says Suetonius, always
marched at the head of his army, and most often on foot, bareheaded, whether
in sunshine or rain; and the same is said of Hannibal;

Bareheaded then he braved the raging storm. (SILIUS ITALICUS.)

A Venetian, who had long resided in the kingdom of Pegu, and has but
lately returned from thence, writes that both the men and women of that
country always go barefoot, even on horseback, the rest of their body being
clothed.
And Plato gives this wonderful advice, that, to keep the whole body in health,
we should give the feet and head no covering but that which Nature has
provided. The man who, following our King, was chosen King of Poland,2
and who is indeed one of the greatest princes of our age, never wears gloves,
nor does he change, however severe the weather in winter, the bonnet he
wears indoors. Just as I cannot go loose and unbuttoned, the labourers round
about here would feel fettered if they had to button up. Varro contends that,
when it was ordained that we should uncover in presence of the gods or the
magistracy, it was rather for our health’s sake, and to harden us against the
inclemency of the weather, than upon the account of reverence.

Source Excerpted from de Montaigne, M. (1927). The essays of Montaigne.

(Vol 1). London: Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1575)

Biographical note Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a French essayist,

a widely read writer of the French Renaissance, who lived in Bordeaux. He
is generally acknowledged as the inventor of the personal or familiar essay
as a modern literary genre. This reading was drawn from what is considered
to be his best-known work, a collection of essays published in three volumes
between 1580 and 1588, and first translated into English in 1603.

***

2. Henri III and Stephen Bathori

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 Dressing the Body

The Significance of Clothes Sylvia H. Bliss

. . . Discriminating and applicable though these theories may be it is obvious

that no one of them adequately accounts for the fact of clothing nor sufficiently
explains its complexity and variety. It may be, as one writer suggests, that
the ancient Britons painted the body with earthy pigments to check the cooling
effect of free evaporation from the skin; that the Andaman Islanders plaster
themselves thickly with mud in order to resist the attacks of insects; the skin
mantle of the Fuegian, shifted to meet the varying winds, and the elaborately
fitted fur garments of the Eskimo, are obviously worn in deference to rigorous
climate; the gourd or sling of certain South American tribes probably serves
as a protection from injury, and the exceedingly small pearl-decorated apron
of the Kafir belle is doubtless worn as a means of attraction; vanity, aesthetic
feeling, the desire for distinction and the motive of comfort play their part.
But as the primitive clothing impulse manifests itself in such varied forms
we are justified in retreating beyond these partial hypotheses to one more
profound and fundamental which underlies and includes them all.
Too great stress must not be laid on the factor of use, on an assumed end
determining the particular form taken by the primitive impulse to decorate
or clothe the body. The doctrine of use as a factor in evolution finds less
favor than formerly. In the language of Professor William Patten of Dartmouth
College, “The use made of an organ can not be the cause of its origin, for
the organ must be present in the first place, in some form or other, before
any use can be made of it:” and while to-day we find man by reason of his
acquired equipment of reason and foresight working toward definitely
conceived ends, it is hardly reasonable to attribute to the primitive creature
at the outset of the human career clearly defined motives which determined
his acts. As has been pointed out by the naturalists Geddes and Thompson,
human nature can not be rightly understood apart from the biological
approach, and even in a matter apparently so far removed from the natural
as that of clothing there will be found many analogies to zoölogical and
biological facts. Primitive psychological attitudes from what has been termed
physiological thought and the instinctive inner urge prompting the acts of
primitive man may be not inaptly compared to those special internal con-
ditions which biologists recognize as determining local growths, organs and
structure, lower down in the scale of life.
In order adequately to frame a philosophy of clothes it is necessary to view
as clearly as possible man’s place in nature. Though there are now on earth
only isolated examples of hairy men it is probable that the primitive human
being and certainly his precursor were covered with hair. We may or may
not accept the Darwinian conclusion that the loss of our coat of hair was

18
 Origins and Motives

due to aesthetic reasons, “the members of one sex having chosen as mates
those of the other who were least hairy” but the fact remains that man, as
Carlyle said, is by nature a naked animal. Moreover he is, broadly speaking,
the only naked animal. In the world of living things are displayed fur, feathers,
thickened and colored hide, scales, various armors, and integuments, for the
tree bark and for all plant forms fitness and beauty of investiture. Man alone
is left with an incomplete exterior. His position in nature is anomalous. All
other creatures are finished and complete, clothed and with instinct sufficient
to form themselves an abode which remains unaltered with the passing of
the ages. Man alone must supplement nature. He has progressed by reason
of his incompleteness and to what extent his initial advance was due to the
lack of a satisfactory and fitting exterior is matter for conjecture. The gods
left man naked in order that he might clothe himself: unfinished that he might
indefinitely continue the process of development.
Underlying all the various motives which apparently lead man to paint,
tattoo, decorate and protect the body is the fundamental feeling of incom-
pleteness, of dissatisfaction with self as it is, and clothing in its origin and
subsequent development is the result of his attempt to remedy the deficiency,
to replace what he has lost. The covering and ornament which human beings
supply for the body stand in lieu of fur, feathers, and all the varied exteriors
found in lower nature and further, serve like ends of protection and adorn-
ment. The fact of the reputed complete nakedness of certain peoples does
not militate against this theory of the primary reason for clothing. While
individuals may be entirely nude it is said that in no tribe do all the members
remain constantly as nature left them. Study of “our contemporary ancestors”
discloses, it is probable, most of the forms of adornment and body covering
used by prehistoric man – complicated in many instances by contact of the
savages with civilized races – and as might be expected there are peoples in
whom the clothing impulse has not developed, or but feebly, going no farther
than paint, the mutilation of some organ or the wearing of a necklace or
belt . . .
Man’s place in nature must be still further defined if we are to appreciate
to the full the significance of clothing. Humanity appears to be a continuation
of the main stem of life of which all lower forms are the branches. They
diverged from the central stem, advanced a pace and became what Nietzsche
would term the goals of nature, plant, insect, animal and bird – man,
according to the German philosopher’s thought, being not a goal but a bridge.
The life which was to become human continued to advance though divested
of many possibilities. It is not necessary to accept all the implications of
Bergson’s philosophy in order to make use of his pregnant idea that life,
evolving in the direction of man has abandoned many things by the way.

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 Dressing the Body

Tendencies which were incompatible with the main trend of life were dropped
and set up a subordinate line of development. Applying this conception to
the matter in hand we may say that man has left far behind the possibility of
a furred or feathered exterior, of blossoms, thorns, horns, tails, and countless
other structures and appendages displayed by lower forms of life, plant and
animal. It may be said further – and here is the crucial point in our philosophy
of clothes – that these structures, appendages and ornaments which are char-
acteristic of life other than human, survive in man as subconscious dispositions
which at various times in the world’s history, some in one race and some in
another, are embodied in his dress. Actual physical survivals of lower forms
of life appear during the development of the human fetus. Certain of these
disappear, others are modified to form working parts of the organism, while
occasionally one persists as an atrophied structure in the fully developed human
being. In the light of these facts we are warranted in assuming the presence
of corresponding mental survivals. The variety and vagary of garb are thus
not due to mere whim and vagary of the human mind. Man is the epitome
of all tendencies and the reason for the complexity of his clothing impulse
may be found in the complexity of his mental inheritance which includes all
that he has lost physically on the way to man. There is scarcely a covering in
nature that has not been utilized or imitated in human apparel; there can
hardly be found a protuberance or appendage that may not have served as
the prototype for some form of human mutilation or adornment. Fur serves
both savage and civilized man. Certain tribes of the Amazon basin fix a
covering of feathers on their bodies, daubed with a sticky substance; other
tribes insert feathers in perforations in the cheek or nasal septum, while
feathers as adornment, especially of the head are found the world over and
not least in modern civilized nations. There are striking simulations of horns,
notably the head-dress of some African tribes, and in England what has been
called “the preposterous horned head-dress” of the reign of Henry V the
student of costume will come upon many an arresting likeness of coronet,
cockade, neck ruff, stock, and frill, plume, sash, and train, to natural organic
characteristics of other creatures and it is interesting to note in passing that
a caricature of the date of 1786, entitled “Modern Elegance,” shows two
women wearing the Bouffon, an exaggerated neckerchief of cambric, and
above them the figure of a Pouter pigeon with characteristically inflated
oesophagus.
Perhaps the most striking example of physiological habit surviving in man
as a mental tendency is that of the tail. This appendage has been so often
simulated that it has given rise to the fable of men with tails and even our
modern sash and train may, without stretch of the imagination, be referred
to a like lowly origin. The student of savage costume comes again and again

20
 Origins and Motives

upon instances of this addition to man’s natural equipment and while the
claim may be made that this widespread habit is due to imitation of animals
it may with greater reasonableness be attributed to the subconscious remin-
iscence of an actual tail. This view is strengthened by the fact that the tail-
like ornament is often worn on the front of the body and quite naturally the
conclusion is reached that the various forms of the fig leaf, apron and clout
may be included in the same category. The tail being one of the most recent
of our losses, physical vestiges of this appendage occasionally, it is said,
persisting in man, the impulse to thus supplement the body is strong. Deeper
than the ends which they serve is the reason for all forms of apparel.

Source Excerpted from Bliss, S.H. (1916). The significance of clothes.

American Journal of Psychology, 27, 217–226.

Biographical note Sylvia Hortense Bliss (1870–1963) is described as a writer,

accomplished musician, and amateur botanist. She studied music in Iowa and
at Syracuse University. She taught piano lessons and was a church organist.
She sought medical treatment for a speech handicap with Boston neurologists
Dr. Morton Prince and Dr. James Putnam and it was during this period (1909–
1918) that she researched and published articles in the American Journal of
Psychology and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology on subjects that inter-
ested her as a layperson.

***
Dress Alfred E. Crawley

DRESS – An analysis of the relations of man’s clothing with his development

in social evolution will naturally be chiefly concerned with psychological
categories. When once instituted, for whatever reasons or by whatever pro-
cess, dress became a source of psychical reactions, often complex, to a greater
extent (owing to its more intimate connexion with personality) than any
other material product of intelligence. Some outline of the historical develop-
ment of dress will be suggested, rather than drawn, as a guide to the main
inquiry. The practical or, if one may use the term, the biological uses and
meaning of dress, are simple enough and agreed upon. These form the first
state of the material to be employed by the social consciousness. Its secondary
states are a subject in themselves . . .

Origins – The primary significance of dress becomes a difficult question as

soon as we pass from the institution in being to its earliest stages and its
origin. For speculation alone is possible when dealing with the genesis of

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 Dressing the Body

dress. Its conclusions will be probable, in proportion as they satisfactorily

bridge the gulf between the natural and the artificial stages of human evol-
ution. The information supplied by those of the latter that are presumably
nearest to the natural state, to Protanthropus, is not in itself a key to the
origin of clothing, but, on the other hand, the mere analogy of animal-life is
still less helpful . . .
It may serve, however, to point by contrast the actual continuity of the
natural and the artificial stages, the physical and the psychical stages, of our
evolution. If we say that man is the only animal that uses an artificial covering
for the body, we are apt to forget that even when clothed he is subject to the
same environmental influences as in the ages before dress. Again, there is no
hint that the approach of a glacial epoch inaugurated the invention of dress.
But it is an established fact that the survivors of immigrants to changed
conditions of climate and geological environment become physically adapted
by some means of interaction and in certain directions of structure, which
are just coming to be recognized . . . The most obvious of these natural adapt-
ations, physiologically produced, to the environment is pigmentation. The
skin of man is graded in colour from the Equator to the Pole. The deeper
pigmentation of the tropical skin is a protection against the actinic rays of the
sun; the blondness of northern races, like the white colour of Arctic animals,
retains the heat of the body.
If we followed the analogy of the animal, we should have to take into
account the fact that a mechanical intelligence enables it to obviate certain
disadvantages of its natural covering. The animal never exposes itself
unnecessarily; its work, in the case of the larger animals, is done at night,
not in the glare of the sun. Automatically it acquires an artificial covering in
the form of shelter. If man in a natural state followed a similar principle, he
would be at no more disadvantage than is the animal. A similar argument
applies to the other use mentioned above, namely, sexual decoration. What
these considerations suggest is that man was not forced by necessity to invent.
The reason is at once deeper and simpler. Again, we get the conclusion that
one primary use and meaning of dress is not so much to provide an adaptation
to a climate as to enable man to be superior to weather; in other words, to
enable him to move and be active in circumstances where animals seek shelter.
The principle is implicit in the frequent proverbial comparison of clothing to
a house.
Dress, in fact, as a secondary human character, must be treated, as regards
its origins, in the same way as human weapons, tools, and machines. Dress
increases the static resisting power of the surface of the body, just as tools
increase the dynamic capacity of the limbs. It is an extension (and thereby
an intension) of the passive area of the person, just as a tool is of the active

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 Origins and Motives

mechanism of the arm. It is a second skin, as the other is a second hand.

Further, if we take an inclusive view of evolution, admitting no break between
the natural and the artificial, but regarding the latter as a sequence to the
former, we shall be in a position to accept indications that both stages, and
not the former only, are subject to the operation of the same mechanical
laws, and show (with the necessary limitations) similar results. These laws
belong to the interaction of the organism and the environment, and the results
are found in what is called adaptation, an optimum of equilibrium, a balanced
interaction, between the two . . . The selective process has not been conscious,
but neither has it been accidental. It is the result of law. Equally unconscious
in its first stages was the adaptation of dress to temperature. This brings us
no nearer to the origins of dress, though it clears the ground. Still further to
simplify speculation, we may notice some prevalent hypotheses on the subject.
Dress being a covering, it assumes, when instituted, all the applicable mean-
ings which the idea of covering involves. But it by no means follows that all
of these, or even any, were responsible for its original institution.
There is, first, the hypothesis that clothing originated in the decorative
impulse. This has the merit of providing a cause which could operate through
unconscious intelligence, automatic feeling . . .
. . . It is in accordance with the rule among animals that among primitive
peoples the male sex chiefly assumes decoration. Ornaments among the Indians
of Guiana are more worn by men than by women. The stock ornamentation
is paint; scented oils are used as vehicles . . .
But this analogy [the male sex . . .] is not to be pressed, though it is sound
as far as it goes. It applies, that is, up to a certain point in social evolution.
Beyond that point the balance inclines the other way, and for the last five
hundred years of European civilization decorative dress has been confined
to women . . .
In practical investigation it is difficult, as Ratzel1 observes, to say “where
clothing ends and ornament begins,” or, on the previous hypothesis, where
clothing springs out of ornament. Since either may obviously develop into
the other when both are instituted, it is idle to examine such cases. Cases
where one or the other is absolutely unknown might serve, but there are no
examples of this. If an instance, moreover, of the presence of clothing and
entire absence of ornament were observed, it would be impossible to argue
that clothing cannot be subject to the decorative impulse. In any case, there
is the self-feeling, satisfaction in individuality, to be reckoned with, for the
impulse to finery is only one phase of it.

1. F. Ratzel, History of Mankind (1896–1898), i, 93–94.

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 Dressing the Body

The supporters of the ornamentation hypothesis of the origin of dress have

an apparently strong argument in the Brazilians and the Central Australians.
These recently studied peoples possess no clothing in the ordinary sense of
the term. But they wear ornament, and on special occasions a great deal of
it. Brazilian men wear a string round the lower abdomen, the women a strip
of bark-cloth along the perineum, tied to a similar abdominal thread. This is
sometimes varied by a small decorative enlargement. The Central Australian
man wears a waist-string, to which is tied a pubic tassel. Corresponding to
the last in the case of the women is a very small apron. Leaving the waist-
string out of account, we have remaining the question of the erogenous centre.
In both the decoration hypothesis and the concealment hypothesis this centre
is the focus of speculation. If the Australian tassel of the male sex and the
leaf-like enlargement of the Brazilian woman’s perineal thread are considered
superficially, they may appear to be, if not ornaments, at least attractions.
But if this be granted, it does not follow that we have here the first application
of the idea of dress. It would be impossible to make out a case to prove that
these appurtenances can ever have satisfied the idea of concealment, as on
the next hypothesis is assumed. This hypothesis is to the effect that male
jealousy instituted clothing for married women . . .
. . . The general connexion between modesty and dress is a subject of little
importance, except in so far as it has involved the creation of false modesty,
both individually and socially. Modesty where there is dress, tends to be
concentrated upon it mechanically. When clothing is once established, the
growth of the conception of women as property emphasizes its importance,
and increases the anatomical modesty of women. Waitz held that male
jealousy is the primary origin of clothing, and therefore of modesty. Diderot
had held this view. Often married women alone are clothed. It is as if before
marriage a woman was free and naked; after marriage, clothed and a slave.
But the fact of dress serving as concealment involved the possibility of
attraction by mystery. Even when other emotions than modesty, emphasized
by male jealousy, intervene, they may work together for sexual attraction . . .
Finally, there is the protection-hypothesis. Sudden falls in the temperature,
rains and winds and burning sunshine, the danger of injuring the feet and
the skin of the body generally when in the forest, and the need of body-
armour against the attacks of insects and of dangerous animals seem obvious
reasons for the invention of dress. But they do not explain the process of
invention, which is the main problem. The cloak, the skirt, the apron, cannot
have been invented in answer to a need, directly, without any stages. The
invention of cloth was first necessary, and this was suggested by some natural
covering. The only line of development which seems possible is from
protective ligatures. There are numerous facts which apparently point to such

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 Origins and Motives

an origin of clothing. One of the most characteristic ‘ornaments’ of savages

all over the world is the armlet. It is quite probable that this has an inde-
pendent origin in the decorative impulse, like the necklace. But here and
there we find bands worn round the ankles, knees, wrists, and elbows, the
object of which is clearly to protect the sinews and muscles from strains. The
pain of a strained muscle being eased by the grip of the hand, the suggestion
of an artificial grip might naturally follow, and a system of ligatures would
be the result . . .
Wild peoples, in fact, understand quite well the limitations and the capacity
of the human organism in respect to the environment. We may credit them
with an adequate system of supplying natural deficiencies, and of assisting
natural advantages also . . .
. . . Now, the great majority of the lowest peoples known wear no clothes.
Shelter is used instead. But there is very commonly a waist-string, and it is
more used by men than by women. We assume that the girdle is the point of
departure for the evolution of dress, and the mechanism of that departure
will be presently discussed. But for the origin of body-clothing it is necessary
to find the origin of the girdle. The civilized idea of a girdle is to bind up a
skirt or trousers. This is certainly not its object among the earliest peoples,
who have nothing to tie up. It might be supposed that the original purpose
of the girdle was that of the abdominal belt, useful both as a muscle-ligature
and to alleviate the pangs of hunger. But the earliest girdles are merely strings,
and string is useless for such purposes. String, moreover, made of grass or
vegetable fibre, or animal sinew or human hair, is an earlier invention than
the bandage. Its first form was actually natural, the pliant bough or stem . . .
. . . The waist-string, therefore, being earlier than clothing proper, and being,
as we have suggested, the point of departure for the wearing of coverings,
we have next to examine the mechanism of the connexion between them.
The use of the string as a holder being given, it would serve not only as a
pocket, but as a suspender for leaves or bunches of grass, if for any reason
these were required. The point to be emphasized here is that the presence of
a suspender would suggest the suspension and therefore the regular use of
articles for which there had been no original demand . . .
It is unnecessary to enter upon a description of the various zones of the
body which require protection, such as the spine at the neck and in the small
of the back, against sun and cold, or the mucous membranes of the perineal
region, against insects. The use of clothing of certain textures and colours to
maintain a layer of air about the skin at a temperature adapted to that of
the body, and to neutralize those rays of light which are deleterious to the
nervous system and destructive of protoplasm, is also out of place here. We
may note, however, that by unconscious selection the evolution of dress has

25
 Dressing the Body

probably followed a thoroughly hygienic course. But no principles of such

hygiene, except the very simplest, can have occurred to primitive man. One
of the simplest, however, we way admit for tropical races – the use of a
protection against insects. The perineal region is most subject to their attacks
when man is naked, owing to the sebaceous character of the surface and its
relatively higher temperature. These facts, no doubt, more than anything
else, are the explanation of primitive habits of depilation. But depilation is
not a complete protection. Something positive is required. The use of bunches
of grass or leaves is natural and inevitable, as soon as there is something to
hold them, namely, the waist-string. A parallel method is the use of a second
string depending from the waist-string in front and behind, and passing
between the legs. The Brazilian strip of bast used by women, and the red
thread which takes its place in the Trumai tribe, though “they attract attention
like ornaments instead of drawing attention away,” yet, as Von den Steinen2
also satisfied himself, provide a protection against insects, a serious pest in
the forests of Brazil. These inter-crural strings protect the mucous membrane,
without, however, concealing the parts, as do leaves and grass. In the present
connexion their chief interest is the use made of the waist-string. When cloth
was invented, the first form of the loin-cloth was an extension of the inter-
crural thread . . .
. . . The protection-hypothesis of the origin of dress may thus be adopted,
if we qualify it by a scheme of development as suggested above. When once
instituted as a custom, the wearing of leaves or bark-cloth upon the abdominal
region served to focus various psychical reactions. One of the earliest of these
was the impulse to emphasize the primary sexual characters. It is an impulse
shown among the great majority of early races in their observances at the
attainment of puberty, and it is, as a rule, at that period that sexual dress or
ornament is assumed. Among civilized peoples, in the Middle Ages and in
modern times, the impulse is well marked by various fashions – the phal-
locrypt and the tail of the savage having their European analogues. A less
direct but even more constant instance of the same recognition is the assigning
of the skirt to women as the more sedentary, and trousers to men as the more
active sex. The suggestion sometimes met with, that the skirt is an adaptation
for sexual protection, need only be mentioned to be dismissed. The Central
Australian pubic tassel and similar appendages will here find significance,
but it is improbable that such accentuation was their original purpose. Once
instituted for protection, the other ideas followed. Another of these, which

2. K. von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Zentral-Brasiliens (Berlin 1894), pp. 190f.
For other protective coverings for the organs against insects, see Wilken-Pletye, Handleiding
voor de vergelijkende Vokenkunde van Nederlands Nederlandscb-Indie- (Leyden 1893), pp.
37–38.

26
 Origins and Motives

at once received an artificial focus, was the emotion of modesty. It has been
observed among the higher animals that the female by various postures guards
the sexual centres from the undesired advances of the male. The assumption
of a waist-cloth does not actually serve the same purpose, but it constitutes
a permanent psychical suggestion of inviolability. Similarly, the use of any
appendage or covering involves the possibility of attraction, either by mere
notification, by the addition of decoration, or, later, by the suggestion of
mystery. Further than this, speculation as to origins need not be carried. The
various forms and fashions of dress, and the customs connected with it, will
supply examples of the material as well as of the psychological evolution of
the subject.
. . . In spite of the underlying similarity of principles, universally found,
dress more than any external feature distinguishes race from race and tribe
from tribe. While distinguishing a social unit it emphasizes its internal solid-
arity. In this latter sphere there is, again, room for individual distinction . . .

Source Excerpted from Crawley, A.E. (1912). Dress. Encyclopedia of

religion and ethics (Vol. 5, pp. 40–72). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Biographical note Alfred Ernest Crawley (1869–1924) was a British social

anthropologist. He was a Fellow of the Sociological Society and an Examiner
to the University of London. He also wrote The Mystic Rose (1902), which
contained research on “primitive” and “traditional” societies, such as magical
and religious practices.

***
Customs and Beliefs: Ceremonial
Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown

We may now return to the question of the meaning of personal ornament in

general. It is a commonplace of psychology that the development of the sense
of self is closely connected with the perception of one’s own body. It is also
generally recognized that the development of the moral and social sentiments
in man is dependent upon the development of self-consciousness, of the sense
of self. These two important principles will help us to appreciate the hypoth-
esis to which the discussion has now led, that in the Andamans the customary
regulation of personal ornament is a means by which the society acts upon,
modifies, and regulates the sense of self in the individual.
There are three methods of ornamenting the body in the Andamans, (1)
by scarification, (2) by painting, and (3) by the putting on of ornaments.
The natives give two reasons for the custom of scarification, that it improves
the personal appearance and that it makes the boy or girl grow up strong.

27
 Dressing the Body

Both these mean that scarification gives or marks an added value. The
explanation of the rite would therefore seem to be that it marks the passage
from childhood to manhood and is a means by which the society bestows
upon the individual that power, or social value, which is possessed by the
adult but not by the child. The individual is made to feel that his value – his
strength and the qualities of which he may be proud – is not his by nature
but is received by him from the society to which he is admitted. The scars on
his body are the visible marks of his admission. The individual is proud or
vain of the scars which are the mark of his manhood, and thus the society
makes use of the very powerful sentiment of personal vanity to strengthen
the social sentiments.
Turning now to the painting of the body, we have seen that the pattern of
white clay serves to make both the painted individual and those who see him
feel his social value, and we have seen that this interpretation explains the
occasions on which such painting is used. To complete the argument it is neces-
sary to consider the occasions on which the use of white clay is forbidden.
Those to whom this prohibition applies are (1) a youth or girl who is aka-
op, i.e., who is abstaining from certain foods during the initation period, (2)
a mourner, (3) a homicide during the period the isolation, and (4) a person
who is ill. All these persons are excluded from full participation in the active
social life, and therefore the social value of each of them is diminished. It
would obviously be wrong for a person in such a condition to express by
decorating himself a social value that he did not at the time possess . . . All
ornament in some way marks the relation of the individual to the society
and to that force or power in society to which he owes his well-being and
happiness. When painting or ornament is used to give protection, it is, as we
have seen, the protective power of the society itself that is appealed to, and
what is expressed is the dependence of the individual on the society. When
ornament or paint is used for display it is again the dependence on the society
that is expressed, though in a different way and on occasions of a different
kind. We have seen that scarification is also a means of marking the depend-
ence of the individual on the society, and it is very important to note that the
Andamanese sometimes explain it as due to the desire for display and some-
times to the need of protection (enabling the child to grow strong and so
avoid the dangers of sickness), showing very clearly that there is some intimate
connection between these two motives, or at any rate that one and the same
method of ornamentation can satisfy both. There is one further example of
red paint, which is combined with the pattern of white clay for purposes of
display, and is also constantly used in many ways as affording protection.
We are thus brought to the final conclusion that the scarification and paint-
ing of the body and the wearing of most if not all the customary ornaments

28
 Origins and Motives

are rites which have the function of marking the fact that the individual is in
a particular permanent or temporary relation to that power in the society
and in all things that affect social life, the notion of which we have seen to
underlie so much of the Andaman ceremonial.
. . . In the various methods of ornamenting the body the two chief motives
that we have considered are so combined that they can hardly be estimated
separately, and it is this mingling of motives that has led us to the final
understanding of the meaning and social function of bodily ornament. Each
of the different kinds of ornament serves to make manifest the existence of
some special relation between the individual and the society, and therefore
of some special relation between him and that system of powers on which
the welfare of the society and of the individual depends. One of the most
important aspects of the relation of the individual to the society is his depend-
ence upon it for his safety and well-being and this is revealed in all painting
and ornament worn for protection. But the society not only protects the
individual from danger; it is the direct source of his well-being; and this makes
itself felt in the customary regulation by which the use of the more important
ornaments used for display is confined to occasions on which it is quite clear
that his happiness is directly due to the society, such as a dance or feast. Thus
the customs relating to the ornamentation of the body are of the kind that I
have here called ceremonial. They are the means by which the society exercises
on appropriate occasions some of the important social sentiments, thereby
maintaining them at the necessary degree of energy required to maintain the
social cohesion . . .

Source Excerpted from Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1922). The Andaman

Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Biographical note Sir Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) was

a leading British social anthropologist. He conducted numerous ethnological
studies in Africa, Australia, and North America. The featured reading is drawn
from his fieldwork among the people of Andaman Islands of Australia. He
is a functional anthropologist. A major contribution was his examination of
behavioral patterns and institutions of a social system in terms of how they
functioned. His goal was a science of society that would formulate laws,
explaining how social systems operated.

***
Dress Ruth Benedict

For the history of dress there are roughly four fields of study: prehuman
behavior, archaeology, primitive peoples and modem civilized conditions.

29
 Dressing the Body

The study of animal behavior emphasizes two facts regarding the origin
of clothing. In the first place, human dress, in so far as it is for protection
against the elements, has no continuity with any prehuman behavior. Animals
in frigid climates grow warm coats, which are transmitted to their offspring
by heredity. The opposite technique of invention and traditionally transmitted
processes does not occur except in man. In the second place, observation of
the higher apes has emphasized the prehuman roots of clothing as self-
decoration. Köhler describes the naïve delight of chimpanzees in hanging
objects about their bodies and trotting about to display them.
Archaeology reveals nothing about the history of dress until the upper
palaeolithic era – which is far removed from earliest man. Clothing is neces-
sarily of perishable materials, but even ornaments of animal teeth, ivory and
shells begin to appear only in the Aurignacian period at the same level at
which is found the characteristic palaeolithic development of mural drawing
and engraving. From this period date also the characteristically distorted nude
figurines of the female form, some of which are wearing bracelets although
they are not represented with any other clothing. It is obvious, however, that
the distortion of these female figurines is in the direction of fertility symbols,
and their nudity furnishes no information as to women’s daily wear in the
Aurignacian period except that bracelets were worn at this period.
The reasons that have led man to clothe himself can therefore be studied
chiefly from a comparison of the divergent behavior of now existing peoples.
There is a strong association in western civilization between dress and the
covering of the sex organs, but most of the literature concerning the origin
of clothing has directed its array of facts to demolish the assumption of the
primacy of this connection and to point out that dress did not have its origin
in a specific instinct of modesty focused on the organs of reproduction.
It is obvious from any study of primitive clothing that this particular
function of dress has very often been unknown in other cultures. The habit
of complete nudity has a wide distribution in the tropical regions of South
America, Melanesia and Africa. In some cases both men and women are
habitually naked, in others only the men, in still others only the women.
Even outside of tropical regions habitual nudity is widespread, although a
skin may be thrown over the shoulders for protection. Such regions are the
Great Basin in North America, California and Australia. Even in arctic
regions, where well tailored clothing is universal, the conventions are often
such that both men and women are habituated to indoor nudity like all people
so habituated exhibit no shame in uncovering. Nansen describes the inter-
crural cord of the east coast of Greenland, the sole covering of the natives
when indoors, as being “so extremely small as to make it practically invisible
to the stranger’s inexperienced eye” (Paaski over Grönland, Christiania 1890,

30
 Origins and Motives

Tr. by H.M. Gepp as The First Crossing of Greenland, 2 vols., London 1890,
vol. i, p. 338–39, vol. ii, p. 277–78).
In more extreme instances that may be brought to bear against this theory
of the origin of clothing in an instinct of modesty the very nature of the
coverings themselves is the point of the argument. The codpiece which was
worn in Europe about 1450 and the custom of the men of certain Papuan
tribes who squeeze their members into the opening of a gourd are indicative
of the exhibitionist nature of certain forms of dress. Many observers in many
parts of the world have commented on the fact that the most obvious function
of the genital coverings was to attract attention rather than to divert it.
It is possible therefore to discard the notion that there is a human instinct
of modesty that expresses itself in clothing. Modesty is a conditioned reflex
and has its roots in the fashion of dress to which any group is accustomed. It
is therefore to be expected that, given certain turns of fashion, other regions
than the genital will be singled out and this emotion directed elsewhere – to
the feet, as among Chinese women of past generations, or to the face, as
with Mohammedan women. Native Brazilian women are extremely unwilling
to remove their nose plugs and Alaskan women to remove their enormous
labrets. Feelings of shame may also be associated with types of behavior not
connected with clothing. Perfectly naked savages, for example, show acute
feelings of shame at seeing anyone eat in public.
All the other theories of the origin of clothing contain varied amounts of
truth. The advocates have erred only in too generalized a support of their
particular positions. It is not necessary to deny any of them, once one has
granted that human custom has no unique root but in different parts of the
world has been the result of quite different circumstances and habits of mind
variously interacting.
Thus Frazer and Karsten argue for the origin of clothing in ideas of magic,
as, for example, the covering of the organs of reproduction in order to prevent
the evil eye being cast upon them. Amulets hung about the neck or inserted
in the lip or the nose are the full scope of clothing among some peoples, and
in those and similar cases costume can be most pertinently studied in con-
nection with local magical beliefs. In some regions these have had a profound
influence upon the development of dress, but it is not necessary to generalize
them as the origin of clothing.
The theory that clothing originated in protection against the rigors of
climate is defended by Knight Dunlap. To doubt that weather has ever been
a factor would be to cast a gratuitous slur on human intelligence and to
ignore one of the great differentiations between human and animal behavior.
If it were the primary factor, however, the primitive tribes living in the cold
climates of the southern hemisphere would have provided for themselves as

31
 Dressing the Body

well as those living in similar climates of the northern hemisphere. But they
have not done so. For the freezing weather to which they are seasonally
exposed the Australians and the Fuegians do not make themselves clothing
but barely protect their shoulders with a skin. Certainly many other motivat-
ions have been as potent in the history of clothing as protection against the
weather.
Westermarck considers dress under the heading of “Primitive Means of
Attraction.” He believes that it is fundamentally rooted in the erotic impulses.
Instances of this sort have been given above and he presents many others,
both of habitual ornamentation of the pubic coverings and of ornamentation
worn for particular occasions, such as dances, especially those of a licentious
character. The history of clothing in our own civilization is ample evidence
of the degree to which one sex dresses for the other, and certainly the often
recurring differentiation of the dresses of the two sexes should be studied
from this angle.
It does not seem necessary, however, to single out the one trait of display
before the opposite sex when dress is so obviously and so often a self-display
on all counts. Sex display in dress may hardly appear in a given area, but
display of trophies or display of status may be fundamental. Thus on the
plains of North America men’s dress is a heraldic display of war counts, and
on the northwest coast a man’s hat will be built up in cumulative units to
designate his rank. As an old explorer said of the Fuegians, “although they
are content to be naked, they are very ambitious to be fine.” This impulse
toward decoration is the most constantly recurring motivation in the history
of clothing and, as we saw above, the one which is found also among the
higher apes.
Modern conditions have introduced only one important factor into human
behavior in regard to clothing. In all that has been said above, modern dress
like that of any other period is merely one of many possible varieties all
illustrative of the general principles. But there is one fundamental difference.
Whereas in simpler conditions, even in untouched rural districts of Europe
today, dress is geographically differentiated, in modern civilization it is temp-
orally differentiated. This rise of fashion in the field of dress had begun
somewhat tentatively between the tenth and the fourteenth century, but it is
with the Renaissance that its full and startling effect is first to be gauged. In
rural districts dress remained and has remained to the present time a matter
of local individuality perpetuated for centuries with great conservatism. The
revolutionary rise of fashion had to do only with the urban population and
even more specifically with the court. Its onset in the fifteenth century was
marked by those peculiarities that have continued to characterize fashion in
the modern world: first, the grotesque exaggeration of certain features, in

32
 Origins and Motives

this case notably the hennin (the fantastically elongated head dress that was
held on by a chin band); and second, the personal arbitership of the great
lady, which is said to have been already a well developed role of Isabelle of
Bavaria, wife of Charles VI.
From this period fashion has been of unceasing importance in the field
of dress. The latter part of the fifteenth century and the earlier part of the
sixteenth show some of the most pleasing of all western European fashions,
styles that are best known through the portraits of the Italian Renaissance.
In the first half of the sixteenth century the woman’s hoop skirt was elaborated,
and this returned in extreme forms in the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth
centuries, in less extreme form in the mid-seventeenth. In the eighteenth
century version in the reign of Louis XVI this was coupled with spectacular
display of costly material in garments; clothes became a primary means for
the ostentatious exhibition of wealth. The greatest excesses were cultivated
in the matter of hairdressing; coiffures were a half yard high and prints show
the hairdressers seated on ladders in order to reach the upper tiers of their
creations. Nor was there any marked improvement during the nineteenth
century. Probably the fashions of the period from 1830 to 1900 – the desper-
ately constricted waist, the bustle and the heavy dragging skirt – were the
ugliest and most unhealthful in the history of women’s dress in western civil-
ization.
The usual view of fashion is, first, that it is an affair of violent contrasts,
each few years’ swing of the pendulum reversing that of the preceding; and
second, that it is essentially dictated by individual Parisian costumers. Kroeber,
however, taking as a test case woman’s full dress toilette from 1844 to 1919,
has shown that, at least in the measurements he has considered, fashion’s
vagaries follow definite long time trends. This is clearest in the measurement
of the width of the skirt, which for fifty years before 1919 had in spite of
incidental variations become progressively more constricted. For almost as
long a period previously it had in the same way grown progressively fuller,
and its cycle therefore would be about one hundred years. The length of the
skirt showed a similar trend. Its cycle for this period was about a third the
duration of the width cycle, but even this is too long to be due to the influence
of a single gifted designer. Kroeber does not claim universal validity for his
examples but draws from them two conclusions: first, in a broader view
styles not merely oscillate between two points but work themselves out in
cycles of considerable length; second, these cycles are obviously longer than
the reign of influence of any one designer and are therefore independent even
of the most powerful costumer.
The study of fashion along with a variety of other cultural traits of modern
civilization, such as mass production, can derive no assistance from the history

33
 Dressing the Body

of the world before comparatively modern times. Fashion is new in human

history and its future course is not known. At present it marks, as Santayana
says, that margin of irresponsible variation in manners and thoughts which
among a people artificially civilized may so easily be larger than the solid
core. It may well be that this swift succession of styles will maintain itself as
a fixed characteristic of dress as a culture trait in our civilization.

Source Benedict, R. (1931). Dress. Encyclopedia of the social sciences (Vol.

5, 235–237). New York: Macmillan.

Biographical note Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887–1948) was an American

cultural anthropologist considered a pioneer in the study of how personality
is shaped by culture. In fact, in her popular book Patterns of Culture (1934),
she noted that a society’s culture was “personality writ large” (p. vii). She
studied with Franz Boas at Columbia and was one of the first women to
earn a doctorate in anthropology, received in 1923 from Columbia University
where she taught throughout her career. She focused her work on religious
beliefs and practices, specifically studying American Plains Indians and
Japanese culture.

References

Dunlap, K. (1928). The development and function of clothing. Journal of General

Psychology, 1, 64–78.
Flügel, J. (1930). The psychology of clothes. London.
Frazer, J.G. (1910) Totemism and exogamy, 4 vols. London. Vol. iv, pp. 194, 200–2,
207.
Havelock, E. (1913). The evolution of modesty, Studies in the psychology of sex.
(3rd ed.) Philadelphia.
Kroeber, A. (1919). On the principle of order in civilization as exemplified by changes
in fashion. American Anthropologist, 21, 235–263.
Lowie, R. (1929). Are we civilized? New York.
Parsons, F. (1920). The psychology of dress. New York.
Westermarck, E.A.(1921). The history of human marriage (5th ed.). London.
Wissler, C. (1922). The American Indian (2nd ed.). New York.

***
Costume and Ideologies Hilaire Hiler and Meyer Hiler

Theories

Such considerations take us back to the very origins of clothing which are so
closely connected with the generally fundamental psychology of the subject

34
 Origins and Motives

that they may appropriately be treated with it. For a more detailed discussion
of these origins the reader is again referred to From Nudity to Raiment, Chapter
V, and the references therein.1 Here it may suffice to outline some of the more
generally accepted theories referring, for purposes of further study, to the
authors who respectively support them.
The Theory of Sex Attraction, based to some extent on Montaigne’s state-
ment that “There are certain things which are hidden in order to be shown”
is best explained in brief by Westermarck, in his History of Human Marriage,
where he declares that “we have every reason to believe that mere decorations
have also developed into clothes” and that clothing originated mainly “in
the desire of men and women to make themselves mutually attractive.” This
theory is supported by Havelock Ellis (with reservations), Grosse and others.
That it is in direct opposition to the Mosaic Theory as expounded in the
Bible, and the Theory of Possession held by Ratzel and other early ethnol-
ogists, both the author and the authorities quoted above, are well aware.
The Taboo Theory, self-explanatory in its title, was put forward by Durk-
heim and supported by Reinach. The latter says that “Durkheim determined
it happily in recognizing the blood taboo as a particular case.” It would
seem reasonable to suppose that Freud would be interested in this theory
and with the possible exception to be mentioned later, lend it his support.
The Totemistic Theory, as advanced by Crawley in his Mystic Rose, argues
for an amuletic origin, claiming that ornamentation, tattooing, etc., may have
originated “for the purpose of magically insulating certain organs.” We are
unacquainted with any important defense or elaboration of this theory on
the part of others.
The Amuletic Theory, is closely related to Crawley’s, as may be also the
idea that clothing originated in the carrying of trophies or trophyistic
surrogates.
I advanced an Esthetic Theory based upon substantiated observations of
the behavior of birds and animals with arboreally developed vision, such as
bower birds, jackdaws, monkeys and apes. Attraction for shiny objects may
have suggested that they might most easily be kept near the possessor by
being attached to the person. Köhler, in The Mentality of Apes; Edmond
Haraucourt, in Daah, le Premier Homme; and Johannes V. Jensen in The
Long Journey directly or indirectly seem to support this theory.
It now seems that an interesting if somewhat complex theory might also
be built up on the Castration Fear so important in Freudian Psycho-analysis.
Quite apart from any directly protective function of the garment, this fear
may well be the basis for the amuletic theory. If men, as their more elaborate

1. Hiler, H. (1929). From nudity to raiment. London: W. and G. Foyle.

35
 Dressing the Body

dress in primitive stages of society may indicate, wore ornament or clothing

before women did, a Castration Theory becomes more plausible.
We can think of a few other factors which come into the psychology of
clothing with an advancingly complex social structure. They touch upon
economic factors increasingly as these in their turn interact with others.
Certain objects and substances which may have owed their first importance
to esthetic and amuletic considerations take on an economic value and tend
to function as a primitive media of exchange. Wampum, shells, teeth, skins,
etc., and finally leather and metals.
Caste and heraldry as manifested by dress seem to have an economic basis
discernable at some early stage. Hunting was certainly an economic activity
and the prowess of the hunter must have automatically been made evident.
Prestige and prestige-imitation, still a powerful conditioner of dress, appear,
flourish and evolve in diversified and ever elaborate forms.

Source Excerpted from Hiler, H., & Hiler, M. (1939). Bibliography of

costume. New York: H.W. Wilson Company.

Biographical note Hilaire Hiler (1898-1966) was an American artist working

in the expressionist style. He worked for the WPA as a muralist and print-
maker. His first book, From Nudity to Raiment: An Introduction to the Study
of Costume History, was published in 1929. The research for that book evolved
into one of the most comprehensive bibliographies of the period, co-edited
with his father, Meyer Hiler.

36
 Physical Connections between the Body and Dress
2
Physical Connections between
the Body and Dress
The Psychology of Clothing George Van Ness Dearborn

The science of clothing so far has never been developed; it is something new,
almost pioneer scientific work. The personal science of clothes and of being
clothed, then, is the topic on which I would suggest a few considerations
from a somewhat technical point of view.
It includes, as I shall consider it, two phases, first, a physiological psychol-
ogy of clothing, and then the beginnings of the applied psychology of clothing.
These complement each other. All this is a new application of psychology
(the general science of how to live), and one of which the great public is
much in real need. The public, to be sure, does not realize this need, any
more than it knew that it was in pressing need of information on diet or on
sex or on other things. The public does need basic scientific information on
how to clothe themselves properly so that they will be both more efficient
and more happy, because continually more comfortable.
I. The Satisfaction-Efficiency Ratio – Underlying this whole matter of the
physiology and the psychology of clothing is an ancient idea which is of
fundamental importance throughout the whole matter. In the lectures to my
students I give it the technical name of the then-euphoric index or ratio –
but we wont worry about the name. Sthen and euphor are two Greek terms;
sthen stands for strength or energy, and euphor for well-bearing, contentment,
well-being, happiness; while ratio, of course, or “index,” is the relationship
between the other two. The old and simple enough idea then, is, to put it
wholly outside of scientific terms, that one expends more energy and is there-
fore more efficient in many ways when he is contented and happy, using the
word happy as a symbol for the broad translation of the general Greek term
euphoria. When a person is satisfied, contented, in good humor, when he is
“happy,” in short, he expends more energy, has more initiative, and is
altogether more efficient than when he is unhappy, worrying about something,
or when he “has a grouch,” or any other of the conditions opposite to

37
 Dressing the Body

happiness. Freedom from discomfort underlies it. It importantly underlies

the psychology of clothing in particular, without any doubt at all, because
personal comfort is absolutely essential “in the long run” to a high-grade of
efficiency in the long life-run. This is not so much true of an Eastport man
for example feeding sheets of tin to a sardine-box stamping machine, but it
is true of any kind of work which involves the optimum action of the “higher”
and freer phases of the mind and skilled body. Comfort in general is
indispensable to ideal behaviour that is at all free.
Comfort has both a physiological and a psychological aspect; but both
aspects underlie efficiency in a way which is measurable even in dollars and
cents. The factory-managers, as you already are aware, not many years ago
started out to prompt their employees and operatives to maintain better
health, to keep them in better “condition;” finding that it was a “good policy,”
even as income was concerned, to go so far as to hire a “doctor” at two or
three thousand a year to help keep the employees well.
. . . The present discussion concerns first the physiological psychology of
clothes. My approach in this knowledge is mostly that of pure science from
the universities and from the psychological and physiological laboratories,
although no actual researches that I am able to hear of have as yet been
done in a scientific laboratory on the psychology of clothing . . .
. . . There is much more physiology in the science of adequate clothing as
a process than most men, even the physiologists, would at first suspect. And
yet it is obvious, on thought for a moment, that any covering as heavy, as
complete, and as relatively rigid as an average suit of clothes or a proper
gown could not help having multiform influences within and without over
the body which wears it. Because so universal and so continuous, these
influences are of noteworthy scientific and practical importance.
The reason in a nutshell for this is that one’s clothes are one of the important
things that intervenes between the individual personality and his environment,
and you understand that life itself in a sense is a reaction of an individual to
his environment. As Webb puts it, “As a matter of fact, our artificial coverings
have become so much a part of our life that one may perhaps be allowed to
apply the methods of the naturalist to their consideration, and deal with
them as if they were part and parcel of the creature which wears them” – as
pragmatically they are. We might almost consider clothes as a vicarious or
artificial skin, almost an extension of the individual’s boundary, involving
important relationships between the person and his environment, spiritual
as much as material. And that is the reason, the deeply fundamental reason,
why there is so much real science in the physiology and the psychology of
clothing, subjective and objective, personally and socially and industrially.

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 Physical Connections between the Body and Dress

Let us take up first then the discussion of the physiological psychology of

clothes in three groups of relations: 1. to the skin; 2. to bodily action or
behavior; and 3. to body-temperature. Since the centuries – those slow,
groping, aspiring centuries – when manhood and womanhood were new and
our preprogenitors were covered with a fairly thick mantle of hair, the human
animal man has been a naturally naked creature. He naturally is so, still.
For a reason none too easily apprehended, there seems to us something
ludicrous in this nakedness of the nâive savage. Thomas Hood the Younger,
for example, almost blushes as he tells us

“And their principle clothes were a ring through the nose

And a patch of red paint on the forehead,”

while other poetasters less known to fame than Thomas Hood, and escaped
missionaries and cartoonists innumerable have almost vied with each other
in expressing in memorable phrases the insistent natural nakedness, always
adorned, of natural man. This interesting and important negative phase of
our subject we must for the present all but ignore.
The human animal is naturally, if you please, then, and normally a naked
animal, and up to within about three hundred years ago people were allowed
to live in corners of Europe, specially in Ireland and in Germany (Rudeck),
naked. Up to three centuries ago, at least, the nakedness of the primeval
man had not become so entirely “immodest” that it was prohibited by
enforced law. Man is naturally a naked animal, and it takes a very long time
indeed to adapt an organism to artificial, “acquired” new conditions. Furless
and with little hair was primeval man; and he still likes to be so.
In clothing him, therefore, one has to respect and not ignore this natural
nakedness; and especially the basal fact that man gets his highest comfort
when naturally warm environmental air is freely playing over and on his
skin. You all know, of course, the delight of exposure to the breeze, and to
warm showers, and to other conditions of the natural environment, when
you are naked.
Now, this basic principle of the physiology of clothes, (that man is con-
structed for efficiency-with-happiness, primally as a naked animal) requires
that he be rather careful in adapting ideal clothing to his requirements, because
man, after all, is a highly sensitive being. His efficiency is an intricate and a
rather susceptible thing, and has to be catered to, if he is to get the most out
of his few and flying years.

Source Excerpted from Dearborn, G. (1918). The psychology of clothing.

The Psychological Monographs, 26, 1–72.

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 Dressing the Body

Biographical note George Van Ness Dearborn (1898–1938) was a physician

practicing in the United States.

Reference

Webb, W.M. (1907). The heritage of dress. London: E.G. Richards.

***
Microcosmus: An Essay Concerning Man and His
Relation to the World Hermann Lotze

. . . Not only, however, with this aesthetic enjoyment do we sympathetically

expand our sentience beyond the limits of our body, but also, when we desire
with practical aims to modify the outer world, we are aided in the calculation
of its relations by a similar projection outwards of our imagination, put within
our power by the delicacy of our sense of touch and the ease with which we
combine past experience. The skin surface of our body is not at all points so
organized that it can, by the production of different local signs, discriminate
the stimulations of their immediately contiguous points, and call up in
consciousness different sensations answering to them, and consequently an
image of their combination, form, and situation . . .
Of all living beings, man is the only one that from his natural defenceless-
ness is forced to use implements in order to attain his ends. The capacity for
using them depends not only on the muscular power or the arm, but to a
very large extent on delicacy of sensation and an extraordinary ease and
certainty in associating ideas. If a rod lightly grasped is lying in our hand, so
that its motions have some free play, it presses the surface of our skin at
various points. The apparently direct feeling which we have at every moment
of the position of our limbs, teaches us to judge whether these momentarily
pressed spots of our hand can be connected together by a straight or a curved,
a vertical or a horizontal line; we ascribe the same form and position to the
rod that causes these sensations . . .
. . . Not only the hands but the whole body is capable of similar perceptions,
though with different degrees of delicacy in different parts, and often with
the assistance of other conditions. The unyielding stone below our feet causes
a different feeling from the wooden step of a staircase or the rung of a ladder,
both of which are by our weight set vibrating with various degrees of
amplitude and velocity . . . These striking phenomena must be taken account
of by those to whom the feeling which we are never without, of the outline,
the position, and the movements of our own body seems explicable only on
the supposition that the sentient soul is diffused or extended through the

40
 Physical Connections between the Body and Dress

Figure 2.1 “If a rod lightly grasped is lying in our hand . . .” Lotze calls objects of
dress such as shoes, hats, and hand-held walking sticks “foreign
bodies” in relationship with the surface of a human’s body. He contends
that they can extend not only a person’s consciousness of their body
but expand the self and the personality in such a way as to create
strength, vigor, steadiness, or even a sense of power of being. From
The Delineator, September 1907, New York: The Buttrick Publishing
Co.

whole of the body. In the cases referred to the soul extends still farther; exactly
the same persuasive illusion that made us before say it was in the finger-tips,
makes us now say it is present – percipient and sentient – at the end of the
stick, of the probe, of the needle . . .
. . . We speak of dress, to which we alone are impelled by an original
instinct, that of the ape being merely one of imitation. We speak not of other

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 Dressing the Body

points of view, which either do not deserve to be examined or must stand

over to other opportunities, of the use of clothes as a protection against the
inclemency of weather, of the sense of modesty that chooses them as a
covering; our inquiry is exclusively as to the source of the pleasure, which
they and other kinds of decoration afford to the human soul. It lies by no
means only in the gratification of the vanity that seeks to be admired by
others, but in the heightened and ennobled vital feeling of the wearer himself.
The colours and the metallic lustre of the finery alone minister to the craving
for outside admiration; in other respects our pleasure in ornament and dress
is derived from the sensations which both excite in ourselves . . .
. . . Wherever, in fact, we bring a foreign body into relationship with the
surface of our body – for it is not in the hand alone that these peculiarities
are developed – the consciousness of our personal existence is prolonged
into the extremities and surfaces of this foreign body, and the consequence is
feelings now of an expansion of our proper self, now of the acquisition of a
kind and amount of motion foreign to our natural organs, now of an unusual
degree of vigour, power of resistance, or steadiness in our bearing.
The earliest stages of these feelings, to mention a few examples, is brought
about by coverings for the head and feet, both peculiarly adapted to add
something, at least apparently, to our height. Every form of head-gear
represents in the perpendicular that passes through its centre of gravity the
above-mentioned rod; its value for feeling is enhanced with its height and
partly with its form, namely, when the result of the latter is a distribution of
bulk such as perceptibly moves the centre of gravity upwards, and at the
same time, in the swerve from the vertical direction, brings about a strong
inclination towards one side that must be counteracted by a balancing effort
of the muscles. The head-gear is of no use till there is a threatening of this
want of balance: in equilibrium it is only a definite amount of weight; hence
one intentionally puts on one’s hat somewhat aslant, in order that one may
always be aware of the distance between its highest inclined point and its
plane of support, the head. Thus arises the pleasing delusion that we ourselves,
our own life, and our strength reach up to that point, and at every step that
shakes it, at every puff of wind that sets it in motion, we have quite distinctly
the feeling as if a part of our own being were solemnly nodding backwards
and forwards. Evidently, therefore, one feels quite differently in a cylindrical
hat that encourages these emotions from what one does in a cap, the raised
peak of which would perform the same office very imperfectly; and we come
quite to understand the disposition (showing itself early and in low stages of
culture, and perfected afterwards in higher ones), by means of high erect
helmets, bearskin caps, and lofty coiffures, to fortify the consciousness of
the wearer with the feeling of a majestic upward extension of his personality,

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 Physical Connections between the Body and Dress

as well as to increase the fear-inspiring or respect-inspiring effect of the figure

on others . . .
The second class of these feelings we derive from all hanging and waving
drapery, which, after the model of the ball set in revolving motion, agitates
the surface of our body by a charming variety of extensions in different
directions, and causes us to feel as if we were ourselves present in the gyrations
of the freely-floating ends . . . The last form of those to which we referred is
that assumed by our feelings under the influence of clothes in the strict sense.
The greater or less tension and firmness possessed by the material in itself,
or due to its cut, is transferred to us as if it resulted from our bearing. A
corset resembles the above-mentioned hollow vessel, only that it is filled by
the body, not at one point merely, but throughout its whole extent; on every
occasion of contact with this stiff case the tension and firmness of its frame-
work is felt exactly as if both properties belonged to our body; unquestionably
this also is a means of imparting the feeling of a more vigorous and elastic
existence . . .

Source Excerpted from Lotze, R.H. (1887). Microcosmos: An essay con-

cerning man and his relation to the world. Edinburgh: T.T. Clark.

Biographical note Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) was a German

philosopher who was a student of both medicine and philosophy. He believed
in the universality of scientific law and insisted that philosophy could be
considered a natural science because both humans and inanimate objects
were subject to natural laws. He held that knowledge was the result of
observation and experimentation. This reading is drawn from Lotze’s principle
work on the theory of knowledge and reality.

***
Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self G. Stanley Hall

II. Within the surface, the child’s somatic consciousness does not at first
penetrate. The skin is often pinched, pulled, scratched and otherwise explored;
but is never thought of as a continuous limiting surface, at first, but later
such questions as, “Could I jump out of it and another get in?” “Would it
fit, stretch, shrink?” etc. “How could I get out of it?” “How would I look?”
etc., are common. Much washing and rubbing develop the dermal con-
sciousness and in several returns even itching and scratching provoke special
attention to the skin. Children often take much satisfaction in stroking and
“pooring” themselves and other persons, and if nervous acquire extreme
sensitiveness to any degree of roughness. The most marked dermal impressions
throughout childhood are thermal.

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 Dressing the Body

At the age of from 3 to 5 the bones are generally noticed, and there are
many questions concerning the hard things under the skin. Some think them
wood, iron, stone, etc. On learning that they are bone there are many flitting
fears, sometimes that they will break or that dogs or other animals who love
bones will eat them, or again that they have a horrid skeleton inside them,
and there are many curious forms of weird bone fancies and scores of
questions as to their purpose, material, size and shape. Often the knee-pan
is the first bone in our returns to become an object of special interest; next
comes the elbow, and then the wrist and joints. Bones are generally the first
and for a time the chief object of curiosity within the body, and the discovery
that cats and dogs have bones is often an event, and their size is often vastly
magnified, and their shape curiously discussed.
Next comes the stomach. Its sensations of plethora and often pain, its
associations with food and drink, are early. Many children believe that the
entire internal body save the bones is a receptacle for food, and that it fills
arms and legs, so that if the skin were anywhere cut, food would be found
to be the stuffing. Some believe it hardens directly into bone. Often whims
concerning appetite have affiliations with the weirdest kind of ideas of the
alimentary tract. Many children conceive of the body as stuffed with saw-
dust or with cotton like a pin-cushion, or with dust of which man was made,
or else sweepings. On pricking or injuring the skin and seeing blood, many
form the idea, often no doubt from inadequate answers to their questions,
that the entire body is a skin or bag filled with blood and if it is tapped
blood will gush out and the body collapse like a balloon. They often notice
the pulsations of the heart and think some one is pounding inside them, and
may even develop a definite image of how the man looks and how he strikes.
Few organs inside the body excite so much curiosity as the heart, but the
questions show that this is in large part due to its association with life and
the soul, which is often identified with it even in form. Upon noticing the
activity of respiration children almost always begin to experiment; they exhale
all the residual breath possible and inhale a maximal amount, breathe as
fast as possible and as slow, experiment with costal and abdominal modes,
and particularly hold the breath often in rivalry with each other, the higher
centres thus learning control of the reflex apparatus. Very many, too, are the
questions – “Why do we breathe?” “Do animals, plants, God, etc., breathe?”
“What is breath?” There are many morbid fears lest respiration should
accidentally stop, and many children resolve to lie awake to prevent this
calamity. At this time the claustraphobias may take their rise, and there
develops unusual dread of being hugged, choked, smothered in close places,
being shut into closets, trunks, etc. Some have for a long time the conception
that the body is a bag of wind, and some children are panic stricken on

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seeing their breath on a frosty morning, thinking the soul is escaping. Perhaps
there was some truth in the antique conception that dreams objectified this
function, and when in nightmare we seem to flutter and hover, it is the lungs
which play the stimulating rôle and suggest the thought of wings.
It is a revelation of great significance if this inward direction of thought
has been aroused to learn what the country boy finds out on butchering day.
Such experiences, although slight and without demonstration, cause a great
and wholesome readjustment of this aspect of self-consciousness by showing
both the nature and the relation of the parts within. The two most frequent
questions throughout are, first, “Why have I stomach, eyes, hands?” etc., or
a question seeking purpose and use; and secondly; “Have other human beings
or animals the same organs?” And to realize that parents, playmates, or dog,
horse and cow have legs, eyes, teeth, ears, stomach and heart as they have,
always excites interest and pleasure. No child, of course, has all these exper-
iences in the foreground of its consciousness, but all have some, and doubtless
pass through, some more and some less consciously, all these phases, the
definite order of most of which still remains to be determined. The internal
sensations and conceptions are, as we shall see later, those most intimately
associated with childish conceptions of the soul.
III. The third element in the child’s consciousness, but not usually included
as a factor of the ego, but which must not be neglected, and on which our
returns are voluminous, is dress and adornment. Rings for fingers or ears,
shoes and gloves attract the child’s attention to the part involved, and a change
of dress often involves change of disposition, and almost character. During
the second year this is often strongly developed. Corresponding perhaps to
the prominent position of the foot in the infantile consciousness, a new pair
of shoes seems quite as important as a new dress. Far later, too, gloves come
into great prominence. Very striking with young children is the charm of
some single and perhaps small feature, as, e.g., a pair of shoes with buckles,
stockings with clocks, jacket with bright buttons, a hat with a feather, a bit
of fur here or ribbon there, a sash with buckle. So, too, the first pocket, the
first trousers, suspenders, long pants or dress, first watch, parasol, muff, gloves,
ring, necklace, standing collar, perfumery, new ways of wearing the hair, the
first belt, breastpin, veil – all these stand out in memory in the most vivid
way, and have played an important rôle in the education of self-consciousness.
The passion to have new things noticed, which often makes children so ridic-
ulous, seems sometimes strongest to strangers and sometimes towards friends.
This seems to mark an important moral distinction. For most girls all new
articles of dress and ornament become doubly dear if liked or admired by
those they know and love best, and lose their charm if the latter do not care
for them.

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 Dressing the Body

Lotze rather curiously thought he had done for personal adornment a

service comparable to what Kepler had done for astronomy by his three laws,
in which he believed he had explained man’s satisfaction in dress. If we touch
an object with a stick, we instinctively analyze our sensations into those felt
by contact of the hand with the stick, and ascribe the rest to the object at the
other end of it. It gives us thus a peculiar pleasure when consciousness runs
through all that touches us, and this we feel in those articles of attire that
lengthen the body by prolongations of our personality at the head or feet –
high shoes, stilts, hats, head-dress etc. He thinks that all these forms of feeling
change with every change of their height and form, which shifts the centre
of gravity, and there is special satisfaction when equilibrium is the least trifle
in danger. We feel the wind or our own motions by very different sensations
in hats that are high, broad, obliquely placed, or heavy. Secondly, all hanging,
fluttering or swinging garments, by their change of tension in different
directions, cause us to feel ourselves most agreeably in the peripheral tract
or graceful curves of their free moving ends: a trail dragging along the earth
is like a new organ, endowing us with a new sense. Rings, ribbons, ear-rings,
watches, sashes and everything that hangs and dangles are worn especially
by the young, not so much for display as to gratify the exquisite pressure
sense so peculiar to them and which, according to the modern fashions, free,
flowing hair no longer does. Lastly the impressions we derive from our own
clothing and its strength, stiffness or thickness our self-feeling imputes to the
form or poise of our own body. The pressure of a corset, Lotze thinks, awakens
the feeling of a stronger and more elastic existence; so girdles, bracelets, and
above all the first pair of trousers with suspenders gives a pleasing sense of
sturdy inflexibility, and uprightness. If this view is correct it follows that we
admire the folds of a graceful, well-fitting garment, not for its beauty, but
that we unconsciously reproduce in ourselves the agreeable sensation of the
wearer’s body. So the false arm or leg half deceives even the wearer as to the
boundaries of his own corporeal existence.
This view is very extreme. The great pleasure in wearing new and beautiful
objects of attire in childhood is to secure thereby the attention and interest
of others. Our returns abound in accounts of children who display and pro-
trude new articles of dress, or call attention to them in the most vain and
laughable way. Moreover the fact that even children will wear thin clothes
when heavy ones would be far more comfortable, shoes that are too small
for the sake of looks, and garments that are uncomfortably tight or thin in
places, shows the dominance of those functions which Lotze disregards. The
chief question is, and especially with girls, not how attire feels, but how it
looks, and this standpoint dominates often in those garments that are not
seen. The child who is habitually well dressed learns to avoid acts and

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 Physical Connections between the Body and Dress

environments which tend to soil his clothes and may become dainty, finical,
fastidious and effeminate. The child who is rudely and poorly dressed, on
the other hand, comes in closer contact with the world about him and acquires
a knowledge more real and substantial. It is difficult to determine which
pleasure is the greater, that of habitually well dressed children when very
exceptionally allowed to put on old garments that cannot be injured and to
strip head and feet and abandon themselves to the natural freedom thus given,
or of very poorly clad children who by some good fortune are provided with
attire that enables them to feel the great luxury of being well dressed. Children
sometimes develop an insistent impulse to strip off parts of and occasionally
all of their clothing, partly from sheer discomfort. Pants as usually made are
an unphysiological and unhygienic garment, and much might be said in favor
of a more rational dress for hips and thighs. There are cases of persistent
denudations in childhood that are morbid and atavistic. Of the three functions
of clothes, protection, ornament and Lotzean self-feeling, we must, I think,
conclude that while the first is more important, the last is most infrequent
and the second by far the most conspicuous in childhood. Many mention a
corroding kind of self-pity with which they regard an old garment after it
has been superseded by a newer and better one, and others preserve for
themselves and later for their children all the articles of the dress of childhood
and infancy, and regard them later with feelings curiously described, and no
doubt still more curiously mingled. That, however, man’s primitive body
consciousness has been largely disguised and translated into clothes-conscious-
ness, there can be no doubt. The comfort of clean garments, sensitiveness to
texture and thickness, flexibility and fit are elements which are no doubt
always present, and Lotze has done a real service in showing us that clothes
are an integral part of our self-consciousness. The love of wearing the dress
of adults may be interpreted thus, but clothes are at best alter ego and also
in part mask and distort the primal sense of the physical self. Cleanliness of
body like clean dress has a prodigious moral effect on children, who change
manners, temper, conduct, and put on a better self after being well washed.
A wise application of clothes-psychology can do very much in rightly poising
a child at the golden mean between too much and too little self-consciousness
if not between excessive shyness and over-boldness.
. . . A person is a vast aggregate of qualities and influences vinculated
together, treated and acting as a unit. After Cicero many ancient and medieval
works on oratory listed the traits of an ideal socius, best calculated to influence
men, and most worthy of respect, or most provocative of imitation. First
was form, figure, complexion, and the factors of physical beauty, fine eyes,
nose, chin, bust, foot, hand, shoulders, etc., the contour of any one of which
might have a perfection that was ravishing, and if truly put in marble would

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 Dressing the Body

make a sculptor immortal. Physical beauty is an immense power, and ugliness

is an eternal disadvantage. Next come dress and toilet, with every detail of
hair, nails, shoes, head-gear, proper fashions, and even cosmetics, perfumery,
etc., if and where needed, correct taste which is the beginning of art and
which remedies defects of form, all of which are subjects worthy of long and
detailed study as sources of proper personal influence. Third come the
automatisms, which are among the most important media of likes and dislikes,
and even fetishisms, tricks of articulation, of facial expression, bearing and
carriage, the use of the voice, positions and movements of hands and feet,
smiling and laughing, habits of fan, handkerchief, napkin, knife and fork,
gesture, inflection, all the minor morals of manners, the magnetic aura, atmos-
phere, presence, style, which reflect all one’s environment, breeding and
heredity, and which because they are unconscious reveal the true self that
words, social forms and conventionalities so often hide. Then come the
voluntary actions, either deeds accomplished or abilities which mark the range
of the ego of will. What can one do? How would he act under the strain of
jealousy, anger, love, fear, temptation, and in any possible condition? What
is the vocational sphere of action? Where would character give way? Self-
control be lost? And how much energy is there? Fifth, what are the quality
and flux of the habitual currents of feeling? The temperament and dominant
sentiments? Is there the hearty euphoria of that good fellowship which covers
a multitude of sins the good heart that is Prince Hal’s “sun and moon?”
Does duty rule? Or is the soul weakened by self-indulgence? Is it malevolent?
Tricky? Hypercritical? How will it stand the strain of disappointment or
affection? Of publicity? Of fame? Of fatigue? Is it stable or moody? Harmon-
ious or unbalanced? Sickly? Self-conscious and morbid? or Hearty? Eupeptic?
or Eucholic? Then, and far less prominent than we think, come the mental
equipment or intellectual possessions of culture, the size of the fund of know-
ledge, the inventory of mental resources, and especially the breadth and height
of sympathies, both for persons and ideas, the range of interests, the judgment
and sense in the use of knowledge, originality, and independence of thought.
If to these we add the still more adventitious advantages of fame, wealth,
birth and name, we shall have a magazine of influences which has a power
to hold other souls up together and to keep them occupied and well directed,
the vast and manifold beneficence of which psychology is still unable to
trace . . .

Source Excerpted from Hall, G.S. (1898). Some aspects of the early sense
of self. American Journal of Psychology, 351–395.

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 Physical Connections between the Body and Dress

Biographical note Granville Stanley Hall (1844–1924) was a pioneer in

establishing psychology in the U.S. He earned, at Harvard, the first doctorate
in psychology awarded in the U.S. He set up the first formal psychology lab-
oratory in the U.S., at Johns Hopkins University. A founder of developmental
psychology, Hall claimed that humans pass through the same developmental
stages as non-humans. He founded several publications and was a founder
and first president of the American Psychological Association.

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 Health Issues and Dress Reform
3
Health Issues and
Dress Reform
Fashion in Deformity William Henry Flower

The propensity to deform, or alter from the natural form, some part of the
body, is one which is common to human nature in every aspect in which we
are acquainted with it, the most primitive and barbarous, and the most
civilized and refined.
The alterations or deformities which it is proposed to consider in this essay,
are those which are performed, not by isolated individuals, or with definite
motives, but by considerable numbers of members of a community, simply in
imitation of one another – in fact, according to fashion “that most inexorable
tyrant to which the greater part of mankind are willing slaves.”
Fashion is now often associated with change, but in less civilized conditions
of society fashions of all sorts are more permanent than with us; and in all
communities such fashions as those here treated of are, for obvious reasons,
far less likely to be subject to the fluctuations of caprice than those affecting
the dress only, which, even in Shakespeare’s time, changed so often that “the
fashion wears out more apparel than the man.” Alterations once made in the
form of the body cannot be discarded or modified in the lifetime of the indiv-
idual, and therefore, as fashion is intrinsically imitative, such alterations have
the strongest possible tendency to be reproduced generation after generation.
The origins of these fashions are mostly lost in obscurity, all attempts to
solve them being little more than guesses. Some of them have become
associated with religious or superstitious observances, and so have been spread
and perpetuated; some have been vaguely thought to be hygienic in motive;
most have some relation to conventional standards of improved personal
appearance; but whatever their origin, the desire to conform to common
usage, and not to appear singular, is the prevailing motive which leads to
their continuance. They are perpetuated by imitation, which, as Herbert
Spencer says, may result from two widely divergent motives. It may be
prompted by reverence for one imitated, or it may be prompted by the desire
to assert equality with him . . .

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 Dressing the Body

Figure 3.1 “. . . everything which is beautiful and excellent in the human foot
destroyed . . .” Flower compared European footwear to Chinese
foot binding as “only a slight step in excess.” He used these three
illustrations to display graphically the serious foot deformities
caused by fashionable European boots. Three forms of the foot –
a) natural, b) with fashionable boot shape, c) boot deformity from
Fashion in Deformity (p. 64), W.H. Flower, 1881, London: Macmillan
and Co.

The feet have suffered more, and altogether with more serious results to
general health and comfort, from simple conformity to pernicious customs,
than any other part of the body. And on this subject, instead of relating the
unaccountable caprices of the savage, we have to speak only of people who
have already advanced to a tolerably high grade of civilization, and to include
all those who are at the present time foremost in the ranks of intellectual
culture.
The most extreme instance of modification of the size and form of the
foot in obedience to fashion, is the well-known case of the Chinese women,
not entirely confined to the highest classes, but in some districts pervading

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 Health Issues and Dress Reform

all grades of society alike. The deformity is produced by applying tight band-
ages round the feet of the girls when about five years old. The bandages are
specially manufactured, Miss Norwood1 tells us, and are about two inches
wide and two yards long for the first year, five yards long for subsequent
years. The end of the strip is laid on the inside of the foot at the instep, then
carried over the toes, under the foot and round the heel, the toes being thus
drawn towards and across the sole, while a bulge is produced in the instep
and a deep indentation in the sole. Successive layers of bandage are wound
round the foot until the strip is all used, and the end is then sewn tightly
down. After a month the foot is put in hot water to soak some time; then the
bandage is carefully unwound. Notwithstanding the powdered alum and other
of the sole. The whole has now the appearance of the hoof of some animal
rather than a human foot, and affords a very inefficient organ of support,
as the peculiar tottering gait of those possessing it clearly shows. When once
formed, the “golden lily,” as the Chinese lady calls her delicate little foot,
can never recover its original shape.
But strange as this custom seems to us, it is only a slight step in excess of
what the majority of people in Europe subject themselves and their children
to. From personal observation of a large number of feet of persons of all
ages and of all classes of society in our own country, I do not hesitate to say
that there are very few, if any, to be met with that do not, in some degree,
bear evidence of having been subjected to a compressing influence more or
less injurious. Let any one take the trouble to inquire into what a foot ought
to be. For external form look at any of the antique models – the nude Hercules
Farnese or the sandaled Apollo Belvidere; watch the beautiful freedom of
motion in the wide spreading toes of an infant; consider the wonderful
mechanical contrivances for combining strength with mobility, firmness with
flexibility; the numerous bones, articulations, ligaments; the great toe, with
seven special muscles to give it that versatility of motion which was intended
that it should possess – and then see what a miserable, stiffened, distorted
thing is this same foot, when it has been submitted for a number of years to
the “improving” process to which our civilization condemns it. The toes all
squeezed and flattened against each other; the great toe no longer in its normal
position, but turned outwards, pressing so upon the others that one or more
of them frequently has to find room for itself either above or under its fellows;
the joints all rigid, the muscles atrophied and powerless; the finely formed
arch broken down; everything which is beautiful and excellent in the human
foot destroyed – to say nothing of the more serious evils which so generally
follow – corns, bunions, in-growing nails, and all their attendant miseries.

1. American missionary at Swatow, Times, Sept. 2, 1880.

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 Dressing the Body

It is not only leathern boots and shoes that are to blame for producing
alterations in the form of the feet; even the stocking, comparatively soft and
pliable as it is, when made with pointed toes and similar form for both sides,
must take its share. The continual, steady, though gentle pressure, keeps the
toes squeezed together, and especially hinders the recovery of its proper form
and mobility, when attempts at curing a misshapen foot are being made by
wearing shoes of rational construction. Socks adapted to the different form
of the two feet, or “rights and lefts,” are occasionally to be met with at hosiers,
and it would add greatly to comfort if they were more generally adopted.
For some cases it is well to have them made with distinct toes like gloves.
With such socks and properly constructed shoes, a much distorted foot, even
of a middle aged person, will raising and propelling the body. Turning out
the toes is, moreover, a common cause of weak ankles, as it throws the weight
of the body chiefly on the inside, instead of distributing it equally over all
parts of the joint . . .
The fact is, that in admiring such distorted forms as the . . . symmetrically
pointed foot, we are opposing our judgment to that of the Maker of our bodies;
we are neglecting the criterion afforded by nature; we are departing from
the highest standard of classical antiquity; we are simply putting ourselves
on a level in point of taste with those Australians, Botocudos, and Negroes.
We are taking fashion, and nothing better, higher, or truer, for our guide;
and after the various examples which have now been brought forward, may
we not well ask, with Shakespeare,

“SEEST THOU NOT, WHAT A DEFORMED THIEF THIS FASHION IS?”

Source Excerpted from Flower, W.H. (1881). Fashion in deformity. London:

MacMillan.

Biographical note Sir William Henry Flower (1831–1899) was a medical

doctor, a surgeon, and professor of comparative anatomy. The reading comes
from an essay that was delivered as a lecture to the Royal Institution of
Great Britain and subsequently published in their proceedings.

***
The Science of Dress Ada S. Ballin

. . . The chief evil, however, of ordinary dress, results from the way in which
it is supported, pressing upon the waist, hindering the development of the
internal organs and cramping them, thus tending to produce injuries which
may affect the happiness of the girl’s future.

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 Health Issues and Dress Reform

Figure 3.2 Ballin used this illustration in her book to describe how the weight of
clothing could potentially cause damage and injuries to a woman’s
body. Line C–D shows how the lowered neckline of a chemise or
low-set sleeves drag down on the shoulders, preventing a woman
from raising her arms over her head and eventually causing rounded,
forward-sloping shoulders. Line A–B shows how the weight of a skirt
and bodice hangs incorrectly from the waist, pressing in on the pelvis.
Lines E–F and G–H are the best areas to properly support garments.
Plate 5 from The Science of Dress in Theory and Practice (across from
p. 174), by A.S. Ballin, 1885, London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle,
and Rivington.

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 Dressing the Body

I believe that a large number of the cases of curvature of the spine met with
in surgical practice, generally in girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen,
result directly or indirectly from the weight and improper pressure of clothes,
a potent agent in causing the deformity being the wearing of high-heeled
boots, which throw the body forward in walking. Tight, stiff stays are res-
ponsible for a great deal of harm, and I am afraid that horrible process called
tight-lacing begins but too frequently earlier than is generally suspected.
I propose to deal with these evils seriatim, and show how best they may
be avoided.
I have already given what seem to me sufficient reasons for maintaining
that wool is the natural and most healthy substance out of which to manu-
facture clothes. Clothes in their action should be merely supplementary to
the skin, and care is required to enable them to properly perform the functions
demanded of them. They should be light, warm, permit free transpiration,
or, in other words, ventilate well; they should exert no pressure on any part,
and they should be free from all poisonous particles, whether of dirt or of dye.
Our bodies lose heat by evaporation, and also by conduction, convection,
and radiation. We, therefore, require our clothes to be absorbent, so that the
evaporation shall not take place on the skin, but from the surface of the
clothes, which prevents chill. The mere fact of covering impedes loss of heat
by convection, and radiation, and provided our garments are made of non-
conducting materials they necessarily minimize that loss of heat by conduction
which is always going on between two bodies of different temperatures, such
as the human body and the air, just on the same principle that a tea-cosy retains
heat in the teapot. We stuff our tea-cosies with wool in perhaps unconscious
obedience to the principles I have explained, and we should clothe our bodies
in the same way.
Stationary air, as has been observed, is a bad conductor of heat; but particles
of air rise, when heated, and give place to colder ones. Hence it is desirable
that the covering of the body should have a rough surface, so as to entangle
in it particles of air, which becoming heated, and being unable to rise, form
a sort of warm atmosphere round the body. It is an advantage, moreover,
for garments to be loosely woven, so that a certain quantity of air may be
entangled in the meshes of the material, and for the same reason, instead of
the clothes consisting of one very thick garment, successive layers of clothing
are and should be worn, as a considerable amount of air is then imprisoned
between them.
The human body has a tiny atmosphere clinging to its hairs, in proportion
to their size, as may be seen by plunging the hand quickly into water, and then
holding it still, when little silvery bubbles will be seen on the skin. But in
other animals better covered than man, air adheres in considerable quantities

56
 Health Issues and Dress Reform

to the thick hair, fur, wool, and feathers, adding to their warmth-saving capa-
bilities, and here again wool is indicated as a most suitable clothing material:
for cotton, linen, and silk, having smoother surfaces, do not provide so pro-
tective an atmosphere.
Nature points to wool as the proper clothing of man, as of the lower
animals, and, as is only to be expected under the circumstances, it fulfils all
the conditions necessary for the preservation of health, as far as dress is con-
cerned; it retains more warmth, while weighing less than any other material,
and it allows the skin to perform those functions of transpiration, interference
with which is the precursor of disease, while stoppage of them causes death,
as surely as the cessation of breathing through the lungs, consequent on
suffocation.
To speak now of the ventilating power of various materials. It might appear
at first sight, and is, indeed, often maintained by the thoughtless, that the
more impervious to air a material is the warmer it must be; but experience
teaches us that this is not so. For instance, a kid glove, which can hardly be
said to allow any air to pass through it, feels by no means so warm on the
hand as one knitted out of wool, through which a great amount of air can
pass, as may easily be seen by blowing through it. If we call the ventilating
power of flannel 100, that of linen is 50, of silk 40, and of buckskin 1; but a
practical comparison of the heat values of these materials shows that flannel
feels decidedly the warmest when worn. Of course it may be said that it feels
warmer because it is a better non-conductor, but I believe another cause for
this effect may be found in its higher ventilating power. I said in a previous
chapter that the skin breathes as well as the lungs, though in a less degree,
and if the air is permitted to reach the skin it not only removes waste and
injurious substances from the body, but it also gives oxygen to the body.
This oxygen combines with the carbon in the small blood-vessels, which in
countless multitudes underlie the skin, and heat is given off.
Speaking of these little blood-vessels leads me to mention another point
about clothing, namely, that if clothes fit too tightly they are not so warm as
those of looser make, and the reason of this is twofold. First, tight clothes
press upon the little blood-vessels in the skin, and thus mechanically interfere
with the circulation of the blood in them, and that hot fluid, the blood, not
being permitted to flow to the skin, that organ feels the loss of its heat supply.
Secondly, tight garments, permitting but little air to lie between them and
the skin, do not so freely permit the interchange of those good offices of
which I have spoken, between it and the air, as would looser garments.
The value of woollen clothing for occupations or sports which bring about
copious perspiration is generally acknowledged, and the reason of this is that
it permits the skin to dry rapidly by absorbing moisture, and does not cling

57
 Dressing the Body

to the skin wet and clammy like cotton or linen. Wet clothes conduct heat
away from the body more rapidly than dry ones do, and if two men, one
wearing a flannel and one a linen shirt, after a vigorous game of lawn-tennis
sat down to cool, the one wearing flannel would probably suffer no ill results,
while the linen-clad hero would soon feel a sudden chill, and would speedily
develop all the too familiar symptoms of cold in the head, or on the chest, or
of sore throat. By absorbing much of the perspiration woollen clothes prevent
the chilling of the body which takes place when evaporation is too rapid.
But, besides wearing woollen during athletic sports, most men wear woollen
vests, drawers, and socks – at any rate during the winter; yet our young girls,
who are infinitely more in need of every advantage that clothes can offer, for
the most part are allowed, even in the coldest weather, to wear cambric or
cotton underclothing, in spite of the fact that most medical men are agreed
that woollen underclothing is necessary in this climate.
My own opinion is that woollen should be worn not only in winter but in
summer also, the only difference being in the thickness of the make and number
of the garments, and I am led to believe this by the physiological facts which
I have stated.
Woollen garments, if themselves kept clean, preserve the skin in a clean
and healthy condition, keeping it warm in winter, and preventing chill in
summer.
That irritation which sometimes follows the unaccustomed wearing of
woollen next the skin is generally caused by the material being of recent
manufacture or coarse quality, and in all but the rarest cases it passes off
within a few days, if the practice is persevered in.
In those rare cases where irritation continues if all-wool garments are worn
next the skin, a mixture of cotton and wool, as in the ordinary “shop”
merinos, or of silk and wool, as in the Anglo-Indian gauze, which is perfectly
smooth, may be worn.
In summer weather I believe that many cases of so-called nettle-rash, and
that most painful skin disease, prickly heat, the name of which admirably
describes the sensations it produces, are caused by the sudden checking of
the functions of the skin, owing to the thinness of the vests worn. These
cases are not often met with in medical practice, as, although extremely
painful, the affections are known not to be dangerous; but I believe they are
much more common than is generally thought, and privately I have met with
several in the persons of young ladies who in summer wear calico next the
skin . . .
There is a very prevalent idea that woollen clothing is weakening, but this
is only a misapprehension of the fact that it is weakening to allow the body
to be constantly overheated. Although woollen is worn, the body need not

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 Health Issues and Dress Reform

be overheated, even in summer, care being taken that the quality and quantity
of the clothes is suitable to the external temperature.
To come now to the practical application of all the principles which I have
endeavoured to explain in this and the preceding chapters, I recommend that
the body, especially of growing girls, should be clad entirely in wool, and for
this purpose I advocate the use of woollen combinations, with high necks
and long sleeves. The combination garment, with the addition of woollen
stockings, forms a complete and most sanitary costume, and, were it not for
the sake of appearances, is all that is needed for summer wear; but other
clothing is required in winter for warmth, and in summer for the sake of
that tyrant appearance.

Source Excerpted from Ballin, A. S. (1885). The science of dress in theory

and practice. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.

Biographical note Ada S. Ballin (d. 1906) was a British philologist, and
translated Muslim history and Hebrew texts. She was a lecturer to the
National Health Society of London, and this reading comes from her book,
which was a collection of previous lectures and articles on health issues and
dress.
***
The Reform Dress Amelia Bloomer in Dexter C. Bloomer

. . . “In January or February, 1851, an article appeared editorially in the

Seneca County Courier, Seneca Falls, N.Y., on ‘Female Attire’ in which the
writer showed up the inconvenience, unhealthfulness and discomfort of
woman’s dress, and advocated a change to Turkish pantaloons and a skirt
reaching a little below the knee.
“At the time, I was publishing a monthly paper in the same place devoted
to the interests of woman, temperance and woman’s-rights being the principal
subjects. As the editor of the Courier was opposed to us on the woman’s
rights question, this article of his gave me an opportunity to score him one
on having gone so far ahead of us as to advocate our wearing pantaloons,
and in my next issue I noticed him and his proposed style in a half-serious,
half-playful article of some length. He took up the subject again and expressed
surprise that I should treat so important a matter with levity. I replied to
him more seriously than before, fully indorsing and approving his views on
the subject of woman’s costume.
“About this time, when the readers of the Lily and the Courier were
interested in and excited over the discussion, Elizabeth Smith Miller, daughter

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 Dressing the Body

Figure 3.3 Amelia Jenks Bloomer wearing Elizabeth Smith Miller’s version of
Turkish Pantaloons and short skirt – the ensemble that became known
as the “Bloomer Costume.” This image appeared in the Illustrated
London News in 1851, drawn from a daguerreotype by T.W. Brown of
Bloomer wearing the ensemble. From Illustrated London News, Vol. 19,
1851, London: William Little.

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 Health Issues and Dress Reform

of the Hon. Gerrit Smith, of Peterboro, N.Y., appeared on the streets of our
village dressed in short skirts and full Turkish trousers. She came on a visit
to her cousin, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was then a resident of Seneca
Falls. Mrs. Miller had been wearing the costume some two or three months
at home and abroad. Just how she came to adopt it I have forgotten, if I ever
knew. But she wore it with the full sanction and approval of her father and
husband. During her father’s term in congress she was in Washington, and
the papers of that city described her appearance on the streets in the short
costume.
“A few days after Mrs. Miller’s arrival in Seneca Falls Mrs. Stanton came
out in a dress made in Mrs. Miller’s style. She walked our streets in a skirt
that came a little above the knees, and trousers of the same material – black
satin. Having had part in the discussion of the dress question, it seemed proper
that I should practise as I preached, and as the Courier man advised; and so
a few days later I, too, donned the new costume, and in the next issue of my
paper announced that fact to my readers. At the outset, I had no idea of
fully adopting the style; no thought of setting a fashion; no thought that my
action would create an excitement throughout the civilized world, and give
to the style my name and the credit due Mrs. Miller. This was all the work
of the press. I stood amazed at the furor I had unwittingly caused. The New
York Tribune contained the first notice I saw of my action. Other papers
caught it up and handed it about. My exchanges all had something to say.
Some praised and some blamed, some commented, and some ridiculed and
condemned. ‘Bloomerism,’ ‘Bloomerites,’ and ‘Bloomers’ were the headings
of many an article, item and squib; and finally someone – I don’t know to
whom I am indebted for the honor – wrote the ‘Bloomer Costume,’ and the
name has continued to cling to the short dress in spite of my repeatedly
disclaiming all right to it and giving Mrs. Miller’s name as that of the
originator or the first to wear such dress in public. Had she not come to us
in that style, it is not probable that either Mrs. Stanton or myself would
have donned it.
“As soon as it became known that I was wearing the new dress, letters
came pouring in upon me by hundreds from women all over the country
making inquiries about the dress and asking for patterns – showing how
ready and anxious women were to throw off the burden of long, heavy skirts.
It seemed as though half the letters that came to our office were for me.
“My subscription list ran up amazingly into the thousands, and the good
woman’s rights doctrines were thus scattered from Canada to Florida and
from Maine to California. I had gotten myself into a position from which I
could not recede if I had desired to do so. I therefore continued to wear the
new style on all occasions, at home and abroad, at church and on the lecture

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 Dressing the Body

platform, at fashionable parties and in my business office. I found the dress

comfortable, light, easy and convenient, and well adapted to the needs of
my busy life. I was pleased with it and had no desire to lay it aside, and so
would not let the ridicule or censure of the press move me. For some six or
eight years, or so long as I remained in active life and until the papers had
ceased writing squibs at my expense, I wore no other costume. During this
time I was to some extent in the lecture field, visiting in all the principal
cities of the North and lecturing on temperance and woman suffrage; but at
no time, on any occasion, alluding to my style of costume. I felt as much at
ease in it as though I had been arrayed in the fashionable draggle skirts. In all
my travels I met with nothing disagreeable or unpleasant, but was universally
treated with respect and attention by both press and people wherever I
appeared. Indeed, I received from the press flattering notices of my lectures.
If the dress drew the crowds that came to hear me it was well. They heard
the message I brought them, and it has borne abundant fruit.
“My paper had many contributions on the subject of dress and that ques-
tion was for some time kept before my readers. Mrs. Stanton was a frequent
contributor and ably defended the new style. She continued to wear it at
home and abroad, on the lecture platform and in the social parlor, for two
or three years; and then the pressure brought to bear upon her by her father
and other friends was so great, that she finally yielded to their wishes and
returned to long skirts.
“Lucy Stone, of the Women’s Journal, adopted and wore the dress for
many years on all occasions; but she, too, with advancing years, saw fit to
return to the old style. We all felt that the dress was drawing attention from
what we thought of far greater importance – the question of woman’s right
to better education, to a wider field of employment, to better remuneration
for her labor, and to the ballot for the protection of her rights. In the minds
of some people, the short dress and woman’s rights were inseparably
connected. With us, the dress was but an incident, and we were not willing
to sacrifice greater questions to it.
. . . The costume of woman should be suited to her wants and necessities.
It should conduce at once to her health, comfort, and usefulness; and, while
it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make
that end of secondary importance. I certainly need not stop to show that
these conditions are not attained by the present style of woman’s dress. All
admit that they are not. Even those who ridicule most freely the labors of
your association are ready to admit the folly and inutility of the prevailing
styles.

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 Health Issues and Dress Reform

Source Excerpted from Bloomer, D. (1975). The life and writings of Amelia
Bloomer. New York: Shocken Books. (Original work published 1895)

Biographical note Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818–1894) was an U.S. reformer

who campaigned for temperance, and women’s rights and suffrage. She was
a journalist and publisher, and an early feminist writer who worked with
such contemporaries as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The
reading is taken from the book written about her by her husband, Dexter C.
Bloomer. In the book he excerpts some of her original work.

***
The Development and Function of Clothing
Knight Dunlap

. . . We have now put ourselves under the necessity of answering a new

question. If clothing is not conducive to modesty or to morality, but rather
the contrary, why has it not disappeared? Its value as a badge has become
minimized. Its protective value is not important except under conditions which
do not obtain much of the time among civilized peoples. It is not conducive
to health. Man could profit in comfort, and hygienically, by reducing his
winter attire as woman has reduced hers, and in warm weather both sexes
would be better off, hygienically, if they completely discarded raiment the
greater part of the time. But still we cling to clothes as the oyster to his shell,
and the police back up public opinion. Is this mere force of habit? Habit of
course plays a major part, but there is another reason why we conceal our
figures; a reason of vital importance to racial betterment; a reason so strong
that it is possible that women may still return to long skirts and pads, and
man may never emerge from his swaddlings.
The reason is to be found in sexual selection and sexual competition. We
may doubt the eugenic value of sexual selection but it is nevertheless an im-
portant phenomenon in all grades of society, and profoundly influences social
and individual life. Sexual competition is based on sexual selection, and is
perhaps the factor of greatest importance in the preservation of certain
clothing habits, once they are established.
The principles of selection are different for the male and the female, and I
think the effects of this difference are recognizable in the sartorial develop-
ments of modern times. The female is evaluated primarily on the basis of
what we call “beauty,” which involves certain objective standards.1 These

1. A more detailed discussion of these standards and their importance is given in the author’s
small volume on Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.

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 Dressing the Body

standards apply to (1) form and proportion of body, (2) coloration of skin,
hair, and eyes, (3) nutrition and general health, (4) coordination in movement
and in posture, and (5) certain minor factors such as texture of hair and
skin, form of eye, mouth and other features, quality of voice, intelligence
and temperament. Other standards exist also; standards of accomplishments,
of social caste, and economic circumstances, but beauty is by far the most
important consideration.
Standards of beauty vary from race to race and from time to time. This is
especially true of the fifth group, but applies to the others also. Standard-
ization, however, is always on a practical basis, although the actual standards,
once established tend to out-last the practical conditions on which they are
based. Where no specific practical determinants exist, the characteristics
peculiar to the race are important, the Chinaman preferring the normal
Chinese type, the Senegambian the normal Senegambian type. The practical
factors are frequently more important than they seem to be to superficial
observation. Where food supplies are precarious, and the reserve fat which
the woman may accumulate for the benefit of the child is of great value,
preference for the obese type may be expected, as among certain African
tribes of worshippers at the shrine of Aphrodite Steatopygia. Purely casual
factors may from time to time become important, such as the taste for red
hair which flourished for a time, supported perhaps by the rhapsodies of
certain poets whose inamorata happened to be adorned with sunset hued
locks. Prevailing fads have their effects, since man wants his women to be
approved, if not envied, by other women. Hence the contemporary feminine
penchant for pathological thinness affects temporarily the preferences of the
male, although his fundamental standards are probably unchanged, and he
would be relieved by the return to more normal proportions. However
important may be the variable factors in beauty, the fundamental anatomical
and physiological characters always have been preëminent, and for the benefit
of the race we may well hope that they always will be.
Standards of sexual attractiveness of the male are characteristically differ-
ent from those of the female, but are likewise on a practical basis. Certain
desiderata are definitely established among Western races (although we do
not refer to them as features of “beauty”), and corresponding ones obtain
among other races. These are: (1) stature above the average, (2) muscular
development for both strength and agility, (3) lung development for endur-
ance, (4) racially normal features, (5) thick hair, preferably curly, and (6)
aggressiveness and economic ability. Here again, cultural conditions mod-
ify the standards, and fads have their influence, but these modifications are
less noticeable than in the case of the standards of female beauty. Economic
ability is of course variable in form. It may be hunting and fighting ability,

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 Health Issues and Dress Reform

or ability of a herdsman or trader, or in the mechanical arts, or in politics or

banditry.2
. . . Looking back over the history of clothing and adornment, we find a
great deal which has been effective in equalizing sexual competition, reducing
the competition to a less deadly level. Gloves make the hands of washerwomen
and princesses look more nearly alike. Long hair permits deceitful coiffures
which tend towards the uniformization of the luxuriant and the scanty locked.
Hoops and bustles make Venus and the Harpy alike, below the belt. The
corset squeezed all waist into an indifferent ugliness. Even long skirts, without
crinoline, reduce the limbs of the goddess to somewhat the level of the knock-
kneed, the bow-legged, the beanpoles, and the parlor grands. Plucking of
eye-brows is another great leveler. Paint and powder, henna and kohl, parasols
and fans, are among the effective union weapons in restraint of competition.
The dominant male also has not been without means and methods for the
neutralization of natural defects and advantages. The camouflage of coats
and trousers has already been mentioned. Robes, and other flowing and flossy
garments, were early worn by men of superior social status. These garments
concealed not only bandy-legs and bull-calves, but also emaciated figures
and aldermanic abdomens, and were undoubtedly great aids in preventing
the women of the upper class men from sighing after more Adonis-like males
of the exposed lower classes. Beards have been natural concealers of faces
handsome and otherwise among many races. The abolition of the beard
among modern men of Western Europe and America has been of course
largely due to the influence of woman, who appreciates the smooth face in
personal contacts. It is not probable, however, that woman would have
succeeded so soon in separating man from his natural growth of facial hair
if this growth had not become so diversified that it constituted a distinct
feature of individual differences. Too many men today would have beards of
painful scantiness, peculiar color, or insufficient distribution on the face, if
they should let them grow, to bear comparison with the well-bearded man.
The beard actually became a competitive point instead of a means of
concealment, before it was abolished.
The story of clothing is now practically complete. Having its primitive
origin in practical protective needs, its amplification and retention under
conditions which render it practically unnecessary, has been fostered by the
resistance to sexual competition which is today the strongest force operating
against dress reform for both sexes. Bobbed hair, the short skirt, and the
peekaboo waist may be denounced in the names of sexual modesty and sexual
morality, but their real objectionableness lies in their furtherance of sexual

2. The bandit has apparently been the economic type preferred by women through the ages.
He is the first, and perhaps the only real “gentleman.”

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 Dressing the Body

competition. The attack on the one-piece bathing suit may have been headed
by male moralists, but its energy was supplied by women who had good
reasons to distrust their ratings in a bathing beauty contest.3
In some respects, at least, savages have been wiser than civilized peoples.
Both physical and mental hygiene demand clothing that shall not transgress
the limits of protective needs. In general, we wear too much clothing, and of
the wrong kind. Woman, long the worst offender, has suddenly outstripped
man, both literally and in the line of progress. Man does not need the protec-
tion from cold which he claims, in winter, and in summer he needs protection
only from flies, mosquitoes, and the rays of the sun in certain climates. Pro-
gress is retarded by a professed moral censorship that is really vicious. Every
activity in this direction has proved itself ridiculous and obstructive. The
restraint of sexual competition may be useful in certain stages of society, but
this usefulness, if it occurs, soon disappears. When we shall have returned to
the primitive basis of clothing, as a means of protection and nothing more,
we will have lost most of our problems of sexual morality, and sexual
immodesty will have disappeared along with its reflection, sexual modesty.

Source Excerpted from Dunlap, K. (1928). The development and function

of clothing. Journal of General Psychology, 1, 64–78. Reprinted by permission
from the Journal of General Psychology.

Biographical note Knight Dunlap (1875–1949) received his doctorate from

Harvard University in 1903. Dunlap was appointed an instructor in psychol-
ogy at Johns Hopkins University where he became Professor of Experimental
Psychology and chair of the psychology department. He remained at Johns
Hopkins until 1936 when he received an invitation to develop a graduate
psychology program at University of California-Los Angeles. Dunlap reflects
the cognitive-behavioral orientation in psychology. He served as President
of the American Psychological Association and first editor of the Journal of
Comparative Psychology, and he was a pioneer in arguing for an experimental
approach to social psychology.

3. The aversion to bodily competition on the part of women is complicated by the fact that
she fears the criticism of her competitors more than she fears the estimation of men. It is
generally known that women dress for the eyes of other women, rather than for the eyes of
men, who, in general do not notice the details of female attire, being much more interested in
woman herself than her clothing. It is a fact also, that most women, regardless of their
pulchritude or impulchritude, would rather unveil themselves completely before men than
before their fellow women. They fear the criticism of other women on precisely the points of
the sexual appeal to men. The corresponding inhibitions of men in respect to their own sex
are far lighter, as shown by observation of their general behavior, and by their radically different
conditions in gymnasiums and swimming pools for the two sexes.

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Fashioning Identity
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 Fashioning Identity

Fashioning Identity
In this section, we focus attention on the concept of identity. What we mean
by identity is an individual’s roles and social positions, his or her personality,
and other characteristics about him- or herself. The first two readings deal
with the role of dress in the establishment of identity. These readings are
followed by selections on appearance management along with presentations
on the communication of specific identities. The writers come from a wide
variety of disciplines with William Hazlitt (1818) being a philosopher, Mary
Fry (1856) a writer concerned with dress as an expression of national identity,
William I. Thomas (1908) a sociologist, Louis Flaccus (1906) a psychologist,
and Grace Morton (1926) a university professor of textiles and clothing.
Thomas, Flaccus, and Morton all wrote at times when their respective fields
were in stages of early development. They foresaw the connections between
dress and its potential as an area of social-science research.

Establishing Identity

William Hazlitt (1818) addresses the question of the function of fashion in

his own time period. He describes fashion as living only in a “giddy round
of constant innovation and restless vanity” (p. 52), defining it as a process
of constant superficial change. Hazlitt contends “dress is the great secret of
address” (p. 55). Hazlitt views participation in fashion as expensive and
confined to the wealthier class in communicating an individual’s station in
life. Hazlitt criticizes fashion as wasteful, therefore, having no purposes except
to induce change. He claims that fashion is losing its power because it allows
class distinction to be masked.
Hazlitt (1818) says that fashion became a “mere affectation on one side,
and gradually ceased to be made a matter of aristocratic assumption on the
other” (p. 54). In this argument, fashion is a moral issue. Beauty and truth
are virtue, and therefore, once fashion becomes mere imitation, anyone, even
the lowest, can assume “airs and graces of pretended superiority” (p. 56).
To Hazlitt, increased participation in the fashion system removes the ability

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to distinguish class distinctions and refinement. Dress is no longer a matter

of taste and beauty, or a way to display accomplishment and virtue.
Mary Fry (1856) calls for the development of a national costume in a time
when many prominent U.S. citizens were following European fashions, and
when the French apparel industry was seen as providing fashion leaders.
According to Fry, this national costume should be based on Christian ideals
and reflect U.S. democratic beliefs. She states that Americans should stop
trying to copy or emulate a style of life that is, in her view, un-American.
Money should not be spent wastefully on extravagant fashion, but should
support other family needs. Fry’s general ideas for an American national
costume include clothing that is “at once neat, comfortable, and elegant,
and which might be regarded by other nations as something of an index to
their [American] professed democratic principles” (p. 736). According to Fry,
fashion conflicts with democracy, and Americans should not rely upon England
and France for fashion leadership, or send money to them. She strongly advo-
cated that Americans should keep that money at home. Her use of the term
costume, used synonymously with “clothing,” fits with ours. Fry’s use is also
historically consistent with the national-costume or folk-dress movement in
the nineteenth century.
William I. Thomas (1908) begins his discussion by reflecting on humans
as primarily unadorned in comparison to other animals in the natural world.
He argues that, over time, humans have been able to use objects to adorn
themselves. He labels these objects as ornament, and says that they are used
to communicate the following aspects of identity – sexual attractiveness,
power, and sex. He distinguishes clothing from ornament and suggests that
clothing was primarily protective worn in cold climates while ornament was
worn in the tropics. According to Thomas, the habit of wearing only ornament
gradually changed to wearing clothing to cover the entire body. His clear
distinction between ornament and clothing does not coincide with the body-
modification and body-supplement ideas that we presented in defining dress.
Thomas (1908) observes that unlike animals that cannot change their feathers
or fur, humans adopt and discard clothing styles. Their ability to make rapid
style changes communicates economic standing, or their ability to engage in
what Veblen (1894, 1899) labeled “conspicuous waste” (p. 166). Thomas
explains gender differences in dress by noting that men appear to have given
up wearing ornament and that women appear to desire and specialize in
wearing it. As a result, women’s appearance does not reflect their individual
identities but rather symbolizes the household. In addition, the communication
of women’s identities is further subjugated by the fashion industry. In
Thomas’s words, “women do not wear what they want . . . The people who
supply them also control them” (p. 69). In taking a stand to raise women’s

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position in society at this time, Thomas contends that this situation “leaves
society short-handed and the struggle for life harder and uglier than it would
be if women operated in it as the substantial and superior creature which
nature made her” (p. 70).

Appearance Management

In attempting to take a scientific approach to the study of clothing, Louis

Flaccus (1906) reviews the survey results of a questionnaire originally
developed by G. Stanley Hall in 1905. Hall designed the survey to assess the
feelings and opinions of college-aged females about their use of clothing and
he refers only to garments. Flaccus groups Hall’s findings into three broad
categories – one dealing with minor matters or “psychological tidbits,” one
dealing with how clothing impacts the individual, and the third dealing with
how clothing impacts relationships with others. Providing only a description
of the findings and limited analysis, he concludes that there is much to be
done to understand the relationship between individuals and their clothing.
In 1906, he outlines those issues or problems he believes about clothing and
mental life that may undergo investigation. Flaccus clearly believes that the
psychology of clothes is important. He states that because the field of
psychology is still developing, scientific research on the topic may be limited.
He makes thoughtful recommendations for supplementing Hall’s earlier
research and “suggests several problems of a very promising kind” (1906
p. 82) that reflect questions and issues we continue to investigate.
Two decades later, in her short essay on the psychology of dress, Grace
Morton (1926) echoes Flaccus’ (1906) recognition that the psychology of
clothing is a significant area of study. As professor of clothing and textiles,
she acknowledges the impact of what we call appearance management on
the individual. She points out that the clothes we wear determine “how much
we go into society, the places we go to, the exercises we take” (p. 484). She
also notes that the right clothes “help us to express the best in ourselves and
are a means of giving pleasure to those about us” (p. 484). Morton remarks
on the need for scientific studies on the relationships between the aesthetics
of dress and personality. She argues that such research will be “revolution-
izing” (p. 66) in the teaching of clothing, creating a new vocation of clothing
advisor, and elevating clothing selection from an intuition base to a scientific
base. Her ideas about a clothing advisor were ahead of her time, foreseeing
the profession of wardrobe consultant that emerged in the late twentieth
century and the introduction of such books as John Molloy’s Dress for Success
(1975).

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Reference

Molloy, J.T. (1975). Dress for success. New York: P.H. Wyden.

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 Establishing Identity
4
Establishing Identity
On Fashion William Hazlitt

Fashion is an odd jumble of contradictions, of sympathies and antipathies.

It exists only by its being participated among a certain number of persons,
and its essence is destroyed by being communicated to a greater number. It
is a continual struggle between “the great vulgar and the small” to get the
start of or keep up with each other in the race of appearances, by an adoption
on the part of the one of such external and fantastic symbols as strike the
attention and excite the envy or admiration of the beholder, and which are
no sooner made known and exposed to public view for this purpose, than
they are successfully copied by the multitude, the slavish herd of imitators,
who do not wish to be behind-hand with their betters in outward show and
pretensions, and which then sink, without any farther notice, into disrepute
and contempt. Thus fashion lives only in a perpetual round of giddy innov-
ation and restless vanity. To be old-fashioned is the greatest crime a coat or
a hat can by guilty of. To look like nobody else is a sufficiently mortifying
reflection; to be in danger of being mistaken for one of the rabble is worse.
Fashion constantly begins and ends in the two things it abhors most, singul-
arity and vulgarity. It is the perpetual setting up and disowning a certain
standard of taste, elegance, and refinement, which has no other foundation
or authority than that it is the prevailing distinction of the moment, which
was yesterday ridiculous from its being new, and to-morrow will be odious
from its being common. It is one of the most slight and insignificant of all
things. It cannot be lasting, for it depends on the constant change and shifting
of its own harlequin disguises; it cannot be sterling, for, if it were, it could
not depend on the breath of caprice; it must be superficial, to produce its
immediate effect on the gaping crowd; and frivolous, to admit of its being
assumed at pleasure by the numbers of those who affect, by being in the
fashion, to be distinguished from the rest of the world. It is not anything in
itself, nor the sign of any thing but the folly and vanity of those who rely
upon it as their greatest pride and ornament. It takes the firmest hold of the
most flimsy and narrow minds, of those whose emptiness conceives of nothing
excellent but what is thought so by others, and whose self-conceit makes

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Image Not Available

Figure 4.1 Dressed in the height of fashion for the theater, 1818. According to
Hazlitt, it is impossible to tell from her dress if this young woman is of
“first quality” or if she is “no better than” an inexperienced, uneducated,
common country or servant girl pretending to be of a higher status.
Evening dress, 1818 from Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce,
Manufactures, Fashions and Politics, 1818, London: Rudolf Ackermann.
The illustration was found in Ackermann’s Costume Plates: Women’s
Fashions in England, 1818–1828 (p. 2, 8), by S. Blum, 1978, New York:
Dover Publications.

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 Establishing Identity

them willing to confine the opinion of all excellence to themselves and those
like them. That which is true or beautiful in itself, is not the less so for standing
alone. That which is good for anything, is the better for being more widely
diffused. But fashion is the abortive issue of vain ostentation and exclusive
egotism: it is haughty, trifling, affected, servile, despotic, mean, and ambitious,
precise and fantastical, all in a breath – tied to no rule, and bound to conform
to every whim of the minute. “The fashion of an hour old mocks the wearer.”
It is a sublimated essence of levity, caprice, vanity, extravagance, idleness,
and selfishness. It thinks of nothing but not being contaminated by vulgar
use, and winds and doubles like a hare, and betakes itself to the most paltry
shifts to avoid being overtaken by the common hunt that are always in full
chase after it. It contrives to keep up its fastidious pretensions, not by the
difficulty of the attainment, but by the rapidity and evanescent nature of the
changes. It is a sort of conventional badge, or understood passport into select
circles, which must still be varying (like the water-mark in bank-notes) not to
be counterfeited by those without the pale of fashionable society; for to make
the test of admission to all the privileges of that refined and volatile atmos-
phere depend on any real merit or extraordinary accomplishment, would
exclude too many of the pert, the dull, the ignorant, too many shallow, upstart,
and self-admiring pretenders, to enable the few that passed muster to keep
one another in any tolerable countenance. If it were the fashion, for instance,
to be distinguished for virtue, it would be difficult to set or follow the example;
but then this would confine the pretension to a small number, (not the most
fashionable part of the community), and would carry a very singular air with
it. Or if excellence in any art or science were made the standard of fashion,
this would also effectually prevent vulgar imitation, but then it would equally
prevent fashionable impertinence. There would be an obscure circle of virtù
as well as virtue, drawn within the established circle of fashion, a little prov-
ince of a mighty empire – the example of honesty would spread slowly, and
learning would still have to boast of a respectable minority. But of what use
would such uncourtly and out-of-the-way accomplishments be to the great
and noble, the rich and the fair, without any of the éclat, the noise and non-
sense which belong to that which is followed and admired by all the world
alike? The real and solid will never do for the current coin, the common
wear and tear of foppery and fashion. It must be the meretricious, the showy,
the outwardly fine, and intrinsically worthless – that which lies within the
reach of the most indolent affectation, that which can be put on or off at the
suggestion of the most wilful caprice, and for which, through all its fluctuations,
no mortal reason can be given, but that it is the newest absurdity in vogue! . . .
. . . What shews the worthlessness of mere fashion is, to see how easily
this vain and boasted distinction is assumed, when the restraints of decency

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or circumstances are once removed, by the most uninformed and commonest

of the people. I know an undertaker that is the greatest prig in the streets of
London, and an Aldermanbury haberdasher, that has the most military strut
of any lounger in Bond-street or St. James’s. We may, at any time, raise a
regiment of fops from the same number of fools, who have vanity enough to
be intoxicated with the smartness of their appearance, and not sense enough
to be ashamed of themselves. Everyone remembers the story in Peregrine
Pickle, of the strolling gipsy that he picked up in spite, had well scoured, and
introduced her into genteel company, where she met with great applause, till
she got into a passion by seeing a fine lady cheat at cards, rapped out a
volley of oaths, and let nature get the better of art. Dress is the great secret
of address. Clothes and confidence will set anybody up in the trade of modish
accomplishment. Look at the two classes of well-dressed females whom we
see at the play-house, in the boxes. Both are equally dressed in the height of
the fashion, both are rouged, and wear their neck and arms bare – both
have the same conscious, haughty, theatrical air – the same toss of the head,
the same stoop in the shoulders, with all the grace that arises from a perfect
freedom from embarrassment, and all the fascination that rises from a
systematic disdain of formal prudery – the same pretence and jargon of
fashionable conversation – the same mimicry of tones and phrases – the same
“lisping, and ambling, and painting, and nicknaming of Heaven’s creatures”;
the same every thing but real propriety of behaviour, and real refinement of
sentiment. In all the externals, they are as like as the reflection in the looking-
glass. The only difference between the woman of fashion and the woman of
pleasure is, that the one is what the other only seems to be; and yet, the
victims of dissipation who thus rival and almost outshine women of the first
quality in all the blaze, and pride, and glitter of shew and fashion, are, in
general, no better that a set of raw, uneducated, inexperienced country girls,
or awkward, coarse-fisted servant maids who require no other apprenticeship
or qualification to be on a level with persons of the highest distinction in
society, in all the brilliancy and elegance of outward appearance, than that
they have forfeited its common privileges, and every title to respect in reality.
The truth is, that real virtue, beauty, or understanding, are the same, whether
“in a high or low degree”; and the airs and graces of pretended superiority
over these which the highest classes give themselves, from mere frivolous
and external accomplishments, are easily imitated, with provoking success,
by the lowest, whenever they dare . . .

Source Excerpted from Hazlitt, W. (1818). On fashion. The Edinburgh

Magazine.

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 Establishing Identity

Biographical note William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was an English writer. As

the son of a Unitarian preacher who supported the American revolution, his
childhood was spent in Ireland and North America until the age of nine. In
his late twenties, he studied painting, worked as a portrait painter, lectured
on philosophy, and produced his first book. He later worked as a parliamentary
reporter, an art, literary and theater critic, and biographer. His essays are
known for his humanist philosophy.

***
Let Us Have a National Costume Mary E. Fry

A recent writer closes an article on “Licentiousness in the Fine Arts” with

these words: “Let us have a Christian art – if need be, an American Christian
art – and if the great artistic world contemn us, we can pity it till it learns
better.” To this we heartily respond, and beg leave to add, Let us have a
Christian costume, and, if need be, an American Christian costume; and if
the fashionable world at Paris and elsewhere sneer at us, we ought to be
able to bear it till they shall have learned to imitate us.
If, as a nation, we are in some danger of marring our innate modesty while
taking the corrupt art of the old world, especially European art, for our mode,
no more can we go on imitating the costume and manners of one of the most
corrupt cities of the old world without a corresponding loss in our morality
and native good taste. Costume, it is true, is no more identical with morals
than taste is, yet one may and greatly does influence the other, as, for instance,
no one would expect to find an immodest costume on a Christian woman of
refined taste, any more than he would look for a neat, modest, and elegant
attire on a courtesan.
But what is costume? Webster defines it to be “an established mode of dress.”
According to this definition, then, nothing of the kind had existed among us
during the last one hundred and fifty years; for in a period of less than one
hundred years, from 1760 to 1850, we find more than twenty of the most
distinct fashions in existence, to say not one word of the numberless variations
of these fashions during the same time. Perhaps most of our women have a
dim recollection of reading somewhere of such a thing as Japanese, Spanish,
or Italian costume for females; well, we assure them no historian or chronicler
of veracity will ever venture to tell the world what is the national costume of
American, English, or French ladies. He might, indeed, go so far as to say,
that the women of these countries wore certain articles of dress called bonnets,
hats, shawls, cloaks, mantillas, and gowns, of every imaginable size, shape,
color, and material; but a more definite description he could not venture on.
And he might add, as an incontrovertible truth, that, as a general thing, in

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Figure 4.2 Fry’s call for a national American dress that eschewed French and
British fashions was taken up by many women in the Unites States.
This version was shown over thirty years later at the Chicago World’s
Fair, recommended by the Executive Board of the Council of Women of
the United States and their standing Committee on Dress. They argued
that this style of walking gown would be the most comforable and
practical for visiting the Fair, and hoped that this variation of the
“American Costume” could become an accepted fashion and regarded
as beautiful dress for women. Mrs. Annie Jenness Miller’s “American
Costume” from Dress Reform at the World’s Fair (p. 313), in The Review
of Reviews, 7 (January–June), 1893, New York: The Review of Reviews.

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 Establishing Identity

matters of dress the French took the lead, and the rest of the enlightened
world, regardless of health, climate, comfort, or even modesty, acquiesced
in all humility . . .
. . . But all must see that it is at war with our form of government, to be
dependent on the nod of a foreign aristocracy for the form and material of
our dress; and in the abstract – not so abstractly either – it is at war with
national prosperity. For an extravagant, foreign costume, presupposes a
corresponding style of living, both of which are a sure and speedy means for
the depletion of either a private or public treasury. And during the process
of this depletion we must take into account how often and sorely peace and
justice are trampled under foot; for be the extravagance whatever it may, it
is the bone and sinew of the land – the laboring masses – who must apply
the means for its gratification. We will not stop to say how much the national
prosperity has advanced since the discovery of gold in California; but it is
surely of little avail to the country that one vessel after another arrives at
New York laden with its million, or half-million of gold dust, if an equivalent
sum is as often shipped to Europe to pay for foreign goods, which the country
could well dispense with, if our women had a little more of the spirit of the
elder Mrs. Adams.
If anyone has doubts as to the increasing extravagance of costume among
American women, he has only to glance carefully over the statistical tables
of imports, to convince himself that costly foreign goods form something
more than moderate items in the list. Indeed, to such a degree of insanity –
one can call it nothing else – have a class of American women arrived, that
it is asserted that merchants and milliners find it no easy matter to procure
goods sufficiently high-priced to suit their taste (?) and purses; they, to their
shame and folly be it said, being more particular about the price than the
quality. American women at Paris, and other places, are known to purchase
articles of dress at prices which would startle a duchess, whose annual income
alone amounts to more than the entire fortune of some of these would-be
aristocrats. No wonder crashing, ruinous failures follow in the footsteps of
such inexcusable imbecility – no wonder if these dear Europeans point their
fingers at us, and ask sneeringly among themselves, to what quarter of the
globe we have cast our former re-publican spirit. Why, it is not so very many
years ago since our fathers fought, and bled, and died, and conquered in the
struggle to secure an independent government for us; and our mothers,
scorning the luxuries of the old world, spun and wove, and cut and made
the clothing for their entire household; have their children degenerated so
soon? Is it true that Americans, and especially American women, have already
become so incompetent, so utterly wanting in the article of ingenuity, that
they can not even contrive to model for themselves a costume at once neat,

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comfortable, and elegant; and which might be regarded by other nations as

something of an index to their professed democratic principles?. . .
. . . But even greater than the necessity which exists for reform in dress –
and which in fact must precede it – is the want of a spirit of independence,
which will enable Americans to be more emphatically themselves; for it is
folly to deny that this grand emblem of nationality is painfully wanting in
the so-called “society,” who claim the privilege of giving tone to manners
and morals. It is plain to every observer, that if the mass of our people were
as deficient in patriotism as this exclusive class, our form of government
would crumble to dust in a twinkling. And, so long as the “exclusive few”
continue to spend their energies in making as close an imitation to European
life as their means and position will allow, it is useless to expect they will
exert themselves much in behalf of the elevation of their own countrymen.
Happily enough, however, the country can tolerably well dispense with them;
for it is the intelligent, independent, and patriotic masses who are the pillars
upholding government, and who alone give a practical voice to religion and
politics, to morals and customs.
. . . For we hold that individual culture must, to a great extent, precede all
permanent elevation of the masses; there may, indeed, be individual culture
without this elevation of the whole, but most assuredly no permanent
elevation of the mass without the exclusive culture of the individual. Nor
need this again be the least discouragement, but rather otherwise as it leaves
each woman free to act, speak, and improve herself for whatever her own
judgment dictates to be her proper sphere; provided, always, that at no time
she steps beyond the bounds of propriety, religion, and her domestic duties.
For every true woman is a law unto herself, and needs not that the public
should prescribe rules for the regulation of her life, any more than for the
expense or mode of her wardrobe; the most she needs is a word of encourage-
ment to keep her in that path of duty, which she has already marked out for
herself. And every true woman can, ought, and will do something for her
own individual culture and elevation, independently of what society expects
and academic halls prescribe. And if at any time she be lacking in motive to
exertion, she has but to bear in mind who plucked the apple, and what the
consequences have been; she will then soon learn that, as through her man
fell, so also through her must she rise again to his former estate. But before
she can ever achieve this restoration, she has first to learn more thoroughly
for herself, that as an intellectual being, an immortal soul, the food for her
mind is of infinitely more importance that the raiment for her body, and the
intelligent mastery and guidance of her own spirit, worth ten thousand
triumphs in a fleeting world of fashion.

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Source Excerpted from Fry, M.E. (1856). Let us have a national costume.
The Ladies’ Repository, 735–738.

Biographical note Mary Fry was a regular contributor to The Ladies’ Repos-
itory, a monthly periodical dedicated to literature, arts, and religion, published
during the nineteenth century. In the mid-1800s, she published eleven articles
in The Ladies’ Repository, with topics that ranged from dress to writing
manuscripts for publications.

***
The Psychology of Woman’s Dress William I. Thomas

The advances which modern life has made over savagery are represented at
some points by a very thin line. Old practices are refined, the old forms are
presented with slightly different coloring and arrangement, and the emphasis
is placed at different points, but we do not get clean away from the old
patterns. Savage life, in its turn, borders very close on the animal, and soci-
ology and psychology must continually go back to the simpler conditions of
animal life to pick up the cue. Man is naturally one of the most unadorned
of animals, without brilliant appearance or natural glitter, with no plumage,
no spots or stripes, no naturally sweet voice, no attractive odor, and no
graceful antics. But, thanks to his hands, he has the power of collecting
brilliant objects and attaching them to his person, and he thus becomes a
rival in radiance of the animals and flowers . . .
. . . Rapid rotation style is a device to attract attention not known to animal
life and not systematically used in the Orient. The woman of the Far East
uses expensive and attractive materials, but she wears them, as she does jewels,
for a long period. Among Occidental women the discarding of dress is not
only seasonal but, if it can be afforded, diurnal. The constant change is not
only striking in itself, but the economic ability to make it distinguish both
the woman and the man whom she represents. What Mr. Veblen happily
terms “conspicuous waste” is a means of distinction which the masses are
not in a position to copy.
Personal display is dangerous ground for woman, since it involves disgust
in the spectator when overdone, and she would never be bold enough to
carry it to such outspoken lengths if she were not operating in a flock. She is
timid about emphasizing herself except as one of a flock, but she is anxious
for all the conspicuousness she can get in the flock, and is above all concerned
to be a member of the most distinguished flock. At this point she shows some
independence of man and almost loses sight of him (after marriage, at least)
in her interest in outstripping other women. Men would prefer her more
simply dressed; but this is her game – indeed, it is almost her business.
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As society advances there is a tendency in man to give up ornament and in

woman to take on more of it. This is not because man is naturally less inclined
to display, but because he has undergone a great reform in his habits, the
greatest perhaps in the history of the world. Primitive man was pugnacious,
unsocial, ostentatious, and lazy, but capable, crafty, and masterfuly – our
true adventurer, but endowed with an inventive imagination and capable of
splendid bursts of energy. This was the wild-oats period of the race, and its
vestiges are still seen in the gamester, the artist, the wild youth, and the
dissipated husband.
But when man exhausted the game which had been his principal pursuit
and began to take up the settled manufacturing and agricultural interests which
had been chiefly developed by woman, and to buy and sell, he brought with
him more ingenuity than woman had ever developed, a freer movement, a
greater power of organization, and at the same time less domestic responsi-
bility, and he gradually transferred some of his interest in the pursuit of game
to the pursuit of business. But business lies, so to speak, outside the region
of appearances. It is primarily a matter of judgment, efficiency, and energy,
and if a man has efficiency and wealth in abundance he is attractive enough
without ornament. No one ever completely loses an interest in bright objects,
but business men take advantage of this fact to display their goods, not their
persons. The color sense and the sexual interest are recognized in the display,
wrapping, and advertising of wares. The glaring billboard and the beautiful
lady on the cigar-box saturate the goods with color and sex, and we buy
them on that basis. But pretentiously housed business and a handsomely
gowned wife are also capital advertisements; they are signs of business success,
and “nothing succeeds like success.” . . .
. . . The dress of woman has, in fact, become so incorporated in business
that, as Sir Henry Maine has pointed out, the greatest calamity which could
be conceived as befalling great populations would be, not a sanguinary war,
a desolating famine, or a deadly epidemic, but a revolution in fashion under
which “women should dress, as men practically do, in one material of one
color. There are many flourishing and opulent cities in Europe and America
which would be condemned by it to bankruptcy or starvation, and it would
be worse than a famine or pestilence in China, India, and Japan.” That is to
say, any great change in our industrial system must be gradual not to be
calamitous.
But, while woman’s demands occupy so large a place in the industrial world,
it is noticeable that she is herself only a pawn in the industrial game played
by man. Her individual possessor uses her as a symbol of his wealth, and the
captains of industry make her and her changeable and expensive fashions the
occasion of a market for the costly and changeable objects which fashionable

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 Establishing Identity

habits force her to accept. New fashions are not always beautiful; they are
even often ugly, and women know it: but they embrace changes as frequent
and as radical as the ingenuity of the mode makers can devise. Women do not
wear what they want, but what the manufacturers and trades-people want
them to want. The people who supply them also control them.
This does not, however, alter the fact that the general tone and pace of
social life are deeply influenced by woman’s emphasis of finery and form.
There is an old story of a lady who purchased a pair of brass andirons and
then by degrees persuaded her husband to refurnish the whole house to match
them. Just so, when silks and furs and gems and lace and the unminted gold
are attached to the person of woman, it follows also that the household and
the world in which she moves are transformed to harmonize with her showy
taste and appearance. Beginning with the rugs, tapestry, porcelain, silver plate,
fine linen, and the rich and gaudy furnishings of the home, the factitious
personality of woman pervades and bedizens everything. The baffling array
of silver at the twelve-course dinner and the costly box at the costly opera
are equally a part of woman’s dress. This situation is the despair of men, but
it is “society.”
The effect of this situation on the character of woman is altogether bad.
One interest expels another or prevents its development. The proverbially
hollow mind of the very beautiful woman is not due to the exhaustion of
nature’s resources on her exterior, but to the fact that her attention is so
bound up with the expression of her own charm that it stops with that. And
the homely woman who competes with her has a still more absorbing
problem. The foolish and disrespectful customs of courtesy which men practise
toward women are also a product of woman’s dress, and tend to keep her
helpless in mind and body. The helplessness involved in lacing, high heels,
undivided skirts, and other impedimenta of women has a certain charm in
the eyes of man. Their helplessness shows him off better by giving freer play
to his protective and masterful instincts. It is his heroic opportunity since the
disappearance of large game and in the “piping times of peace.” To flatter
this disposition of man, woman therefore assumes even greater helplessness
than she possesses, and the most romantic periods in history are those char-
acterized by tight lacing and purposive fainting.
The rôle of “half angel and half bird” is a pretty one, if you can look at it
in that way; but it denatures woman, makes her a thing instead of a person,
a fact of the environment and an object of man’s manipulation instead of an
agent for transforming the world. It leaves society short-handed and the
struggle for life harder and uglier than it would be if woman operated in it
as the substantial and superior creature which nature made her. We have a
machine-made civilization which has introduced class inequalities, hatred,

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 Fashioning Identity

and suffering unknown in savagery or barbarism. We are wealthy but not

humanized. Man is pursuing business on the same pitiless principle that he
formerly pursued game. Women have a base of maternal feeling that makes
them more social than man, and if the economic value of the superfluity of
their dress and the energy and attention they waste in following the fashions
were devoted to humanistic enterprises we should be in a fair way to add the
elements lacking to make our machine system a civilization. But there is no
use trying to talk fashions down. The change will come gradually, as women
become more intelligent and independent and of themselves “experience the
expulsive power of a new affection.”

Source Excerpted from Thomas, W.I. (1908). The psychology of women’s

dress. The American Magazine, 67, 66–72.

Biographical note William I. Thomas (1863–1947) was an American

sociologist and social psychologist, whose fields of study included cultural
change and personality development. He taught sociology at the University
of Chicago (1894–1918), the New School for Social Research (1923–1928),
and Harvard University (1936–1937).

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 Appearance Management
5
Appearance Management
Remarks on the Psychology of Clothes Louis W. Flaccus

. . . No one, I think, will deny the general statement that clothes have a marked
effect upon our mental life. But it is one thing to make a broad statement of
this sort, and quite another thing to ground it scientifically, and to define
with some approach to accuracy and thoroughness the nature of this effect
and some of its causes.
The problem at hand shares with many others which have been recently
taken up certain difficulties in the way of a scientifically accredited discussion.
The following is the crux of the matter. Certain mental states are so complex
and of so subtle an origin that they cannot be dealt with analytically with any
measure of success by the current methods of psychology. The less a chance
for physiological and experimental work, the greater the difficulty. Thus,
while we have some excellent papers on the feeling-tone of sounds and colours
and the aesthetic value of certain simple forms, we have much wild theorizing
on such complex matters as the nature of evanescent aesthetic emotions of
the total affective state of consciousness during the appreciation of a tragedy.
The psychology of the crowd, of the weather, the study of ideals, etc. – these
are all interesting problems. The psychical effect may be traced; the demand
for an explanation is justifiable; we must, however, admit that this demand
overtaxes the present resources of psychology. To hope that psychology will
ever be able to give a scientific formulation of all that stirs in the depths of
consciousness is to be unduly optimistic. There are, I believe, certain experi-
ences so extremely subjective that they do not admit even of the preliminary
process of fixation.
Luckily for us, the problem of the effect of clothes on the psychical life is
not hopelessly insoluble, although in some of its aspects it is on the ragged
edge of scientific analysis. There are what the Germans call Anhaltspunkte.
Certain effects are indirectly traceable to physiological factors – skin sensa-
tions of pressure, contact, temperature, etc. – others show the simplest routine
working of association of ideas. The interest there lies solely in bringing out
the facts of connection. Much of the material then comes under the usual

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 Fashioning Identity

rubrics of psychology. When physiological clues are not to be had and psycho-
logical terminology proves insufficient, nothing can be attempted beyond a
few tentative suggestions.
. . . It is, perhaps, hardly serviceable to sum up and draw conclusions from
what are frankly acknowledged to be suggestions of an unsystematic kind,
based on very limited material. Attention has at least been drawn to two
factors in the far-reaching effect of clothes on the mental life.

1. Simple: such as any ordinary psychology must take account of.

2. Complex: (a) such as are found in subtle personal reactions; (b) such as
are found in the operation of standards of group-judgment.

This study may be supplemented in many ways, and it is my purpose to

outline very briefly what is needed towards such supplementation and to
suggest several problems of a very promising kind.

1. Simple psychological experiments with a view towards ascertaining the

sense-factors in the psychological effects of clothes.
2. A study of more complex factors, such as emotional displacements,
aesthetic judgments, changes in personality.
3. Studies in abnormal psychology with a view towards connecting any
changes in the clothes-consciousness with the well-known insane delus-
ions in the body-consciousness.
4. A study of sex-differences. This should prove one of the most fruitful
lines of investigation.
5. A study of differences due to age, station, interest, etc. A questionnaire
like the one discussed does not give the whole story. Generalizations
would be one-sided. On the other hand the peculiar part clothes play in
the consciousness of actors or tailors or uniformed officials should be
noted and investigated. At this point attention might be drawn to the
investigation of clothes as steadying forces or regenerative agencies of a
social kind, as in reform schools or as facilitating social organization
(badges, insignia, uniforms).
6. A study of clothes from the point of view of social psychology. This would
mean an exhaustive analysis of group-estimates, group-standards, etc.
7. An account of social symbolism in dress and its relation to emotional
states. This would mean a discussion of membership insignia, national
costumes, characteristic colors and styles, mourning and bridal costumes,
professional cuts, etc. Valuable hints have been thrown out on these
points by H. Schurtz, Urgeschichte der Kultur.
8. An anthropological account of dress and ornament (cf. H. Schurtz,
Grundzüge einer Philosophie der Tracht).

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 Appearance Management

9. An adequate historico-psychological account of costumes, fashion, etc.

10. A genetic account of clothing with the view towards a genetic theory.
The latter can be done only on the basis of a vast array of materials, but
should prove very valuable, since it in turn would give us the key to
many curious facts.

It is for the purpose of stimulating an investigation of the many problems

instanced that these suggestions on the very complex interplay of psycho-
logical effects of clothing are set forth.

Source Excerpted from Flaccus, L.W. (1906). Remarks on the psychology

of clothes. The Pedagogical Seminary, 13, 61–83.

Biographical note Louis Flaccus (1880–1953) received a doctorate from

Harvard in 1904. He taught philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

***
Psychology of Dress Grace Margaret Morton

Undoubtedly there are a few exceptional people to whom clothes mean very
little aside from efficiency and who, in spite of boasted indifference to
appearance, do “arrive” professionally. But for the vast majority of the human
race, clothes play a large part in making for happiness and success. Even
children are susceptible to the effect of clothes. Margaret Story writes of an
experiment tried out in one of our city slums. A ragged, dirty child from the
street was taken to a welfare home. She was scrubbed, shampooed, and
dressed in clean, attractive clothes. The transformation was startling. She
was changed almost immediately from a listless, broken-spirit child to a self-
respecting and well-mannered little lady.
Clothes help to make us self-confident, self-respecting, jolly, free, or they
may make us self-conscious, shy, sensitive, restrained. They determine how
much we go into society, the places we go, the exercises we take. They help
us to get jobs and to hold them, to miss them and to lose them.
Clothes that are suitable, appropriate, and beautiful help us to express the
best in ourselves and are a means of giving pleasure to those about us. Being
well dressed is an evidence of good taste. A passage from Ruskin reads
something like this: “What you like determines what you are.” Another old
adage may be paraphrased thus: “The way you look speaks so loud I cannot
hear what you say.” Clothes, then, make or mar us. They may enhance our
personality or be so conspicuous as to subordinate us to them, or they may
be just ordinary, nondescript, characterless. I am thinking of a young teacher

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 Fashioning Identity

of my acquaintance – a very sedate, earnest, shy, little soul with very light
bobbed hair, who wore when I first knew her a tan felt hat and dark blue
twill frock with red trimming. I must confess this little lady did not impress
me greatly then. Some months later, after a careful study of clothes, she
appeared in a becoming black velvet hat and a dress of green-blue charmeen
with frills of soft green and violet crepe. You would not believe till you could
see the charm these new clothes brought out. Her hair was soft and golden,
her eyes were deep blue, and her complexion lovely. The shyness, the reserve,
the mousiness were gone. She was a distinct personality, dainty, demure,
peppy, quite convincing.
Since the beginning of time women have consciously or unconsciously
dressed to suit their types, but it has remained for this scientific era to classify
personality and to discover those principles of line, color, and materials which
best express each personality.
Considered from a purely anatomical standpoint, there are short stout and
tall stout people, thin angular ones, and the rest. Especially must be remem-
bered those with special difficulties of proportions which call for an application
of that psychological principle requiring that we make something interesting
happen to carry the eye away from the particular difficulty we wish to conceal.
A study of the spiritual and mental characteristics of women reveals two
outstanding different classes – the one stately, dramatic, striking, forceful;
and the other dainty, petite, demure, naïve. Seldom do we find a perfect
example of either type. Most of us are combinations, but nearly all of us have
tendencies toward one or the other big class. Almost invariably the most
becoming costumes in any wardrobe whether chosen deliberately or intuitively
do show such qualities of structure, color, and texture as to verify the claim
that dressing to suit one’s type is based on scientific principles.
Such personality study together with a knowledge of the psychology of
design, color, and texture, so essential to its use, is revolutionizing the teaching
of clothing, opening up a new vocation, that of clothing advisor, and lifting
clothing selection from the realm of the intangible based on intuition and
personal bias to the dignity of a tangible art with a scientific basis.

Source Morton, G. (1926). Psychology of dress. Journal of Home Economics,

18, 484–486. Used by permission from the Association of Family and Consumer
Sciences-Journal of Home Economics.

Biographical note Grace Margaret Morton (d. 1943) was a professor of

textiles and clothing at the University of Nebraska. Her work includes a book
on costume selection. Her background was in art.

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 Part 3
The “ F ” Word
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 The “F” Word

The “F” Word

We borrowed the title of this section, “The ‘F’ Word,” from Valerie Steele’s
1991 article.1 In it, she captures the controversy among academics that
surrounds the topic of fashion, citing everything from disdain to silence and
embarrassment. Generally, everyone agrees that fashion involves change. Our
selections examine fashion as a change agent along with offering explanations
for why dress changes. Writers provide methods to predict fashion change
and discuss participation in fashion as collective behavior as well as consumer
behavior. We chose authors with ideas that continue to interest contemporary
fashion researchers. In this section, the writers come from the disciplines of
anthropology, biology, sociology, psychology, art history, theater, and
economics.

Fashion as Change

George Darwin (1872) in his attempt to explain change proposes that the
development of dress parallels the evolution of species, borrowing heavily
from the evolutionary theory of his father, Charles Darwin. He uses the term
dress to refer to garments and accessories (such as hats or boots) and defines
fashion as the “love of novelty and the extraordinary tendency which men
have to exaggerate any peculiarity” (p. 410). He notes “the law of progress
holds good in dress and forms blend into one another with almost complete
continuity” (p. 410). By the process of natural selection, those forms of dress
that are not beneficial disappear and those that serve some function remain.
In addition to the operation of the laws of progress and natural selection,
fashion plays an important role in the development of dress. However, the
process of selection in dress is not because of sexual selection, but rather
because of fashion selection.
According to Darwin (1872), participation in fashion is “a mark of good
station in life” (p. 410), whereby he adds an element of status to the process
of fashion selection. As proof of the existence of progress in both dress and

1. Steele, V. (1991). The “F” word. Lingua Franca, 2, 16–20.

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 The “F” Word

animals, Darwin posits “remnants of former stages of development survive

to a later stage, and thus preserve a tattered record of the history of their
evolution” (p. 410). These archaic remnants are present in two forms: “Some
parts of the dress have been fostered and exaggerated by the selection of
fashion, and are then retained and crystallized” even though their use is gone;
and “[p]arts originally useful . . . have been handed down in an atrophied
condition” (p. 410). He notes that it is not just in dress that one can find
these remnants, but also in any quotidian object. According to Darwin, archaic
forms are most often retained in ceremonial or ritual dress, such as court
dress, formal evening clothes, or uniforms.
Herbert Spencer (1896), although not directly discussing fashion per se, also
uses an evolutionary explanation for the change and development of body
modifications and supplements. He uses dress, clothing, and ornament incon-
sistently but is clearly concerned with the topic of dressing the body and its
importance from a sociological perspective. According to Spencer, change in
dress (our term) is a sequential process of becoming civilized. Spencer, in
attempting to explain contemporaneous uses of clothing and the profusion
of decorative ornament, contends that one must first understand their origins
or roots in primitive cultures. Spencer labels early forms of clothing as trophies.
Because human beings dominate the animal world, trophies result as the
spoils of the hunt. As marks of honor, trophies evolve into badges to designate
status or rank in a social situation. Just as badges derive from trophies, orna-
ment evolves from badges, for an ornament symbolically represents the
original badge. To Spencer, clothing has the same capabilities as a badge in
symbolically designating prestige and social position or class distinctions, and
in fact as society becomes complex, items of decorative clothing or adornment
become distinctive of rank and position.
Georg Simmel (1904), in his classic discussion of fashion change, points
out that fashion is a process of imitation, not evolution. In the process of
fashion change, emulation leads to imitation, and imitation leads to both
equalization and the need for further differentiation. Unlike Spencer (1896)
and Darwin (1872), where change in forms of dress is an evolving linear
progression, Simmel proposes that change in fashion is cyclic. Innovation in
fashion originates in the elite social classes and fashion differentiates not only
one era from another but also one social class from those below it. This idea
forms the basis for the trickle-down theory of fashion change. Simmel claims
that the process of fashion change requires a differentiated society. Fashion
is a form of class differentiation and is a recurrent natural process of change.
Elizabeth Hurlock (1929), in an essay based on her dissertation, tests prev-
alent theories and explanations concerning motives for fashion change and
clothing selection. These theories include Spencer’s (1896) ideas about fashion

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 The “F” Word

as evolution and Simmel’s (1904) trickle-down theory among others. She

based her questionnaire on suggestions listed in the work of Hall (1898),
Flaccus (1906), and Rusling (1905), and from the “many theories regarding
the motives at the basis of fashion, and from suggestions made by a group
of graduate students at Columbia University” (p. 38). She gathered data from
a total of 1,452 individuals who were students in high school or college
settings, both males and females, with ages ranging from 16 to 51. She
analyzed the responses of these individuals to determine which theories and
which motives were refuted or supported by contemporaneous behavior. In
her tests of these theories and explanations, her results do not support that
changes in fashion result from imitation and differentiation or as a result of
a desire for attraction. Rather, she finds that the desire for novelty is a
predominant reason for fashion change.
Edward Sapir (1931) writes a definition of the concept of fashion for the
Encyclopedia of the Social Science from an anthropological perspective. In
this excerpt, Sapir clarifies the concept of fashion and compares it to other
related concepts such as fad, classic, or custom. For Sapir, “fashion is custom
in the guise of departure from custom” (p. 140). He offers an explanation
for fashion change as well as for gender differences in dress. Sapir says that
fashion is an objective term that depends on context to give it its “emotional
qualities” (p. 139). He critiques fashion and examines fashion as a symbol
of the ego. In the excerpt we selected, his focus is on discussing the “fund-
amental drives leading to the creation and acceptance of fashion” (p. 140).
James Laver (1937) proposes a theory of fashion change by critiquing exist-
ing explanations for what he calls the origins of clothing. This work was
written several years before it was published. In this excerpt Laver contends
that “fashion begins with the discovery . . . that clothes could be used as a
compromise between exhibitionism and modesty” (p. 200). Fashion change is
not arbitrary, but can be explained by Flügel’s (1930) theory of shifting
erogenous zones, in which new styles of clothing reveal parts of the female
body that were previously concealed. Laver contends that the sexuality of the
female body makes for seductiveness, and in fact, this seductiveness drives
fashion change. His explanation privileges the male gaze as women are erot-
icized in the juxtaposition between the shifting zones. The constant process
of revealing and concealing aspects of a woman’s body creates the explanation
for a style’s acceptance, but Laver is not as clear about why styles fall out of
acceptance. According to Laver, writing in the 1930s, fashion change was
accelerated by mass production within a class-based society. Laver echoes
Simmel’s (1904) earlier contention that fashion change is based on imitation
and class differentiation. He also sees fashion as impacting multiple aspects
of life, foreshadowing Blumer’s (1939) analysis.

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 The “F” Word

Predicting Fashion Change

Also addressing the topic of fashion change is Agnes Brooks Young (1937).
Taking an evolutionary perspective, she strives to explain why fashion changes,
how the changes take place, and shares how fashion can be predicted. Model-
ing her work after a method and analysis outlined by Kroeber (1919), she
proposes principles in her explanation, the first that change is continuous;
second, that change is slow; and third, that change is gradual. “Fashion change
in women’s dress is a continuous, slow process of modification” (p. 206).
Her study of what she called “annual typicals” was based on analyzing over
8,000 fashion plates and magazine images that represented, in her view, the
modal styles dating from 1760 to 1937. Her statistical analysis reveals three
basic styles of women’s skirt silhouettes – bell-shaped, back fullness, and
tubular – that allow for the prediction of future fashion. She clearly tries to
develop laws or principles to be tested and used to predict fashion change.
Another component of her book is an explanation of why fashion changes.
She presents logical reasons outlining the psychological benefits of change
and emphasizes a phased cycle of change from an evolutionary perspective.

Fashion as Collective and Consumer Behavior

Herbert Blumer (1939) looks at fashion from a sociological perspective. He

quickly points out that fashion is not narrowly limited to dress and has a much
wider impact reaching into the fine arts as well as the hard sciences. Blumer
echoes Simmel’s (1904) and Laver’s (1937) contention that fashion is based
fundamentally on differentiation and emulation within a class-based society.
Essentially, fashion is an important social movement with differing character-
istics from other types of collective behavior. Fashion is “a genuine expressive
movement” (p. 276), one based on subjective needs and one that supports and
contributes to building shared experience and tastes.
Adam Smith (1759) approaches fashion from the perspective of economics.
Our excerpt, drawn from one of the classics in the science of economics,
presents his viewpoint that includes moral arguments and judgments. He
discusses fashion as reserved for the upper social classes. He precedes Blumer
(1939) in stating that fashion as change is not restricted to clothing styles or
furniture but includes and impacts other aspects of the arts – literature, music,
and architecture. Custom and fashion dominate judgments concerning the
ideals of beauty. Ideals are what he calls “species-specific” (p. 288). Most
interesting is his comment that what makes a member of each species beautiful
is the most customary or average form rather than the unique form. Smith

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 The “F” Word

sees fashion as influencing notions of beauty, resulting in his making a moral

judgement against being fashionable.
Thorstein Veblen (1894, 1899) also takes an economic approach to fashion
as an important aspect of consumer behavior. He explains how dress became
more than just a way to make an individual attractive to becoming a means
of economic expression. In the debate on the motives for dressing the body,
Veblen accepts the principle of adornment as a primary fact of social evol-
ution. The motive behind dressing the body has evolved from an aesthetic
expression to an economic one. What makes it an economic expression is
that dress functions as an “index of the wealth of its wearer or, to be more
precise, of its owner, for the wearer and owner are not necessarily the same
person” (p. 199). Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Veblen notes
that the function of dress varies between men and women. Men’s dress reflects
utility whereas women’s dress has come to symbolize her role as a “pecuniary
possession” of her husband or father. In this aspect, women’s dress is a means
to display the earning and purchasing power of men. In Veblen’s view, being
fashionable becomes a moral concern, for he calls it not only wasteful
expenditure but also wasteful consumption.
Estelle De Young Barr’s (1934) excerpt, published from her dissertation,
attempts scientifically to uncover the motives underlying an individual’s choice
of dress. Her approach is theoretical and takes into account a consumer point
of view, not an economic one. She recognizes that choosing dress is a major
social activity that serves as a medium for communication. In order to use
dress as an effective communication medium, a person needs knowledge of
design elements as well as knowledge of the self. As a result of her research
findings, Barr discusses the important factors underlying consumer choice
concerning dress, noting that there are multiple factors motivating an indiv-
idual’s choice. Choice is not reduced to just an economic or a communicative
function; rather, the dress of an individual reflects a wider range of aesthetic,
psychological, and practical considerations.

Reference

Flügel, J. C. (1932). The psychology of clothes. London: Hogarth Press.

Rusling, L.A. (1905). Children’s attitudes toward clothes. Pedagogical Seminary, 12,
525–526.

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 Fashion as Change
6
Fashion as Change
Development in Dress George H. Darwin

The development of dress presents a strong analogy to that of organisms, as

explained by the modern theories of evolution; and in this article I propose
to illustrate some of the features which they have in common. We shall see
that the truth expressed by the proverb, “Natura non facit saltum”,1 is
applicable in the one case as in the other; the law of progress holds good in
dress, and forms blend into one another with almost complete continuity. In
both cases a form yields to a succeeding form, which is better adapted to the
then surrounding conditions; thus, when it ceased to be requisite that men in
active life should be ready to ride at any moment, and when riding had for
some time ceased to be the ordinary method of travelling, knee breeches and
boots yielded to trousers. The “Ulster Coat,” now so much in vogue, is evi-
dently largely fostered by railway travelling, and could hardly have flourished
in the last century, when men either rode or travelled in coaches, where there
was no spare room for any very bulky garment.
A new invention bears a kind of analogy to a new variation in animals;
there are many such inventions, and many such variations; those that are
not really beneficial die away, and those that are really good become incorp-
orated by “natural selection,” as a new item in our system. I may illustrate
this by pointing out how macintosh-coats and crush-hats have become
somewhat important items in our dress.
. . . But besides the general adaptation of dress above referred to, there is
another influence which has perhaps a still more important bearing on the
development of dress, and that is fashion. The love of novelty, and the extra-
ordinary tendency which men have to exaggerate any peculiarity, for the
time being considered a mark of good station in life, or handsome in itself,
give rise I suppose to fashion. This influence bears no distant analogy to the
“sexual selection,” on which so much stress has recently been laid in the

1. Editor’s note: Natura non facit saltum is translated as “Nature does not make a leap.”
Used frequently by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species (1859), the adage is
originally attributed to Linnaeus and expresses the evolutionary ideas of gradual change and
continuity.

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 The “F” Word

“Descent of Man.” Both in animals and dress, remnants of former stages of

development survive to a later age, and thus preserve a tattered record of
the history of their evolution.
These remnants may be observed in two different stages or forms. 1st.
Some parts of the dress have been fostered and exaggerated by the selection
of fashion, and are then retained and crystallized as it were, as part of our
dress, notwithstanding that their use is entirely gone (e.g., the embroidered
pocket-flaps in a court uniform, now sewn fast to the coat). 2ndly. Parts
originally useful have ceased to be of any service, and have been handed
down in an atrophied condition . . .
COATS. – Everyone must have noticed the nick in the folded collar of the
coat and the waistcoat; this is of course made to allow for the buttoning
round the neck, but it is in the condition of a rudimentary organ, for the
nick would probably not come in the right place, and in the waistcoat at
least there are usually neither requisite buttons nor buttonholes . . .
. . . At the end of the seventeenth, and at the beginning of the eighteenth
centuries, coats seem very commonly to have been furnished with slits running
from the edge of the skirt, up under the arms, and these were made to button
up, in a manner similar in all respects to the slit of the tails. The sword was
usually worn under the coat, and the sword-hilt came through the slit on the
left side. Later on these slits appear to have been sewed up, and the buttons
and button-holes died away, with the exception of two or three buttons just
at the top of the slits; thus in coats of about the year 1705, it is not uncommon
to see several buttons clustered about the tops of all three slits. The buttons
at the top of the centre slit entirely disappeared, but the two buttons now on
the backs of our coats trace their pedigree up to those on the hips. Thus it is
not improbable that although our present buttons represent those used for
making the waist, as above explained, yet that they in part represent the
buttons for fastening up these side slits.
. . . It was not until the reign of George III that coats were cut back at the
waist, as are our present evening coats, but since, before that fashion was
introduced, the coats had become swallowtailed in the manner explained, it
seems likely that this form of coat, was suggested by the previous fashion.
And, indeed, stages of development of a somewhat immediate character may
be observed in old engravings. In the uniforms of the last century the coats
were double-breasted, but were generally worn open, with the flaps thrown
back and buttoned to rows of buttons on the coat. These flaps, of course,
showed linings of the coat, and were of the same colour as the tails; the
button-holes were usually embroidered, and thus the whole of the front of
the coat became richly laced. Towards the end of the century the coats were
made tight, and were fastened together in front by hooks, but the vestiges of

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the flaps remained in a double line of buttons, and in the front of the coat
being of a different colour from that of the rest, and being richly laced. A
uniform of this nature is still retained in some foreign armies. This seems also
to explain the use of the term “facings” as applied to the collar and cuffs of
a uniform, since, we shall see hereafter, they would be of the same colour as
these flaps. It may also explain the habit of braiding the front of a coat, as is
done in our Hussar and other regiments.
. . . I have now gone through the principle articles of men’s clothing, and
have shown how numerous and curious are the rudiments or “survivals,” as
Mr. Tylor calls them; a more thorough search proves the existence of many
more. For instance, the various gowns worn at the Universities and elsewhere,
afford examples. These gowns were, as late as the reign of Queen Elizabeth,
simply upper garments,2 but have survived into this age as mere badges.
Their chief peculiarities consist in the sleeves, and it is curious that nearly all
of such peculiarities point to various devices by which the wearing of sleeves
has been eluded or rendered less burdensome. Thus the plaits and buttons in
a barrister’s gown, and the slit in front of the sleeve of the B.A.’s gown, are
for this purpose. In an M.A.’s gown the sleeves extend below the knees, but
there is a hole in the side through which the arm is passed; the end of the
sleeve is sewed up, but there is a kind of scallop at the lower part, which
represents the narrowing of the wrist. A barrister’s gown has a small hood
sewed to the left shoulder, which would hardly go on the head of an infant,
even if it could be opened out into a hood shape.
It is not, however, in our dress alone that these survivals exist; they are to
be found in all the things of our every-day life . . .
. . . It seems a general rule that on solemn or ceremonial occasions men retain
archaic forms; thus it is that court dress survival of the every-day dress of the
last century; that uniforms in general are richer in rudiments than common
dress; that a carriage with a position is de rigueur at a wedding; and that (as
mentioned by Sir John Lubbock) the priest of a savage nation, acquainted
with the use of metals, still use a stone knife for their sacrifices – just as Anglican
priests still prefer candles to gas.
The details given in this article, although merely curious, and perhaps
insignificant in themselves, show that the study of dress from an evolutional
standpoint serves as yet one further illustration of the almost infinite ramifi-
cations to which natural selection and its associated doctrines of development
may be applied.

Source Excerpted from Darwin, G.H. (1872). Development in dress.

MacMillan’s Magazine, 410–416.

2. See figures, pp. 254, 311, Fairholt (1846).

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Biographical note Sir George Darwin (1845–1912) was the son of Charles
Darwin. He was an English astronomer and professor at Cambridge University.
He studied tidal effects on the planets, and tried unsuccessfully to apply evol-
utionary theory to explain the development of the moon. He was the first to
apply mathematical techniques to study the evolution of the Sun-Earth-Moon
system.

References

Darwin, Charles. (1961). The origin of species (The Harvard classics series, Vol.
11). New York: Collier.
Fairholt, F.W. (1846). Costume in England. London.

***
Badges and Costumes Herbert Spencer

The pursuit of interpretations once more takes us back to victories achieved

over men or animals. Badges are derived from trophies; with which, in early
stages, they are identical. We have seen that by the Shoshones, a warrior is
allowed to wear the feet and claws of a grizzly bear, constituting their “highest
insignia of glory,” only when he has killed one: the trophy being thus made
into a recognized mark of honor. And seeing this, we cannot doubt that the
buffalo-horns decorating the head of a Mandan chief and indicating his dignity,
were at first worn as spoils of the chase in which he prided himself: implying
a genesis of a badge out of a trophy, which gives meaning to the head-dresses
of certain divine and human personages among ancient peoples. Beginning as
a personal distinction naturally resulting from personal prowess, like the lion’s
skin which Hercules wears, the trophy-badge borne by a warrior whose super-
iority gains for him supremacy, tends to originate a family-badge; which
becomes a badge of office if his descendants retain power. Hence the natural-
ness of the facts that in Ukimi “the skin [of a lion] . . . is prepared for the
sultan’s wear, as no one else dare use it;” that “a leopard-skin mantle is the
insignia of rank among the Zoolus;” and that in Uganda, certain of the king’s
attendants wear “leopard-cat skins girt round the waist, the sign of royal
blood.”
Of course if skins or other parts of slain beasts, tend thus to become badges,
so, too, do parts of slain men. “The Chichimecs flea their heads [of their
vanquished enemies] and fit that skin upon their own heads with all the hair,
and so wear it as a token of valour, till it rots off in bits.” Here the scalp
which proves his victory, is itself used in stamping the warrior as honorable.

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Similarly when, of the Yucantanese, Landa says that “after a victory they
tore from the slain enemy the jaw-bone, and having stripped it of flesh, they
put it on their arm” we may recognize the beginning of another kind of
badge from another kind of trophy. Though clear evidence that jawbones
become badges, is not forthcoming, we have good reason to think that
substituted representations of them do. After our war with Ashantee, where,
as we have seen, jawbones are habitually taken as trophies, there were brought
over to England among other curiosities, small models of jawbones made in
gold, used for personal adornment. And facts presently to be cited suggest
that they became ornaments after having originally been badges worn by
those who had actually taken jawbones from enemies . . .
. . . Civilized usages obscure the truth that men were not originally prompted
to clothe themselves by either the desire for warmth or the thought of decency
. . . We are shown that the dress, like the badge, is at first worn from the
wish for admiration.
Some of the facts already given concerning American Indians, who wear
as marks of honour the skins of formidable animals they have killed, suggest
that the badge and the dress have a common root, and that the dress is, at any
rate in some cases, a collateral development of the badge . . . Whence it is
inferable that the honourableness of the badge and of the dress, simultaneously
arise from the honourableness of the trophy. That possession of a skin-dress
passes into a class-distinction I find no direct proof; though, as the skins of
formidable beasts often become distinctive of chiefs, it seems probable that
skins in general become distinctive of a dominant class where a servile class
exists. Indeed, in a primitive society there unavoidably arises this contrast
between those who, engaged in the chase when not engaged in war, can obtain
skin-garments, and those who, as slaves, are debarred from doing so by their
occupation. Hence, possibly, the interdicts in medieval Europe against the
wearing of furs by the inferior classes.
Even apart from this it is inferable that since, by taking his clothes,
nakedness is commonly made a trait of the prisoner, and consequently of the
slave, relative amount of clothing becomes a class-distinction. In some cases
there result exaggerations of the difference thus incidentally arising. Where
the inferior are clothed, the superior distinguish themselves by being more
clothed . . .
. . . Of course with that development of ceremonial control which goes
along with elaboration of political structure, differences of quantity, quality,
shape and colour are united to produce dresses distinctive of classes. This
trait is most marked where the rule is most despotic; as in China where
“between the highest mandarin or prime minister and the lowest constable,
there are nine classes, each distinguished by a dress peculiar to itself;” as in

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Japan, where the attendants of the Mikado “are clad after a particular fashion
. . . and there is so much difference even among themselves, as to their habits,
that thereby alone it is easily known what rank they are of, or what employ-
ment they have at Court;” and as in European countries during times of
unchecked personal government, when each class had its distinctive costume.
The causes which have originated, developed, and specialized badges and
dresses, have done the like with ornaments; which have, indeed, the same
origins.
How trophy-badges pass into ornaments, we shall see on joining with facts
given at the outset of the chapter, certain kindred facts. In Guatemala, when
commemorating by war-dances the victories of earlier times, the Indians were
“dressed in the skins and wearing the heads of animals on their own;” and
among the Chibchas, persons of rank “wore helmets, generally made of the
skins of fierce animals.” If we recall the statement already quoted, that in
primitive European times, the warrior’s head and shoulders were protected
by the hide of a wild animal (the skin of its head sometimes surmounting his
head); and if we add the statement of Plutarch that the Cimbri wore helmets
representing the heads of wild beasts; we may infer that the animal-ornaments
on metal-helmets began as imitations of hunter’s trophies. This inference is
supported by evidence already cited in part, but in part reserved for the present
occasion. The Ashantees who, as we have seen, take human jaws as trophies,
use both actual jaws and golden models of jaws for different decorative pur-
poses: adorning their musical instruments, &c., with the realities, and carrying
on their persons the metallic representations. A parallel derivation occurs
among the Malagasy. When we read that by them silver ornaments like croc-
odile’s teeth are worn on various parts of the body, we can scarcely doubt
that the silver teeth are substitutes for actual teeth originally worn as trophies.
We shall the less doubt this derivation on observing in how many parts of
the world personal ornaments are made out of these small and durable parts
of conquered men and animals – how by Caribs, Tupis, Moxos, Ashantees,
human teeth are made into armlets, anklets, and necklaces; and how in other
cases the teeth of beasts, mostly formidable, are used in like ways. The neck-
laces of the Land Dyaks contain tiger-cat’s teeth; the New Guinea people
ornament their necks, arms, and waists with hogs’ teeth; while the Sandwich
Islanders have bracelets of the polished tusks of the hog, with anklets of
dogs’ teeth. Some Dacotahs wear “a kind of necklace of white bear’s claws
three inches long.” Among the Kukis “a common armlet worn by the men
consists of two semi-circular boar’s tusks tied together so as to form a ring.”
Enumerating objects hanging from a Dyah’s ear, Boyle includes “two boar’s
tusks, one alligator’s tooth.” And picturing what her life would be at home,
a captive New Zealand girl in her lament says – “ the shark’s tooth would

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hang from my ear.” Though small objects which are attractive in colour and
shape, will naturally be used by the savage for decorative purposes, yet pride
in displaying proofs of his prowess, will inevitably make him utilize fit trophies
in preference to other things, when he has them. The motive which made
Mandans have their buffalo-robes “fringed on one side with scalp-locks,”
which prompts a Naga chief to adorn the collar round his neck with “tufts
of the hair of the persons he had killed” and which leads the Hottentots to
ornament their heads with the bladders of the wild beasts they have slain, as
Kolben tells us, will inevitably tend to transform trophies into decorations
wherever it is possible. Indeed while I write I find direct proof that this is
so . . .
And then from cases in which the ornament is an actual trophy or
representation of a trophy, we pass to cases in which it avowedly stands in
place of a trophy. Describing practices of the Chibchas, Acosta says that
certain of their strongest and bravest men had “their lips, noses, and ears
pierced, and from them hung strings of gold quills, the number of which
corresponded with that of the enemies they had killed in battle:” the
probability being that these golden ornaments, originally representations of
actual trophies, had lost resemblance to them.
Thus originating, adornments of these kinds become distinctive of the
warrior-class; and there result interdicts on the use of them by inferiors. Such
interdicts have occurred in various places. Among the Chibchas, “paintings,
decorations and jewels on dresses, and ornaments, were forbidden to the
common people.” So, too, in Peru, “none of the common people could use
gold or silver except by special privilege.” And without multiplying evidence
from nearer regions, it will suffice to add that in medieval France, jewellery
and plate were marks of distinction not allowed to those below a certain
rank.
Of course decorations beginning as actual trophies, passing into repre-
sentations of trophies made of precious materials, and, while losing their
resemblance to trophies, coming to be marks of honour given to brave war-
riors by their militant rulers (as in Imperial Rome, where armlets were thus
awarded) inevitably pass from relative uniformity to relative multiformity.
As society complicates there result orders of many kinds – stars, crosses,
medals, and the like. These it is observable are most if not all of them of
military origin. And then where a militant organization evolved into rigidity,
continues after the life has ceased to be militant, we find such decorations
used to mark ranks of another kind; as in China, with its differently-coloured
buttons distinguishing its different grades of mandarins.
I must not, however, be supposed to imply that this explanation covers all
cases. Already I have admitted that the rudimentary aesthetic sense which

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leads the savage to paint his body, has doubtless a share in prompting the use
of attractive objects for ornaments; and two other origins of ornaments must
be added. Cook tells us that the New Zealanders carry suspended to their
ears the nails and teeth of their deceased relations; and much more bulky
relics, which are carried about by widows and others among some races,
may also occasionally be modified into decorative objects. Further, it seems
that badges of slavery undergo a kindred transformation. The ring through
the nose, which Assyrian sculptures show us was used for leading captives
taken in war, which marked those who, as priests, entered the service of certain
gods in ancient America, and which in Astrachan is even now a sign of dedi-
cation, that is of subjection; seems elsewhere to have lost its meaning, and to
have survived as an ornament. And this is a change analogous to that which
has occurred with marks on the skin.
. . . How this diffusion of dresses marking honourable position and disuse
of dresses marking inferiority, has gone far among ourselves, but is still incom-
plete, is shown in almost every household. On the one hand we have the
fashionable gowns of cooks and housemaids; on the other hand we have
that dwarfed representative of the muslin cap, which, once hiding the hair,
was insisted upon by mistresses as a class distinction, but which, gradually
dwindling, has now become a small patch on the back of the head: a good
instance of the unobtrusive modifications by which usages are changed . . .

Source Excerpted from Spencer, H. (1924). The principles of sociology. New

York and London: Appleton. (Original work published 1896)

Biographical note Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was an English sociologist

and philosopher of biological and social evolution. Although he received no
formal training, his education was the result of his own extensive reading in
the natural sciences. During his own time, Spencer was criticized by the
academic establishment. Spencer studied human society from an evolutionary
viewpoint, and is important as one of the first to establish the scientific study
of human society. He is thought to have coined the phrase “survival of the
fittest.”
***
Fashion Georg Simmel

. . . Fashion is the imitation of a given example and satisfies the demand for
social adaptation; it leads the individual upon the road which all travel, it
furnishes a general condition, which resolves the conduct of every individual
into a mere example. At the same time it satisfies in no less degree the need
of differentiation, the tendency towards dissimilarity, the desire for change

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and contrast, on the one hand by a constant change of contents, which gives
to the fashion of today an individual stamp as opposed to that of yesterday
and of to-morrow, on the other hand because fashions differ for different
classes – the fashions of the upper stratum of society are never identical with
those of the lower; in fact, they are abandoned by the former as soon as the
latter prepares to appropriate them. Thus fashion represents nothing more
than one of the many forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in
uniform spheres of activity the tendency towards social equalization with
the desire for individual differentiation and change. Every phase of the
conflicting pair strives visibly beyond the degree of satisfaction that any
fashion offers to an absolute control of the sphere of life in question. If we
should study the history of fashions (which hitherto have been examined
only from the view-point of the development of their contents) in connection
with their importance for the form of the social process, we should find that
it reflects the history of the attempts to adjust the satisfaction of the two
counter-tendencies more and more perfectly to the condition of the existing
individual and social culture. The various psychological elements in fashion
all conform to this fundamental principle.
Fashion, as noted above, is a product of class distinction and operates like
a number of other forms, honor especially, the double function of which
consists in revolving within a given circle and at the same time emphasizing
it as separate from others. Just as the frame of a picture characterizes the
work of art inwardly as a coherent, homogeneous, independent entity and
at the same time outwardly severs all direct relations with the surrounding
space, just as the uniform energy of such forms cannot be expressed unless
we determine the double effect, both inward and outward, so honor owes
its character, and above all its moral rights, to the fact that the individual in
his personal honor at the same time represents and maintains that of his
social circle and his class. These moral rights, however, are frequently consid-
ered unjust by those without the pale. Thus fashion on the one hand signifies
union with those in the same class, the uniformity of a circle characterized
by it, and, uno actu, the exclusion of all other groups.
Union and segregation are the two fundamental functions which are here
inseparably united, and one of which, although or because it forms a logical
contrast to the other, becomes the condition of its realization. Fashion is
merely a product of social demands, even though the individual object which
it creates or recreates may represent a more or less individual need. This is
clearly proved by the fact that very frequently not the slightest reason can be
found for the creations of fashion from the standpoint of an objective,
aesthetic, or other expediency. While in general our wearing apparel is really
adapted to our needs, there is not a trace of expediency in the method by

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which fashion dictates, for example, whether wide or narrow trousers, colored
or black scarfs shall be worn. As a rule the material justification for an action
coincides with its general adoption, but in the case of fashion there is a
complete separation of the two elements, and there remains for the individual
only this general acceptance as the deciding motive to appropriate it. Judging
from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would
seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us
to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone. The absolute indifference
of fashion to the material standards of life is well illustrated by the way in
which it recommends something appropriate in one instance, something
abstruse in another, and something materially and aesthetically quite
indifferent in a third. The only motivations with which fashion is concerned
are formal social ones. The reason why even aesthetically impossible styles
seem distingué, elegant, and artistically tolerable when affected by persons
who carry them to the extreme, is that the persons who do this are generally
the most elegant and pay the greatest attention to their personal appearance,
so that under any circumstances we would get the impression of something
distingué and aesthetically cultivated. This impression we credit to the ques-
tionable element of fashion, the latter appealing to our consciousness as the
new and consequently most conspicuous feature of the tout ensemble.
Fashion occasionally will accept objectively determined subjects such as
religious faith, scientific interests, even socialism and individualism; but it
does not become operative as fashion until these subjects can be considered
independent of the deeper human motives from which they have risen. For
this reason the rule of fashion becomes in such fields unendurable. We there-
fore see that there is good reason why externals – clothing, social conduct,
amusements – constitute the specific field of fashion, for here no dependence
is placed on really vital motives of human action. It is the field which we can
most easily relinquish to the bent towards imitation, which it would be a sin
to follow in important questions. We encounter here a close connection
between the consciousness of personality and that of the material forms of
life, a connection that runs all through history. The more objective our view
of life has become in the last centuries, the more it has stripped the picture
of nature of all subjective and anthropomorphic elements, and the more
sharply has the conception of individual personality become defined. The
social regulation of our inner and outer life is a sort of embryo condition, in
which the contrasts of the purely personal and the purely objective are differ-
entiated, the action being synchronous and reciprocal. Therefore wherever
man appears essentially as a social being we observe neither strict objectivity
in the view of life nor absorption and independence in the consciousness of
personality.

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Social forms, apparel, aesthetic judgment, the whole style of human expres-
sion, are constantly transformed by fashion, in such a way, however, that
fashion – i.e., the latest fashion – in all these things affects only the upper
classes. Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, thereby
crossing the line of demarcation the upper classes have drawn and destroying
the uniformity of their coherence, the upper classes turn away from this style
and adopt a new one, which in its turn differentiates them from the masses;
and thus the game goes merrily on. Naturally the lower classes look and strive
towards the upper, and they encounter the least resistance in those fields
which are subject to the whims of fashion; for it is here that mere external
imitation is most readily applied. The same process is at work as between the
different sets within the upper classes, although it is not always as visible here
as it is, for example, between mistress and maid. Indeed, we may often observe
that the more nearly one set has approached another, the more frantic becomes
the desire for imitation from below and the seeking for the new from above.
The increase of wealth is bound to hasten the process considerably and render
it visible, because the objects of fashion, embracing as they do the externals
of life, are most accessible to the mere call of money, and conformity to the
higher set is more easily acquired here than in fields which demand an
individual test that gold and silver cannot affect.

Source Excerpted from Simmel, G. (1904). Fashion. International Quarterly,

10, 130–155.

Biographical note Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was a German philosopher

and sociologist. He established sociology as a field of study and made import-
ant contributions to sociological methodology. He is important to the field
of apparel and textiles because he sought to specifically analyze and address
the process of fashion. His most important contribution is his conception of
sociology as an independent discipline.

***
Motivation in Fashion Elizabeth Hurlock

. . . Few attempts have been made to determine the fundamental motives at

the basis of fashions in clothing, or the motives involved in the selection of
one type of clothing rather than another. Perhaps the difficulty of the problem
itself is responsible for this lack of information. The study of human motives
is always a difficult one, and this becomes increasingly so when personal motives
are closely bound up with custom and tradition. There are many speculations
and theories as to the why and wherefore of clothing, but it usually ends
there. Historians and artists have recorded clothing fashions of the past, but

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what the motives were that inspired these fashions have either been ignored
or passed over with a casual comment. Recently, philosophers, psychologists,
economists, and designers have turned their attention to this phase of fashion
analysis, and, as a result, we have the beginning of a scientific approach to
the whole problem of clothing.
. . . The questionnaire used in this study was based on suggestions from
the works of Hall, Flaccus and Rusling, from the many theories regarding the
motives at the basis of fashion, and from suggestions made by a group of
graduate students . . .
. . . The questionnaires were sent out from 1923 to 1928 and during this
time one thousand, four hundred and fifty-two people recorded their opinions
about fashion on these.
. . . In any experimental study, one of the most interesting as well as most
important phases, is a direct comparison of its results with those of former
studies. When, however, few studies have been made along the same general
lines, and when there are many theoretical analyses, comparisons become
especially interesting. The writer has therefore made an effort to compare
the present work from every possible angle with previous studies along the
same general lines. These comparisons will be subdivided into two groups,
those that relate to theoretical studies, and those that relate to experimental
studies. In the comparisons with the theoretical studies, analyses of motives,
fashion changes and fashion’s relation to sex, are taken up separately.
While Ross, Gault, Bogardus, Allport, Nystrom and other writers all hold
that two ruling principles are at the basis of fashion, namely, Imitation and
Differentiation, answers to this questionnaire did not agree with these
principles. Seventy-seven per cent of the entire group used for the experiment
said they did not follow fashions so as to appear equal to those having a
higher social position than they, while only 23% admitted that they were
ruled by this motive.
The desire to attract attention, or “self-advertisement,” as it was described
by Gault, Bernard and Allport, did not prove to be so powerful as believed
by these authors. Only 17% of the group said they selected their clothing to
draw attention to themselves and of this number 8% were men and 27%
were women. A desire to combine becomingness with the prevailing style
motivated 91% of the group, while 95% said they tried to make their clothing
the background, rather than the outstanding feature of their personalities.
In selecting colors, becomingness and utility ranked as prime motives in the
majority of cases. Hence, it would seem that dress for the purpose of self-
advertisement is not so commonly used as has been thought.
Dress as a means of compensation for physical or personality deficiencies,
as suggested by Bernard, Allport and Nystrom, was used by 54% of the groups.

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It is interesting to note that 72% of the women, as opposed to 38% of the

men, said they used dress for this purpose. Eighty-eight per cent of the group,
of which 95% were women and 82% men, said they selected their clothing
with the idea of bringing out their best qualities. It would seem, therefore,
that the compensatory value of clothing is very great, and theory here is
substantiated by fact.
The rôle of fear in fashion, which has been so greatly stressed by Dearborn
is justified by the results of this study. One-hundred per cent of the men and
86% of the women, making a combined average of 93%, claimed that they
preferred to have a style well established before adopting it. Dearborn’s
“clothes-fear,” it would seem, is responsible for this conservatism.
The use of clothes for economic display, which has been so strongly emph-
asized by Veblen, does not stand out as conscious motive, though indirectly
the members of the group used for the study show that they were dominated
by it. Seventy-four per cent said they did not always try to dress so as to
appear prosperous; while 55% only said they would be willing to deprive
themselves of certain pleasures in order to be in style. When asked if they
would be willing to deprive themselves of certain necessities in order to be in
style, the answer was negative in three-quarters of the cases. The use of dress
as a means of creating the impression of being a person of leisure proved to
be a conscious motive in the case of only 12% of the entire group. These
results, therefore, are distinctly not in agreement with Veblen’s theory or,
perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the subjects used for this study
were unconscious of being influenced by such motives.
Many theories have been given in answer to the question, why do fashions
change? and these theories, like those in regard to fashion motives, are often
very conflicting. The present analysis includes several questions which relate
definitely to fashion changes, and, in view of the theories, the answers given
in this study are very interesting. To 64% of the group, the desire for novelty,
which was stressed by Nystrom as one of the most important factors in change,
was given as their reason for changing styles from season to season. Only
12% said they do so to avoid the appearance of poverty, which to Veblen
stands out as the most important single motive in fashion changes. Dearborn’s
“clothes-fear” seems to have been operative in one-quarter of the group who
said they accepted fashion changes so as to avoid social criticism.
The relation of clothing to sex was analyzed in several of the questions.
Thirty-eight per cent of the group, of which number, 41% were women and
36% men, said they dressed so as to win the approval of their own sex.
Thorndike, it may be remembered states firmly that “women obviously dress
for other women’s eyes.” While 25% of the group admitted that they dressed
to please the opposite sex, 36% said they dressed to win the approval of

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both sexes. From these answers, it would seem that the desire to win approval
as such is stronger than the sex motive so often attributed in popular literature
to fashion.
The influence of modesty, which might be considered an out growth of
the sex motive, is seen in the answers . . . Ninety per cent of the group, of
which there was a slightly higher percentage of men than of women, said
that they would refuse to accept certain prevailing styles because they thought
them immodest. While many writers who have studied the possible causes
underlying the origin of clothing, have stressed the modesty factor, it is
interesting to note that writers of present-day fashion motivation have given
little or no attention to this factor. And yet, from the large percentage of the
group that stressed this point, it is obvious that modesty is an important
motive in the acceptance or rejection of a fashion.
Comparisons with former experimental studies have brought to light some
interesting data. The emphasis which Hall and Flaccus have laid on the effect
of clothing upon children’s behavior and happiness, has been corroborated
by the present study, the subjects of which were of more mature years. In
this study, 92% of the group said that dress affected their behavior and 95%,
that it affected their happiness. Dearborn’s emphasis on the relationship
between clothing and efficiency was also confirmed. Eighty-eight per cent of
the group, of which it is interesting to note that 94% were women and only
83% men, said that dress so affected their efficiency that they could do better
work if they felt they were well dressed. Almost 100% of the women and
94% of the men said that their feeling of self-confidence was increased by
being well and appropriately dressed,
Indirectly the relationship between clothing and success in life, which
Dearborn emphasized so strongly, may be seen in the answers . . . One-hundred
per cent of the men and 99% of the women claimed that their estimates of
people were influenced by the effects their clothing made on them, while
80% said this held only for first impressions. Nevertheless, first impressions
in the business and social world are often very important factors in deter-
mining success or failure. When asked if they spent a disproportionate amount
of their incomes on clothes, 42% said “professional advancement” and 17%,
a “good front” were the motivating causes. In as much as 33% claimed they
did not spend disproportionate amounts, it is conclusive that those who do,
do so because they believe that success and good appearance go hand in
hand.
The Photoplay research study which laid great emphasis on the rôle of
youth in present-day fashion matters, seems not to have exaggerated this
rôle, so far as the results of this study may be taken as conclusive evidence.
Ninety per cent of the group studied said they had noticed a change in their

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attitude toward clothing from childhood until the present time. In 67% of
the cases, adolescence was the period in which clothes interest was strongest,
while in 33%, it was during mature years.
Adolescence for two-thirds of the group and maturity for one-third, seem
to be the times when social approval of one’s clothing is most strong and
influential in the individual’s life.
Two-thirds of the group claimed that adolescence was the period of life in
which happiness, efficiency and behavior were most affected by clothes, and
one-third laid emphasis on maturity as the more important period. The same
percentage claimed that their self-confidence was increased by being well-
dressed in adolescence and maturity.
The rôle of reason or common sense has not been stressed either in the
theoretical or experimental studies which have appeared before this study
was made. Somehow or other, students of fashion motivation have ignored
these motives, or have looked upon them as of lesser value than the motives
they have emphasized, and hence have overlooked them. The present study,
however, has shown that this is unjustified. Reason plays an important rôle
in fashion motivation to-day, and it must be ranked with the other motives
as powerful in determining the fashions of the hour. According to the answers
given . . . 89% of the group, of which 95% consisted of men and 82% of
women, said they always considered whether or not clothes would be useful
to them when they made their selections. In 87% of the cases, the cost was
always taken into consideration in the selection, and once again, this was
true of a slightly larger percentage of the men than of the women. Disapproval
of a prevailing fashion, because it would prove to be detrimental to health,
or for some other good reason, would hold back 90% of the men and 79% of
the women in adopting it. It is evident, therefore, that reason cannot justifiably
be omitted from the list of fashion motives, and that fashion designers would
do well to appeal strongly to this motive, especially when dealing with young
people.
In summarizing the comparisons between this study and those previously
made, it may be said that on the whole, the agreement is strong. The greatest
amount of agreement, however, comes in the comparison with experimental
studies, while many of the widely heralded theories seem to fall down under
evidence of the sort brought forth in this study.

Source Excerpted from Hurlock, E.B. (1929). Motivation in fashion. Archives

of Psychology, 17(3): 5–71.

Biographical note Elizabeth Hurlock (1898–1988) received her Ph.D. in

psychology from Columbia University in 1924. She wrote many books on

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psychology on such topics as child development and adolescent development

in addition to her work on fashion motivations. She taught at Columbia
University and at University of Pennsylvania.

References

Allport, F. (1924). Social psychology. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Bernard, L.I. (1926). An introduction to social psychology. New York: Henry Holt.
Bogardus, E.S. (1924). Social psychology of fads. Journal of Applied Sociology, 8,
239–243.
Dearborn, G. (1918). The psychology of clothing. The Psychological Monographs,
26, 1–72.
Flaccus, L.W. (1906). Remarks on the psychology of clothes. Pedagogical Seminary,
13, 61–83.
Gault, R. (1923). Social psychology. New York: Henry Holt.
Hall, G.S. (1897–1898). Early sense of self. American Journal of Psychology, 9, 351–
395.
Nystrom, P. (1928). Economics of fashion. New York: Ronald Press.
Ross, E.A. (1917) Social psychology. New York: Macmillan.
Rusling, L.A. (1905.) Children’s attitudes toward clothes. Pedagogical Seminary, 12,
525–526.
Thorndike, E. (1914). Educational psychology – Briefer course. New York: Columbia
University.
Veblen, T. (1894). The economic theory of women’s dress. Popular Science Monthly,
46, 198–205.

***
Fashion Edward Sapir

The fundamental drives leading to the creation and acceptance of fashion

can be isolated. In the more sophisticated societies boredom, created by leisure
and too highly specialized forms of activity, leads to restlessness and curiosity.
This general desire to escape from the trammels of a too regularized existence
is powerfully reinforced by a ceaseless desire to add to the attractiveness of
the self and all other objects of love and friendship. It is precisely in function-
ally powerful societies that the individual’s ego is constantly being convicted
of helplessness. The individual tends to be unconsciously thrown back on
himself and demands more and more novel affirmations of his effective reality.
The endless rediscovery of the self in a series of petty truancies from the
official socialized self becomes a mild obsession of the normal individual in
any society in which the individual has ceased to be a measure of the society

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itself. There is, however, always the danger of too great a departure from
the recognized symbols of the individual, because his identity is likely to be
destroyed. That is why insensitive people, anxious to be literally in the fashion,
so often overreach themselves and nullify the very purpose of fashion. Good
hearted women of middle age generally fail in the art of being ravishing
nymphs.
Somewhat different from the affirmation of the libidinal self is the more
vulgar desire for prestige or notoriety, satisfied by changes in fashion. In this
category belongs fashion as an outward emblem of personal distinction or
of membership in some group to which distinction is ascribed. The imitation
of fashion by people who belong to circles removed from those which set
the fashion has the function of bridging the gap between a social class and the
class next above it. The logical result of the acceptance of a fashion by all
members of society is the disappearance of the kinds of satisfaction responsible
for the change of fashion in the first place. A new fashion becomes psycho-
logically necessary, and thus the cycle of fashion is endlessly repeated.
Fashion is emphatically a historical concept. A specific fashion is utterly
unintelligible if lifted out of its place in a sequence of forms. It is exceedingly
dangerous to rationalize or in any other way psychologize a particular fashion
on the basis of general principles which might be considered applicable to
the class of forms of which it seems to be an example. It is utterly vain, for
instance, to explain particular forms of dress or types of cosmetics or methods
of wearing the hair without a preliminary historical critique. Bare legs among
modern women in summer do not psychologically or historically create at
all the same fashion as bare legs and bare feet among primitives living in the
tropics. The importance of understanding fashion historically should be
obvious enough when it is recognized that the very essence of fashion is that
it be valued as a variation in an understood sequence, as a departure from
the immediately preceding mode.
Changes in fashion depend on the prevailing culture and on the social
ideals which inform it. Under the apparently placid surface of culture there
are always powerful psychological drifts of which fashion is quick to catch
the direction. In a democratic society, for instance, if there is an unacknow-
ledged drift toward class distinctions fashion will discover endless ways of
giving it visible form. Criticism can always be met by the insincere defense
that fashion is merely fashion and need not be taken seriously. If in a puritanic
society there is a growing impatience with the outward forms of modesty,
fashion finds it easy to minister to the demands of sex curiosity, while the
old mores can be trusted to defend fashion with an affectation of unawareness
of what fashion is driving at. A complete study of the history of fashion would
undoubtedly throw much light on the ups and downs of sentiment and attitude

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at various periods of civilization. However, fashion never permanently outruns

discretion and only those who are taken in by the superficial rationalizations
of fashion are surprised by the frequent changes of face in its history. That
there was destined to be a lengthening of women’s skirts after they had become
short enough was obvious from the outset to all except those who do not
believe that sex symbolism is a real factor in human behavior.
The chief difficulty of understanding fashion in its apparent vagaries is the
lack of exact knowledge of the unconscious symbolisms attaching to forms,
colors, textures, postures and other expressive elements in a given culture.
The difficulty is appreciably increased by the fact that the same expressive
elements tend to have quite different symbolic references in different areas.

Source Excerpted from Sapir, E. (1931). Fashion. Encyclopedia of the social

sciences. Vol 6. New York: Macmillan. Reprinted by permission from the
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences.

Biographical note Edward Sapir (1884–1939) is a foremost figure in American

anthropological linguistics. An ethnolinguist, Sapir was a student of Franz
Boas at Columbia University and is well known for his work on American
Indian languages. He held appointments at Universities of California,
Pennsylvania, and Chicago, then led the study of cultural anthropology at
Yale University.

***
Some Conclusions James Laver

The old fashioned moralist’s view – a view not quite extinct among the upper
clergy – was that fashion changed because women were incurably frivolous
and inconstant. “La donna è mobile . . .”1 But we have seen that fashion’s
changes are never entirely arbitrary: they always have some inner historical
significance, so that the inadequacy of the female character cannot be a
complete explanation. Women themselves generally see in fashion’s changes
an ever-progressing evolution towards something more sensible in the way
of dress. Most women, if questioned on this point, will give as their opinion
that the fashions of yesterday were indeed ridiculous, and that the fashions
of the present day are both beautiful and practical. Women were probably
always of this opinion, and all that can be said about it is that it is a complete
delusion. Practicality plays a very minor part in the formation of fashion. If
it were not so women would not have worn crinolines in the days when buses

1. Editor’s note: “Woman is fickle” Translated from Italian: title of tenor aria from Verdi
opera Rigoletto.

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and railway carriages were at their very narrowest; nor would they to-day
grope for brake and accelerator through the confusion of a trailing evening
skirt. They would have adopted something like the fashion of 1927, and
kept to it for ever. The psychologists have come forward with another
explanation, that is probably very much nearer the truth, however unflattering
it may be to the ears of emancipated women.
There are probably now very few among those who have studied the subject
of clothes, either from the anthropological or the psychological angle, who
hold that the origin of clothing is to be found in the impulse of modesty. It is
generally agreed that the main impulse among primitive people comes, on
the contrary, from the desire for display, such display consisting in its most
primitive forms of a decorative emphasis on those very parts of the body
which modesty leads us to hide. Protection, as a motive for clothing, is now
relegated to a very minor rôle, and sometimes dismissed as a mere rational-
ization of a process which has other causes. Even those who still hold that
clothing had its origin in modesty are as convinced as their opponents of the
sexual significance of bodily coverings of all kind. But such sexual significance
has, since men made the great renunciation at the end of the eighteenth
century, been confined almost exclusively to female attire.2 The sexuality of
the female body is more diffused than that of the male, and as it is habitually
covered up the exposure of any one part of it focuses the erotic attention,
conscious or unconscious, and makes for seductiveness. Fashion really begins
with the discovery in the fifteenth century that clothes could be used as a
compromise between exhibitionism and modesty. The dècolletage, however,
which arose at this period has been dealt with in another chapter. It is
sufficient here to note that the aim of fashion ever since has been the exposure
of, or the emphasis upon, the various portions of the female body taken in
series.
The main fact which emerges from the experiences of nudists in modern
times is that while the imaginative contemplation of the naked body may be
a highly erotic proceeding, the actual experience is exactly the reverse. It is
not a matter of beauty or ugliness, but simply that the eye becomes so accus-
tomed to the naked human body that it ceases to have any meaning to the
imagination at all. Since the relaxations of prudery during the last ten years
even the costumes of the lighter stage have exhibited the same law; in fact,
men have become so accustomed to seeing certain parts of the female body
exposed that they no longer get any excitement out of the spectacle at all. In
1900 old gentlemen used to faint when they caught a passing glimpse of a

2. For a full discussion of these problems see Dr. J.C. Flügel’s Psychology of Clothes (the
International PsychoAnalystic Library, London, 1930).

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female ankle. The modern young man can contemplate without emotion the
entire area of the female leg and a considerable portion of the female stomach.
In the nineteen-twenties, for the first time for many hundreds of years, the
female leg was exposed to general view. The bust, however, also for the first
time for many centuries, was not supposed to exist at all, and women who
did not mind in the least exposing their lower limbs would have been embar-
rassed if called upon to wear a deep dècolletage.3
In short, the female body consists of a series of sterilized zones, which are
those exposed by the fashion which is just going out, and an erogenous zone,
which will be the point of interest for the fashion which is just coming in.
This erogenous zone is always shifting, and it is the business of fashion to
pursue it, without ever actually catching it up. It is obvious that if you really
catch it up you are immediately arrested for indecent exposure. If you almost
catch it up you are celebrated as a leader of fashion.
Granting, however, that this is an explanation of why fashions come in, it
is not a complete explanation of why they go out, for in the eclipse of every
fashion a large social – one might say snobbish – element is involved. The
speeding up of fashion’s changes during the last hundred years is due to several
causes, chiefly to large-scale production and to the survival of snobbery into
a democratic world.
The breakdown of the social hierarchy leaves every woman (for man has
ceased to compete) free to dress as well as she can afford, with the result
that the only possible superiority is the slight one of cut or material, or the
short one of adopting a new fashion a little sooner than her neighbors. The
latest creations of the great Paris couturiers are copied and duplicated almost
as soon as they appear in the shops, so that the fashionable woman is forced
to adopt something still newer in order to preserve her advantage. Fashion,
in a word, filters steadily down in the social scale. The actual garments which
express it become less and less adequate, owing to the use of poorer material
and because they are less skilfully made. A fashion, therefore, very quickly
becomes dowdy, and this is sufficient to induce women who can afford it to

3. During the rehearsals of Nymph Errant at the Adelphi Theatre in 1933 the practice dress
of most of the chorus girls consisted of backless bathing costume. No one thought anything of
this – least of all the girls themselves. But the day came for dress rehearsal, and in one of the
scenes it was found that Doris Zinkeisen had devised for the chorus a costume very much like
the male costume of 1830: tailcoat, trousers, waistcoat, etc. The front of the waistcoat, however,
was cut low, so as to form a kind of décolletage. It was not a very startling décolletage –
certainly no lower than would have been worn without any embarrassment by an ingénue of
the eighties when attending her first ball. But there was a strike among the chorus against the
indecency of this costume, and Mr. Cochran was compelled to fill up the offending gap with
gauze.

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change it as quickly as possible. After a while it becomes worse than dowdy:

it becomes hideous, and this may be confirmed by the simple process of
showing to any woman a photograph of the dress which she herself wore
ten years before.
In fact, the following list might be established. The same costume will be:

Indecent ......................................................... 10 years before its time

Shameless ........................................................ 5 years before its time
Outré (daring) .................................................. 1 year before its time
Smart .................................................................................................
Dowdy ................................................................ 1 year after its time
Hideous ........................................................... 10 years after its time
Ridiculous ........................................................ 20 years after its time
Amusing .......................................................... 30 years after its time
Quaint ............................................................. 50 years after its time
Charming ........................................................ 70 years after its time
Romantic ....................................................... 100 years after its time
Beautiful ........................................................ 150 years after its time

In the race for chic – that is, for contemporary seductiveness – which is
the essence of fashion, certain members of the community get left behind.
These are either older women, who have given up the struggle, or poor
women, women so poor that they cannot afford to struggle at all. That some
duchesses are ill dressed, and that some women who are well dressed have
not a penny in the bank, does not affect the argument. Contrary to the expect-
ations of Liberal reformers in the nineteenth-century, the more you abolish
differences of caste and rank, the more desperate does the struggle for chic
become, because it is only so that a woman can demonstrate superiority . . .
. . . The foregoing list shows quite clearly that there is no validity in our
judgment concerning fashion until a certain period has elapsed: in short,
there is a gap in appreciation; and it is the thesis of the present chapter that
this gap in appreciation is not to be found only in questions of women’s
dress, but in every other matter of taste.

Source Excerpted from Laver, J. (1937). Tastes and fashion: From the French
revolution until today. London: G.G. Harrap.

Biographical note James Laver (1899–1975) worked as keeper for 37 years

in the department of engraving, illustration, and design at London’s Victoria
and Albert Museum. His interest in the history and psychology of costume
began through his desire to date paintings by the costume depicted. He is

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best remembered for his theory of cycles of fashion, and the relationship
between dress and the economic and social factors controlling the evolution
of taste.

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 Predicting Fashion Change
7
Predicting Fashion Change
On the Nature of Fashion Agnes Brooks Young

. . . The essence of fashion is change, and the chief value of the long series of
annual typicals is that it provides a means for studying what it is that changes
in fashion from year to year, and how the changes take place. This book
attempts to answer those two questions. In the course of the study there have
been developed certain general conclusions about the nature and processes
of fashion change. Three of these general conclusions appear to be always
valid.
The first of them is that fashion change in women’s dress is always a con-
tinuous process. The typical fashion of each year always differs from that of
the preceding year and that of the following year. There are no duplicates
and no repetitions among the annual typicals.
The second general rule is that fashion change in women’s dress is always a
slow process. No annual typical differs in marked degree from its predecessor
or from its successor. This is not in accord with the popular beliefs concerning
fashion changes, which appear to hold that rates of change are highly variable,
and that from time to time sweeping innovations appear. Probably these pop-
ular impressions have developed because waves of current interest in fashions
are of widely varying intensity, and so give rise to the belief that fashion
changes are sudden, capricious and unpredictable. This wide variability in
the degree of public interest in women’s fashions was well exemplified in the
ferment of popular discussion concerning the short skirts of the middle 1920’s.
The third principle is that fashion change in women’s dress always proceeds
by the modification of what has previously prevailed, and never by abrupt
departure from it. Each new fashion can be traced back to its predecessor,
for it is always an outgrowth or an adaptation in which the lineal descent is
clearly evident.
These three general principles may be combined in the statement that
fashion change in women’s dress is a continuous, slow process of modification.
There are three other conclusions of a somewhat different character which
are derived from the study of the long series of annual typicals illustrated in

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Image Not Available

Figure 7.1a The three series of recurring “annual typicals” proposed by Young are
based on the silhouette and shape of the woman’s skirt. They are
called the bell, the back-fullness, and the tubular. According to Young,
these three skirt types have succeeded one another in that order of
sequence in cycles lasting approximately thirty-three years. Figure 2
from Recurring Cycles of Fashion, 1760–1937 (pp. 14–16), by
A.B. Young, 1937, New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted
with permission.

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 Predicting Fashion Change

Image Not Available

Figure 7.1b Figure 3 from Recurring Cycles of Fashion, 1760–1937 (pp. 14–16),
by A.B. Young, 1937, New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted with
permission.

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 The “F” Word

Image Not Available

Figure 7.1c Figure 4 from Recurring Cycles of Fashion, 1760–1937 (pp. 14–16),
by A.B. Young, 1937, New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted with
permission.

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 Predicting Fashion Change

this book. They may not be fundamental principles, for possibly the develop-
ments of future fashion changes may alter them by introducing exceptions
from them. They are statements concerning the ways in which fashion changes
have taken place during the past century and three-quarters.
The first of these general observations is that, as far back as these records
run, changes in the fashion of women’s dress have been grouped in well-
defined cycles, during each of which the continuous evolution has consisted
of modifications of a single type of dress characterized by the form and
contour of its skirt.
The second of these three observations about the historic pattern of fashion
behavior is that there have been so far only three of these accepted types of
street dress skirts. These three types are the bell, the back-fullness and the
tubular, and during the entire period covered by these records these three
skirt types have succeeded one another in that unvarying order of sequence.
The third of these three significant general facts revealed by these records
is that the succession of these three skirt types, and of the dress cycles
consisting of modifications based on them, has so far taken place on an almost
regular time schedule in which each cycle has lasted for approximately one-
third of a century.
It may well prove that this curiously regular pattern of fashion evolution
will be modified in the years to come. It is possible that a modification is
under way even now, for this present dress cycle based on the tubular skirt
has already lasted so long that, according to historic precedent, it has used
up its allotted span of years. We cannot yet tell how this may prove to be,
but we are warranted in believing that we shall be able to understand and
interpret the developments, as time reveals them, only if we employ in our
studies such measuring instruments as the scale of annual typicals presented
here.

Source Excerpted from Young, A.B. (1937). Recurring cycles of fashion.

New York: Harper and Brothers. Reprinted by permission from the publisher.

Biographical note Agnes Brooks Young (1898–1974) was an author and

artist. She headed the costume department (1928–1929) at the Yale University
Theater, and was lecturer on art and the psychology of dress at Western
Reserve University (1930–1932). She authored twelve books on topics related
to medicine, surgery, and the art and psychology of dress.

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 Fashion as Collective and Consumer Behavior
8
Fashion as Collective and
Consumer Behavior
Fashion Movements Herbert Blumer

While fashion is thought of usually in relation to clothing, it is important

to realize that it covers a much wider domain. It is to be found in manners,
the arts, literature, and philosophy, and may even reach into certain areas of
science. In fact, it may operate in any field of group life, apart from the
technological and utilitarian area and the area of the sacred. Its operation
requires a class society, for in its essential character it does not occur either
in a homogenous society like a primitive group, nor in a caste society.
Fashion behaves as a movement, and on this basis it is different from custom
which, by comparison, is static. This is due to the fact that fashion is based
fundamentally on differentiation and emulation. In a class society, the upper
classes or so-called social elite, are not able to differentiate themselves by
fixed symbols or badges. Hence the more external features of their life and
behavior are likely to be imitated by classes immediately subjacent to them,
who, in turn, are initiated by groups immediately below them in the social
structure. This process gives to fashion a vertical descent. However, the elite
class finds that it is no longer distinguishable, by reason of the imitation
made by others, and hence is led to adopt new differentiating criteria, only
to displace these as they in turn are imitated. It is primarily this feature that
makes fashion into a movement and which has led one writer to remark that
a fashion, once launched, marches to its doom.
As a movement, fashion shows little resemblance to any of the other move-
ments which we have considered. While it occurs spontaneously and moves
along in a characteristic cycle, it involves little in the way of crowd behavior
and it is not dependent upon the discussion process and the resulting public
opinion. It does not depend upon the mechanisms of which we have spoken.
The participants are not recruited through agitation or proselyting. No esprit
de corps or morale is built up among them. Nor does the fashion movement
have, or require, an ideology. Further, since it does not have a leadership
imparting conscious direction to the movement, it does not build up a set of

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tactics. People participate in the fashion movement voluntarily and in response

to the interesting and powerful kind of control which fashion imposes on
them.
Not only is the fashion movement unique in terms of its character, but it
differs from other movements in that it does not develop into a society. It
does not build up a social organization; it has no personnel or functionaries;
it does not develop a division of labor among its participants with each being
assigned a given status; it does not construct a set of symbols, myths, values,
philosophy, or set of practices, and in this sense does not form a culture; and
finally, it does not develop a set of loyalties or form a we-consciousness.
Nevertheless, the movement of fashion is an important form of collective
behavior with very significant results for the social order. First, it should be
noted that the fashion movement is a genuine expressive movement. It does
not have a conscious goal which people are trying to reach through collective
action, as is true in the case of the specific social movements. Nor does it
represent the release of excitement and tension generated in a dancing crowd
situation. It is expressive, however, of certain fundamental impulses and
tendencies, such as an inclination toward novel experience, a desire for
distinction, and an urge to conform. Fashion is important especially in
providing a means for the expression of developing tastes and disposition;
this feature establishes it as a form of expressive behavior.
The latter remark provides a cue for understanding the rôle of fashion
and the way in which it contributes to the formation of a new social order.
In a changing society, such as is necessarily presupposed for the operation of
fashion, people are continually having their subjective lives upset; they
experience new dispositions and tastes which, however, are vague and ill-
defined. It seems quite clear that fashion, by providing an opportunity for
the expression of dispositions and tastes, serves to make them definite and
to channelize them and, consequently, to fix and solidify them. To understand
this, one should appreciate the fact that the movement and success of fashion
are dependent upon the acceptance of the given style or pattern. In turn, this
acceptance is based not merely upon the prestige attached to the style but
also upon whether the style meets and answers to the dispositions and
developing tastes of people. (The notorious failures that attend efforts to
make styles fashionable upon the basis of mere prestige provide some support
for this point.) From this point of view, we can regard fashion as arising and
flourishing in response to new subjective demands. In providing means for
the expression of these dispositions and tastes, fashion acts, as suggested
before, to shape and crystallize these tastes. In the long run fashion aids, in
this manner, to construct a Zeitgeist or a common subjective life, and in
doing so, helps to lay the foundation for a new social order.

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Source Excerpted from Blumer, H. (1939). Fashion movements. In R.E.

Park (Ed.), An outline of the principles of sociology (pp. 275–277). New
York: Barnes and Noble.

Biographical note Herbert Blumer (1900–1987) was an American sociologist.

He studied under George Mead and received his doctorate from the University
of Chicago in 1928. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1928 to
1951, and at University of California-Berkeley from 1952 until 1967 when
he retired. Blumer is considered the father of symbolic interactionism. In
1983, he received the American Sociological Association’s highest recognition,
The Award for a Career of Distinguished Scholarship (American National
Biography, vol. 3, pp 73–76).

***
Of the Influence of Custom and Fashion upon our
Notions of Beauty and Deformity Adam Smith

. . . Fashion is different from custom, or rather is a particular species of it.

That is not the fashion which every body wears, but which those wear who
are of a high rank or character. The graceful, the easy, and commanding
manners of the great, joined to the usual richness and magnificence of their
dress, give a grace to the very form which they happen to bestow upon it. As
long as they continue to use this form, it is connected in our imaginations
with the idea of something that is genteel and magnificent, and though in
itself it should be indifferent, it seems, on account of this relation, to have
something about it that is genteel and magnificent too. As soon as they drop
it, it loses all the grace which it had appeared to possess before, and being
now used only by the inferior ranks of people, seems to have something of
their meanness and awkwardness.
Dress and furniture are allowed by all the world to be entirely under the
dominion of custom and fashion. The influence of those principles, however,
is by no means confined to so narrow a sphere, but extends itself to whatever
is in any respect the object of taste – to music, to poetry, to architecture. The
modes of dress and furniture are continually changing; and that fashion
appearing ridiculous to-day which was admired five years ago, we are experi-
mentally convinced that it owed its vogue chiefly or entirely to custom and
fashion. Clothes and furniture are not made of very durable materials. A
well-fancied coat is done in a twelvemonth, and cannot continue longer to
propagate, as the fashion, that form according to which it was made. The
modes of furniture change less rapidly than those of dress; because furniture
is commonly more durable. In five or six years, however, it generally

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undergoes an entire revolution, and every man in his own time sees the fashion
in this respect change many different ways. The productions of the other
arts are much more lasting, and, when happily imagined, may continue to
propagate the fashion of their make for a much longer time. A well contrived
building may endure many centuries; a beautiful air may be delivered down,
by a sort of tradition, through many successive generations; a well-written
poem may last as long as the world; and all of them continue for ages together
to give the vogue to that particular style, to that particular taste or manner,
according to which each of them was composed. Few men have an oppor-
tunity of seeing in their own times the fashion in any of these arts change
very considerably. Few men have so much experience and acquaintance with
the different modes which have obtained in remote ages and nations, as to
be thoroughly reconciled to them, or to judge with impartiality between them
and what takes place in their own age and country. Few men, therefore, are
willing to allow, that custom or fashion have much influence upon their
judgments concerning what is beautiful, or otherwise, in the productions of
any of those arts; but imagine that all the rules which they think ought to be
observed in each of them are founded upon reason and nature, not upon
habit or prejudice. A very little attention, however, may convince them of
the contrary, and satisfy them that the influence of custom and fashion over
dress and furniture is not more absolute than over architecture, poetry, and
music.
. . . Neither is it only over the productions of the arts that custom and
fashion exert their dominion. They influence our judgments in the same
manner with regard to the beauty of natural objects. What various and
opposite forms are deemed beautiful in different species of things! The
proportions which are admired in one animal are altogether different from
those which are esteemed in another. Every class of things has its own peculiar
conformation, which is approved of, and has a beauty of its own, distinct
from that of every other species. It is upon this account that a learned Jesuit,
Father Buffier, has determined that the beauty of every object consists in
that form and colour, which is most usual among things of that particular
sort to which it belongs. Thus in the human form the beauty of each feature
lies in a certain middle, equally removed from a variety of other forms that
are ugly. A beautiful nose, for example, is one that is neither very long nor
very short, neither very straight nor very crooked, but a sort of middle among
all those extremes, and less different from any one of them than all of them
are from one another. It is the form which Nature seems to have aimed at in
them all, which, however, she deviates from in a great variety of ways, and
very seldom hits exactly; but to which all those deviations still bear a very
strong resemblance. When a number of drawings are made after one pattern,

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though they may all miss it in some respects, yet they will all resemble it
more than they resemble one another; the general character of the pattern
will run through them all; the most singular and odd will be those which are
most wide of it; and though very few will copy it exactly, yet the most accurate
delineations will bear a greater resemblance to the most careless, than the
careless ones will bear to one another. In the same manner, in each species of
creatures, what is most beautiful bears the strongest characters of the general
fabric of the species, and has the strongest resemblance to the greater part of
the individuals with which it is classed. Monsters, on the contrary, or what
is perfectly deformed, are always most singular and odd, and have the least
resemblance to the generality of that species to which they belong. And thus
the beauty of each species, though in one sense the rarest of all things, because
few individuals hit this middle form exactly, yet in another is the most
common, because all the deviations from it resemble it more than they
resemble one another. The most customary form therefore is, in each species
of things, according to him, the most beautiful. And hence it is that a certain
practice and experience in contemplating each species of objects is requisite,
before we can judge of its beauty, or know wherein the middle and most usual
form consists. The nicest judgment concerning the beauty of the human species
will not help us to judge of that of flowers or horses, or any other species of
things.

Source Excerpted from Smith, A. (1966). The theory of moral sentiments.

New York: Augustus M. Kelley. (Original work published 1759)

Biographical note Adam Smith (1723–1790) was an eighteenth-century

Scottish moral philosopher. He became a professor of Logic at Glasgow, and
eventually the Chair of the Moral Philosophy. He left the university in 1764
to tutor the Duke of Buccleuch. He is best known for his book, Wealth of
Nations (1776), where he discussed a variety of issues pertaining to econ-
omics, such as education, commerce, labor, and politics.

***
The Economic Theory of Woman’s Dress
Thorstein B. Veblen

. . . The line of progress during the initial stage of the evolution of apparel
was from the simple concept of adornment of the person by supplementary
accessions from without, to the complex concept of an adornment that should
render the person pleasing, or of an enviable presence, and at the same time
serve to indicate the possession of other virtues than that of a well-favored

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person only. In this latter direction lies what was to evolve into dress. By the
time dress emerged from the primitive efforts of the savage to beautify himself
with gaudy additions to his person, it was already an economic factor of
some importance. The change from a purely aesthetic character (ornament)
to a mixture of the aesthetic and economic took place before the progress
had been achieved from pigments and trinkets to what is commonly under-
stood by apparel. Ornament is not properly an economic category, although
the trinkets which serve the purpose of ornament may also do duty as an
economic factor, and in so far be assimilated to dress. What constitutes dress
an economic fact, properly falling within the scope of economic theory, is its
function as an index of the wealth of its wearer – or, to be more precise, of
its owner, for the wearer and owner are not necessarily the same person. It
will hold with respect to more than one half the values currently recognized
as “dress,” especially that portion with which this paper is immediately
concerned – woman’s dress that the wearer and the owner are different
persons. But while they need not be united in the same person, they must be
organic members of the same economic unit; and the dress is the index of
the wealth of the economic unit which the wearer represents.
Under the patriarchal organization of society, where the social unit was
the man (with his dependents), the dress of the women was an exponent of
the wealth of the man whose chattels they were. In modern society, where
the unit is the household, the woman’s dress sets forth the wealth of the
household to which she belongs. Still, even to-day, in spite of the nominal
and somewhat celebrated demise of the patriarchal idea, there is that about
the dress of women which suggests that the wearer is something in the nature
of a chattel; indeed, the theory of woman’s dress quite plainly involves the
implication that the woman is a chattel. In this respect the dress of women
differs from that of men. With this exception, which is not of first-rate
importance, the essential principles of woman’s dress are not different from
those which govern the dress of men; but even apart from this added char-
acteristic the element of dress is to be seen in a more unhampered development
in the apparel of women. A discussion of the theory of dress in general will
gain in brevity and conciseness by keeping in view the concrete facts of the
highest manifestation of the principles with which it has to deal, and this
highest manifestation of dress is unquestionably seen in the apparel of the
women of the most advanced modern communities.
. . . Woman, primarily, originally because she was herself a pecuniary
possession, has become in a peculiar way the exponent of the pecuniary
strength of her social group; and with the progress of specialization of
functions in the social organism this duty tends to devolve more and more
entirely upon the woman. The best, most advanced, most highly developed

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Figure 8.1 “. . . the dress is the index of the wealth of the economic unit which the
wearer represents . . .” These fashionable and elaborate gowns of 1890
are excellent examples of Veblen’s thesis that dress can be used as the
index of a household’s wealth. Of Parisian design, they are made of silk
with copious trimmings and complex underpinnings in the shelf-bustle
style. Fashion Plate – Les Modes Parisiennes. From Peterson’s
Magazine, May, 1890, Philadelphia: C.J. Peterson.

societies of our time have reached the point in their evolution where it has
(ideally) become the great, peculiar, and almost the sole function of woman
in the social system to put in evidence her economic unit’s ability to pay.
That is to say, woman’s place (according to the ideal scheme of our social
system) has come to be that of a means of conspicuously unproductive
expenditure.
The admissible evidence of the woman’s expensiveness has considerable
range in respect of form and method, but in substance it is always the same.
It may take the form of manners, breeding, and accomplishments that are,
prima facie, impossible to acquire or maintain without such leisure as
bespeaks a considerable and relatively long-continued possession of wealth.
It may also express itself in a peculiar manner of life, on the same grounds
and with much the same purpose. But the method in vogue always and

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everywhere, alone or in conjunction with other methods, is that of dress.

“Dress,” therefore, from the economic point of view, comes pretty near being
synonymous with “display of wasteful expenditure.” . . .
. . . It is not that the wearers or the buyers of these wasteful goods desire
the waste. They desire to make manifest their ability to pay. What is sought
is not the de facto waste, but the appearance of waste. Hence there is a
constant effort on the part of the consumers of these goods to obtain them
at as good a bargain as may be; and hence also a constant effort on the part
of the producers of these goods to lower the cost of their production, and
consequently to lower the price. But as fast as the price of the goods declines
to such a figure that their consumption is no longer prima facie evidence of
a considerable ability to pay, the particular goods in question fall out of
favor, and consumption is diverted to something which more adequately
manifests the wearer’s ability to afford wasteful consumption . . .

Source Excerpted from Veblen, T.B. (1894). The economic theory of

women’s dress. Popular Science Monthly, 46, 198–205.

***
Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture
Thorstein B. Veblen

It will be in place, by way of illustration, to show in some detail how the

economic principles so far set forth apply to everyday facts in some one direc-
tion of the life process. For this purpose no line of consumption affords a
more apt illustration than expenditure on dress. It is especially the rule of
the conspicuous waste of goods that finds expression in dress, although the
other, related principles of pecuniary repute are also exemplified in the same
contrivances. Other methods of putting one’s pecuniary standing in evidence
serve their end effectually, and other methods are in vogue always and
everywhere; but expenditure on dress has this advantage over most other
methods, that our apparel is always in evidence and affords an indication of
our pecuniary standing to all observers at the first glance. It is also true that
admitted expenditure for display is more obviously present, and is, perhaps,
more universally practised in the matter of dress than in any other line of
consumption. No one finds difficulty in assenting to the commonplace that
the greater part of the expenditure incurred by all classes for apparel is
incurred for the sake of a respectable appearance rather than for the protection
of the person. And probably at no other point is the sense of shabbiness so

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keenly felt as it is if we fall short of the standard set by social usage in this
matter of dress. It is true of dress in even a higher degree than of most other
items of consumption, that people will undergo a very considerable degree
of privation in the comforts or the necessaries of life in order to afford what
is considered a decent amount of wasteful consumption; so that it is by no
means an uncommon occurrence, in an inclement climate, for people to go
ill clad in order to appear well dressed. And the commercial value of the
goods used for clothing in any modern community is made up to a much
larger extent of the fashionableness, the reputability of the goods than of the
mechanical service which they render in clothing the person of the wearer.
The need of dress is eminently a “higher” or spiritual need.
This spiritual need of dress is not wholly, nor even chiefly, a naïve propensity
for display of expenditure. The law of conspicuous waste guides consumption
in apparel, as in other things, chiefly at the second remove, by shaping the
canons of taste and decency. In the common run of cases the conscious motive
of the wearer or purchaser of conspicuously wasteful apparel is the need of
conforming to established usage, and of living up to the accredited standard
of taste and reputability. It is not only that one must be guided by the code
of proprieties in dress in order to avoid the mortification that comes of unfav-
orable notice and comment, though that motive in itself counts for a great
deal; but besides that, the requirement of expensiveness is so ingrained into
our habits of thought in matters of dress that any other than expensive apparel
is instinctively odious to us. Without reflection or analysis, we feet that what
is inexpensive is unworthy. “A cheap coat makes a cheap man.” “ Cheap
and nasty” is recognized to hold true in dress with even less mitigation than
in other lines of consumption. On the ground both of taste and of service-
ability, an inexpensive article of apparel is held to be inferior, under the maxim
“cheap and nasty.” We find things beautiful, as well as serviceable, somewhat
in proportion as they are costly. With few and inconsequential exceptions,
we all find a costly hand-wrought article of apparel much preferable, in point
of beauty and of serviceability, to a less expensive imitation of it, however
cleverly the spurious article may imitate the costly original; and what offends
our sensibilities in the spurious article is not that it falls short in form or color,
or, indeed, in visual effect in any way. The offensive object, may be so close
an imitation as to defy any but the closest scrutiny; and yet so soon as the
counterfeit is detected, its aesthetic value, and its commercial value as well,
declines precipitately. Not only that, but it may be asserted with but small
risk of contradiction that the aesthetic value of a detected counterfeit in dress
declines somewhat in the same proportion as the counterfeit is cheaper than
its original. It loses caste aesthetically because it falls to a lower pecuniary
grade.

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But the function of dress as an evidence of ability to pay does not end with
simply showing that the wearer consumes valuable goods in excess of what
is required for physical comfort. Simple conspicuous waste of goods is effec-
tive and gratifying as far as it goes; it is good prima facie evidence of pecuniary
success, and consequently prima facie evidence of social worth. But dress
has subtler and more far-reaching possibilities than this crude, first-hand
evidence of wasteful consumption only. If, in addition to showing that the
wearer can afford to consume freely and uneconomically, it can also be shown
in the same stroke that he or she is not under the necessity of earning a liveli-
hood, the evidence of social worth is enhanced in a very considerable degree.
Our dress, therefore, in order to serve its purpose effectually, should not only
be expensive, but it should also make plain to all observers that the wearer
is not engaged in any kind of productive labor. In the evolutionary process
by which our system of dress has been elaborated into its present admirably
perfect adaptation to its purpose, this subsidiary line of evidence has received
due attention. A detailed examination of what passes in popular apprehension
for elegant apparel will show that it is contrived at every point to convey the
impression that the wearer does not habitually put forth any useful effort. It
goes without saying that no apparel can be considered elegant, or even decent,
if it shows the effect of manual labor on the part of the wearer, in the way of
soil or wear. The pleasing effect of neat and spotless garments is chiefly, if
not altogether, due to their carrying the suggestion of leisure – exemption
from personal contact with industrial processes of any kind. Much of the
charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous
cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick, which so greatly enhance the native
dignity of a gentleman, comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer
cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and
immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance
not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure. It
not only shows that the wearer is able to consume a relatively large value,
but it argues at the same time that he consumes without producing.
The dress of women goes even farther than that of men in the way of
demonstrating the wearer’s abstinence from productive employment. It needs
no argument to enforce the generalization that the more elegant styles of
feminine bonnets go even farther towards making work impossible than does
the man’s high hat. The woman’s shoe adds the so-called French heel to the
evidence of enforced leisure afforded by its polish; because this high heel
obviously makes any, even the simplest and most necessary manual work
extremely difficult. The like is true even in a higher degree of the skirt and
the rest of the drapery which characterizes woman’s dress. The substantial
reason for our tenacious attachment to the skirt is just this: it is expensive and

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it hampers the wearer at every turn and incapacitates her for all useful exertion.
The like is true of the feminine custom of wearing the hair excessively long.
But the woman’s apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man in
the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar
and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything
habitually practised by the men. This feature is the class of contrivances of
which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory,
substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject’s
vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is
true, the corset impairs the personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss
suffered on that score is offset by the gain in reputability which comes of her
visibly increased expensiveness and infirmity. It may broadly be set down
that the womanliness of woman’s apparel resolves itself, in point of substantial
fact, into the more effective hindrance to useful exertion offered by the
garments peculiar to women. This difference between masculine and feminine
apparel is here simply pointed out as a characteristic feature. The ground of
its occurrence will be discussed presently.
So far, then, we have, as the great and dominant norm of dress, the broad
principle of conspicuous waste. Subsidiary to this principle, and as a corollary
under it, we get as a second norm the principle of conspicuous leisure. In dress
construction this norm works out in the shape of divers contrivances going
to show that the wearer does not and, as far as it may conveniently be shown,
cannot engage in productive labor. Beyond these two principles there is a
third of scarcely less constraining force, which will occur to any one who
reflects at all on the subject. Dress must not only be conspicuously expensive
and inconvenient; it must at the same time be up to date. No explanation at
all satisfactory has hitherto been offered of the phenomenon of changing
fashions. The imperative requirement of dressing in the latest accredited
manner, as well as the fact that this accredited fashion constantly changes
from season to season, is sufficiently familiar to every one, but the theory of
this flux and change has not been worked out. We may of course say, with
perfect consistency and truthfulness, that this principle of novelty is another
corollary under the law of conspicuous waste. Obviously, if each garment is
permitted to serve for but a brief term, and if none of last season’s apparel is
carried over and made further use of during the present season, the wasteful
expenditure on dress is greatly increased. This is good as far as it goes, but it
is negative only. Pretty much all that this consideration warrants us in saying
is that the norm of conspicuous waste exercises a controlling surveillance in
all matters of dress, so that any change in the fashions must conform to the
requirement of wastefulness; it leaves unanswered the question as to the
motive for making and accepting a change in the prevailing styles, and it

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also fails to explain why conformity to a given style at a given time is so

imperatively necessary as we know it to be . . .

Source Excerpted from Veblen, T.B. (1899). The theory of the leisure class.
New York: Macmillan.

Biographical note Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857–1929) was an economist

and social scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1884, and taught at
the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and The New School for Social
Research. His theory of the leisure class reflects his fundamental views. Veblen
believed that economics should be studied as an aspect of culture.

***

A Psychological Analysis of Fashion Motivation

Estelle de Young Barr

Overview of the General Problem

The psychology of choice is one of the most fundamental problems in applied

social psychology. It is essentially the study of motivation, of attitudes and
desires functioning as “coercive” and directive energies leading to acceptance-
rejection responses.
It is the purpose of this investigation to study the practical problems of
choice in the selection of women’s clothes. For the sake of concreteness and
comparability of data only the selection of the “daytime frock,” a garment
of general utility, is considered. This study is concerned with the complex
of numerous varied factors in such selection, their relative potencies, their
interrelationships and their conflicting and congruent effects on the resultant
activity of choice.
. . . The choice of a dress is a major social activity. A study of this selective
activity involves not only a consideration of the cultural pattern but of the
individual as an element in the pattern. It involves also a consideration of
the individual’s awareness of the self as an entity, a Gestalt, within the total
configuration.
The problem is concerned with such questions as: To what extent does the
awareness of self involve self-analysis? How cognizant is the individual of
the qualities and characteristics of the physical I and the I that is called
personality? If self-analysis leads to awareness of the qualities that contribute

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to the total Gestalt, the prevalent mode determines the standard of beauty
by which these qualities are judged acceptable or unacceptable. Clothes
attitudes may be analyzed down to awareness of self, self-analysis, recognition
of defects and the creation of an “ideal” self. Clothes are not only part of
the self, but they are the means for expressing those traits which seem
desirable. They are at once the instrument of self-expression and of conformity
to an ideal. If a woman chooses clothes to present a certain picture of herself,
the choice depends not only on a knowledge of self, but also on the perception
of certain basic elements of design of the garment. Thus the desire for
conformity, desire for self-expression and aesthetic preferences and judgements
exert their influences on the selection of the dress, which is both an end and
a means . . .
Fashion is sometimes compared to or contrasted with “custom” which, of
course, has greater stability as well as wider scope. In general, fashion is
defined as the “mode” in choices within a group; mode in a statistical sense.
But, besides its connotations of conformity, popularity, prevalence and
majority opinion, it is also recognized as being characterized by change often
described as “cyclic,” but not necessarily associated with progress. The modal
elements might be considered centripetal and the cyclic elements centrifugal
in their influences.
Suggestibility, imitativeness, desire to conform, desire for companionship
and fear of social disapproval are some of the individual tendencies most
often mentioned to account for this group modality in choices. Desire for
the new, progress, desire for economic and social prestige and desire for
leadership and self-assertion are some of the urges usually associated with
change in fashion. Commercial interests and fashion experts are included
among the factors which make for style change and style adoption.

Relative Importance of Group Attitudes

Of the fundamental attitudes involved in the psychology of choice of dress,

the following are found to be among the more significant:

1. Desire to conform is the most diffuse of the desires measured; is more

effective as a motive in determining the time of buying than desire for
economy, and varies in intensity with the technical or professional interest
of the group.
2. Desire for comfort with respect to temperature and tactual sensations is
very important.
3. Modesty, though a significant factor, is not a very important motive for
resisting a new fashion (brassiere bathing suit). Desire for comfort

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(freedom of movement), aesthetic standards, awareness of physical style

defects, desire for conformity, are other factors creating resistance.
4. Desire for economy is very widespread as an attitude but as a motive in
determining time of buying is less effective than the desire to conform.
5. The aesthetic impulse is very important in the choice of a dress and
functions in conjunction with the desire to be beautiful and the desire
for conformity.

Of the constellation of fundamental attitudes related to the desire for self-

expression:

1. Awareness of the physical self is very important in the choice of clothes.

2. Desire to be beautiful is important and operates in conjunction with the
desire to conform.
3. The expression of different personality traits through the choice of a
dress is of variable importance:
Desire to express “personality” is of more than moderate importance.
Desire to appear distinctive is of moderate importance.
Desire to appear dignified or youthful is of barely moderate importance.
Desire to appear competent is of less than moderate importance.
Desire to appear prosperous is of very little importance.

The most important factor determining the place of purchase is direct

experience or experimental investigation rather than advertisements or
recommendation.
Sources of style knowledge are of variable importance to the different
groups. Reading sources are on the average, among the more important; social
sources are among the less important.
Fashion knowledge is approximately commensurate with reading habits
and technical interest in fashion.

Conclusions

. . . The following conclusions are drawn from the results of this investigation:
The really fundamental attitudes in the choice of clothes – those associated
with the desire to conform, desire for comfort, desire for economy, the artistic
impulse, and with self expression through sex and femininity – occur so
positively and so widely diffused as to seem to be “universal.” They cut across
differences in educational backgrounds, in economic status, in reading habits,
in amount of technical fashion knowledge and in professional interest in
fashion.

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Most differences in attitudes involve differences in the intensity of the desire

to be in fashion and in the more specific and practical expression of the
fundamental attitudes.
Awareness of the physical Gestalt and a definite desire to attain to ideals
of slenderness and tallness, particularly by those who deviate most from the
standards of beauty set by fashion, are keen. Attitudes are naturally very
closely interwoven and interact functionally on each other. The choice of
particular design elements in a dress may at once express the individual’s
ideas of what is beautiful, the desire to conform to the prevailing mode and
the desire to be beautiful through creating the illusion of beauty of form and
through enhancing personal coloring with clothes colors.
The desire to be beautiful is evidenced by the choice of design elements of
dress effective in creating the illusion of beauty of form and by the choice of
colors to enhance the tones of the physical self.
The desire to express personality is very widely diffused, although such
individual personality characteristics as distinctiveness, youthfulness and
dignity seem to be of barely moderate importance as objectives in the choice
of a dress. Expression of the economic or social traits – the desire to appear
competent or affluent – seems to be definitely negative as motivating factors.
The attitudes involved in the expression of the self do not differ significantly
as between different groups.
An index of the importance which the choice of a dress assumes in the
mind of the consumer is the amount of time and effort expended in window-
shopping and shopping around, which more often than advertisements or
recommendation directly determine the place where to buy.
Advertising seems to be more potent as a source of fashion ideas than as a
direct stimulus to buying. Discrepancies in advertising practice and consumer
attitudes may account in part, though not entirely, for this loss in effectiveness.

Source Excerpted from Barr, E. (1934). A psychological analysis of fashion

motivation. Archives of Psychology, 26, 1–100.

Biographical note Estelle de Young Barr (1893–1979) was a psychologist

who received her academic training at Barnard College, University of Pitts-
burgh, New School for Social Workers in New York City, and Columbia
University, where she received her doctorate. She worked in several clinical
settings as a psychologist.

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 Chronological Annotated Bibliography

Chronological Annotated
Bibliography (1575–1940)
Those entries marked with an asterisk (*) are excerpted readings included in
the text. All of the readings have been annotated with the exception of those
that are presented in their entirety.

*1575. de Montaigne, M. (1927). The essays of Montaigne. (Vol. 1). London: Oxford
University Press. (Original work published 1575)
The reading is presented in its entirety.

*1759. Smith, A. (1966). The theory of moral sentiments. New York: Augustus M.
Kelley. (Original work published 1759)

In Smith’s theory, the principles of custom and fashion both control human judgments
of beauty. As social behaviors, fashion and custom are important to Smith’s theory
in which morality is a matter of social interaction. Custom establishes the general
rules, and fashion gives grace and character to social conduct and good taste. As
discussed in the excerpt, ideas of fashion as continuous rapid change apply to such
objects of taste as dress, furniture, music, poetry, and architecture.

*1818. Hazlitt, W. (1818). On fashion. The Edinburgh Magazine.

Hazlitt in this article notes the power of fashion. As fashion spreads to the masses it
lessens its influence. Fashion, according to Hazlitt begins and ends in two things:
“singularity and vulgarity . . . first setting up the style and then disowning it.” Hazlet
remarks on the communicative power of dress through his comment that “dress is
the great secret of address” (1818, p. 55).

1833. Carlyle, T. (1908). Sartor resartus. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. (Original
work published 1833)
In this book Carlyle poses as an editor preparing a collection of material for
publication. The philosophy of clothes operates as an elaborate metaphor allowing
Carlyle to develop his philosophy about man’s place in the universe.

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*1856. Fry, M.E. (1856). Let us have a national costume. The Ladies Repository,
16, 735–738.
Fry is calling for dress reform. She is advocating a national costume, a style that
reflects U.S. values and identity rather than importing styles from other countries.

*1872. Darwin, G.H. (1872). Development in dress. Macmillan’s Magazine, 26, 410–
416.

Darwin is applying evolutionary theory to explain changes in styles of clothing. He

contends that forms of clothing are evolving to better styles and clothing that ceases
to have a function is handed down in atrophied conditions.

1877. Blanc, C. (1877). Art in ornament and dress. New York: Scriber, Wilfred-
Armstrong.
The principles of repetition, alternation, progression, symmetry, and confusion found
in nature have been and will continue to serve as the basis for dressing the body.

*1881. Flower, W.H. (1881). Fashion in deformity. London: Macmillan.

Flower defines the word deformity and gives his view on the evolution and adoption
of clothing styles. The motive behind the prevailing fashions is the need not to appear
singular. He notes that the most civilized peoples practice some of the most absurd
fashions. He offers suggestions for improvements on dress styles.

*1885. Ballin, A.S. (1885). The science of dress in theory and practice. London:
Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.
Ballin discusses dress and dress reform in relation to health. Her book is a treatise
on the unhealthy effects of fabrics, colors and dyes, the weight of garments, and
restrictive undergarments on the bodies of women and children. Ballin proposes her
system as a science of dress based on a classic Greek ideal of health and beauty. Her
ultimate goal is to make clothing both healthy and fashionable so that her system
will find success.

*1887. Lotze, R.H. (1887). Microcosmos: An essay concerning man and his relation
to the world. Edinburgh: T.T. Clark.
Lotze uses human satisfaction in dress and clothing as a means to present his
philosophical ideas and work on the theory of knowledge and reality. According to
Lotze, human beings perceive and learn about the world and the universe on a physical
level, through their bodies and clothing. Clothing gives sensations and feelings of
existence, and is used to convey impressions and personality and both embody and
modify the world outside the human body.

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1892. Russell, F.E. (1892). A brief survey of American dress reform movement of
the past with views of representative women. The Arena, 6(33), 325–339.
Russell reflects on several articles that address issues relating to women’s dress
including dress reform from the perspective both of women’s health and of improving
the condition of women.

1893. Foley, C.A. (1893). Fashion. Economic Journal, 3, 458–474.

Foley notes in her discussion of fashion that fashion results from conformity in
behavior. She contends that when customs are stable change in dress is slower.

*1894. Veblen, T.B. (1894). The economic theory of women’s dress. Popular Science
Monthly, 46, 198–205.

Veblen in this reading presents his view of the purpose of dress. According to Veblen
people dress they way they do for comfort (which in his view is an afterthought) and
for economic reasons. Veblen focuses his presentation on the economic reasons. The
excerpt provides his main arguments.

*1895. Bloomer, A. (1975). In Dexter C. Bloomer, The life and writings of Amelia
Bloomer. New York: Shocken Books. (Original work published 1895)
This excerpt is drawn from the book written after her death by Amelia Bloomer’s
husband. In addition to biographical information and chapters about her travels
and relationships with women’s suffrage contemporaries, Dexter Bloomer included
generous excerpts from Bloomer’s own writings and commentaries about Bloomer
and her work written by her contemporaries.

*1896. Spencer, H. (1924). The principles of sociology. New York and London:
Appleton. (Original work published 1896)
Spencer views clothing as a method of communication. Clothing is also intrinsically
imitative and serves to obliterate marks of class distinction.

*1898. Hall, G.S. (1898). Some aspects of the early sense of self. American Journal
of Psychology, 9, 351–395.
Hall writes about the functions of clothing: protection, ornamentation, and Lotzean
self-feeling. He examines clothing in relationship to self and self-development. The
discussion outlines what Hall believes to be the evolution of the development of self-
consciousness. The excerpt is taken from a larger discussion of what Hall believes is
the progression that children follow in developing an awareness of what is a part of
their body and what aspects of their bodies they control and what is outside of
bodily self. The excerpt focuses on the role that dress plays in the development of
self.

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1899. Thomas, W.I. (1899). The psychology of modesty and clothing. American
Journal of Sociology, 5, 246–262.
Thomas is examining the relationships between modesty and clothing. The focus of
his thesis in this article is that modesty comes about as a result of the habit of wearing
clothing.

*1899. Veblen, T.B. (1899). The theory of the leisure class. New York: Macmillan
Company.

Veblen provides definitions to distinguish between the terms clothing and dress. He
contends that dress is an indicator of social status and women’s dress in particular,
reflects not her own social status but those of her family namely, her husband’s or
father’s. His view is that dress reflects conspicuous waste.

*1904. Simmel, G. (1904). Fashion. International Quarterly, 10, 130–155.

Simmel discusses one of the theories of fashion diffusion – the trickle-down theory.
He views fashion as a process of innovation followed by emulation. The process
reflects an attempt at social equalization but because change never ends, fashion
segregates. Simmel offers explanations for why ugly items become fashions, why
some individuals do not participate in fashion, and under what conditions fashion
actually exists. The excerpt focuses on his explanation for fashion change.

*1906. Flaccus, L.W. (1906). Remarks on the psychology of clothes. The Pedagogical
Seminary, 13, 61–83.

Flaccus is using the data gathered in research by G. Stanley Hall to make some
observations on the psychology of clothing. The data were gathered from girls enrolled
in a normal school in the state of New York. He divided the participants responses
into three groups: Minor and incidental matters, changes of self-feeling, and effects
of the self as a social reflex phenomenon. Presented in the excerpt are his opening
remarks and concluding statements as well as recommendations for needed research
in the area.

1907. Webb, W.M. (1907). The heritage of dress. London: E.G. Richards.

Webb describes his book as “a popular contribution to the natural history of man”
(1907, p. ix). The writing focuses on the application of the principles of evolution to
clothing. His presentation focuses on several examples of clothing. He also addresses
body modifications and dress reform.

*1908. Thomas, W.I. (1908). The psychology of women’s dress. The American
Magazine, 67, 66–72.

Thomas in this reading is addressing motives for dress as well as outlining the role of
dress in society. He explains for the reader why men’s dress has become somber while
women’s dress has increased in ornamentation. His main thesis is presented in the
excerpt.

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*1912. Crawley, A.E. (1912). Dress. Encyclopedia of religion and ethics (Vol. 5, pp.
40–72). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Crawley defines dress as a second skin, as both an extension of the passive area of a
person and of personality. He notes that the main problem in studying the origins of
and motives for wearing clothes is not the invention of dress but the process of
invention. Although analyzed as an evolutionary question, Crawley says that dress
seems to have come into use all of a piece. He looks at how dress functions in
numerous cultural settings, how dress changes as social roles change, and how dress
reflects those changes.

1913. Clerget, P. (1913). The economic and social role of fashion. Smithsonian
Institution Report, 755–765.

Clerget in his treatment of the economic and social role of fashion notes that fashion
is a social custom that is transmitted by imitation or by tradition. He also addresses
the cyclic nature of fashion and the issue of conspicuous consumption.

1915. Freud, S. (1943). Symbolism in dreams [from lectures in Vienna 1915–1917].

In S. Freud and J. Riviere (trans), General introduction to psychoanalysis (pp. 133–
145). Garden City and New York: Garden City Publishing Co. (Original work
published 1920)
Freud’s work in this volume is drawn from lectures prepared for presentations to the
general public, not to psychology students or scientific colleagues. He describes
clothing symbolism as it is used in dream interpretation for mentally disturbed
patients. In Freud’s work, the human body is symbolized as a house, and clothes or
uniforms symbolize nakedness. Various clothing symbols, such as hats and cloaks,
represent sexual symbols.

*1916. Bliss, S.H. (1916). The significance of clothes. American Journal of Psych-
ology, 27, 217–226.

In this discussion Bliss attempts to answer the question of why humans wear clothes.
Why did humans feel a need to add to what nature provided? She refutes several of
the contemporary theories and presents her own views. She contends that humans
got dressed due to feelings of incompleteness. Humans are dissatisfied with our bodies
as they are and clothing in its origin is at attempt to remedy the situation. Her view
is evolutionary in nature. We present in this excerpt her main arguments.

*1918. Dearborn, G.V.N. (1918). The psychology of clothing. The Psychological

Monographs, 26, 1–72.

Dearborn reflects on both the physiological and the applied psychological aspects of
dress. He is attempting to locate scientific laws that will be applicable to dressing the
body. He examines the relationship between clothing and the skin. He views clothing
as intervening between the body and the larger environment as well as impacting

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humans spiritually. In the reading he addresses the relationships of clothing to the

skin, reasons for the development of clothes, and the psychology of clothing including
presenting some early ideas on the importance of dress for social advancement. The
excerpt presents his ideas on the physiologic aspects of clothing.

1919. Kroeber, A.L. (1919). On the principle of order in civilization as exemplified

by changes of fashion. The American Anthropologist, 21, 235–263.

Kroeber, in order to better understand civilization, in this article is looking for the
principles that guide fashion. His approach is to measure illustrations of women’s
dress. He used fashion plates that were idealized depictions of women’s clothing styles.

1920. Parsons, F.A. (1920). The psychology of dress. Garden City and New York:
Doubleday, Page, and Company.

The book presents a history of France, England, Italy, and the United States from
the twelfth century to the present, illustrated through the lives of the rulers, their
dress, and housing. Parsons outlines his views on clothing, including the notion that
clothing was the first receptacle of art, the use of clothing to attract attention, and
communication of social status. He contends that the personal expression through
clothing by some is only possible through the oppression of others. He also notes
that although sumptuary laws are written, people reject them, and it is difficult, if
not impossible, to regulate human display.

1922. Malinowski, B. (1961). Argonauts of the western Pacific. London. (Original

work published in 1922)

In this reading Malinowski outlines what to consider in a functional analysis of a

culture. He notes that the physical world of the individual must be taken into account
along with the body of tools and commodities produced. He presents what he views
as the biological and derived needs of humans and how humans meet these needs.
He notes that humans develop dress in response to a need for bodily comforts.

*1922. Radcliffe-Brown, Sir A.R. (1922). The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Radcliffe-Brown’s work presented in the book is based on his fieldwork with the
Andaman Islanders near the Bay of Bengal, India. He is exploring, in general, the
meaning of personal ornament. According to Radcliffe-Brown, our sense of self
attaches to our clothing and ornament, and can therefore transfer sensations to us
symbolically. Amulets used for protection from evil are one example of this. He
proposes two motives for the use of personal ornament – desires for protection and
for display.

1924. Bogardus, E.S. (1924). Social psychology of fads. Journal of Applied Sociology,
8, 239–243.

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Bogardus provides an analysis of fads that he conducted over a 10-year period. He

notes that fads are located in superficial aspects of life and that the life of a fad is
generally about 2 to 3 months but definitely not lasting more than one year. Fads
exist in several aspects of life.

1924. Heard, G. (1924). Narcissus: An anatomy of clothes. London: Kegan Paul

Trench Trubner.

Heard uses a theory labeled projected evolution. The theory states that human kind
has evolved to a point where humans do not change but through their intelligence
they continue the evolutionary procession in architecture and dress.

*1926. Morton, G.M. (1926). Psychology of dress. Journal of Home Economics,

18, 484–486.

Morton reflects on the psychological value of clothing. The reading is presented in

its entirety.

1927. Sanborn, H.C. (1927). The function of clothing and of bodily adornment.
The American Journal of Psychology, 38(1), 1–20.

Sanborn in this reading shares his views on origins of clothing. He discusses several
perspectives including dress as a response to a need to attract sexual attention, as a
need for modesty, as protection from the physical environment, and as a need for
aesthetic expression.

*1928. Dunlap, K. (1928). The development and function of clothing. Journal of

General Psychology, 1, 64–78.
Dunlap in this reading points out what are the four important theories concerning
the origin of clothing. He discusses each with a view to determining their relevance
to contemporary behavior. He then proceeds to a discussion of why clothing persists
if not for reasons of health, modesty, and the like. The excerpt presents the main
components of Dunlap’s view on the function of clothing for both men and women.

1928. Nystrom, P. (1928). Economics of fashion. New York: Ronald Press.

Nystrom presents definitions of key terms including style and fashion. He discusses
factors that influence fashion change and traces the origins and developments of
“modern” fashion in apparel, home furnishings, and industrial innovation.

1929. Flügel, J.C. (1929). Clothes symbolism and clothes ambivalence. International
Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 10, 205–217.
Flügel is influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud. He examines the conscious and
unconscious use of clothing as well as symbolic aspects of various items of clothing.
Flügel presents three classes of symbols: phallic, vaginal, and uterine. His unconscious
motives for clothing include modesty, protection, and display.

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1929. Hiler, H. (1929). From nudity to raiment. London: W. and G. Foyle.

Hiler’s book provides an introduction to the history of dress based on almost 1,000
collected references to clothing and adornment in the literature of numerous
disciplines. His stated purpose was to place costume in its proper position among
the arts. He emphasizes the long prehistory of dress prior to the Egyptian civilization.
Hiler proposed the study of costume as an indication of the stages of civilization.

*1929. Hurlock, E.B. (1929). Motivation in fashion. Archives of Psychology, 17(3),

5–71.

Hurlock does an investigation of the motives involved in clothing selection. She

collects data over a period of several years and tests other writers’ hypotheses about
why people wear what they wear. Hurlock presents an overview of contemporary
views on fashion motivations, the development of her questionnaire, and the results
of her analysis.

1929. Hurlock, E.B. (1929). The psychology of dress. New York: Ronald Press.
Hurlock’s book presents an expanded background and historical analysis for her
study on motivation. She defines the fashion impulse as a democratic social force,
and postulates that war, commercial interests, cross-cultural contact, and technology
all contribute to the speed of change. In general, fashion can’t be predicted, but
styles are recycled approximately every 100 years. Hurlock discusses fashion as a
mirror of the period, and states that general trends of thought and feeling are best
shown in dress.

1930. Flügel, J.C. (1930). On the mental attitude to present-day clothes. British
Journal of Medical Psychology, 2(9), 97–149.

Flügel reports on research he conducted with men and women that examined physical
and social aspects of clothing. In this work Flügel distinguishes different types of
persons: prudish, protected, supported, skin and muscle eroticism, and self-satisfied.

1931. Dooley, W.H. (1931). Clothing and style. New York: D.C. Heath.

Dooley addresses a variety of topics including apparel production, care, history,

aesthetics, and psychology. He offers a detailed view with the underlying intention
that people be knowledgeable about clothing so they select clothing that is appropriate
for them.

*1931. Benedict, R. (1931). Dress. Encyclopedia of the social sciences (Vol. 5, 235–
237). New York: Macmillan.
Benedict is defining the concept of dress. This reading is presented in its entirety.

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*1931. Sapir, E. (1931). Fashion. Encyclopedia of the social sciences (Vol. 6, 139–
144). New York: Macmillan.
Sapir attempts to define the concept of fashion. He begins by differentiating the concept
fashion from other related terms. He then proceeds to address what fashion is and
how it functions in society. The excerpt focuses on his ideas about fashion change.

1931. Vincent, J.M. (1931). Sumptuary legislation. Encyclopedia of the social sciences
(Vol. 14, 464–466). New York: Macmillan.
Vincent addresses sumptuary legislation explaining their purpose and indicating that
these laws are difficult to enforce. He explains the difference between sumptuary
laws and “modern” tariffs, suggesting that the motives behind each are different.

1932. Flügel, J.C. (1932). The psychology of clothes. London: Hogarth.

Flügel outlines for the reader his view of the purposes of clothing: decoration, modesty,
and protection. Flügel also introduces two principle types of development in clothing:
modish and fixed, suggesting that the first is faster in evolutionary change than the
latter.

1932. Harnik, E.J. (1932). Pleasure in disguise: The need for decoration and the
sense of beauty. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1, 216–264.

Harnik takes a case-study approach to determine the origins of what he labels sexual
peculiarities. His argument focuses on the castration complex and its relationship to
fetishism and transvestism. He offers explanations for several aspects of dressing the
body including tattooing.

*1934. Barr, E. de Young. (1934). A psychological analysis of fashion motivation.

Archives of Psychology, 26, 1–100.

The excerpt comes from Barr’s Ph.D. dissertation in which she studied the practical
problems of choice in the selection of women’s clothes. Barr looked at fashion
motivation from the consumer’s point of view, measuring the importance of attitudes,
the effectiveness of attitudes as motives in clothing choice, and the relationship
between these two. Her goal was to develop a picture of fashion as a complex dynamic
system.

1937. Elliot, H. (1937). Fashions in art. New York: Appleton-Century.

Elliot provides a broad overview of types of art focusing on fine art and architecture.
Although dress is mentioned at times, it is not a focus of this work. However, his
ideas can be applied to dress including his notion that in order to understand art one
needs to be aware of the context and the prevalent ideas of the time.

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*1937. Laver, J. (1937). Taste and fashion: From the French revolution until today.
London: G.G. Harrap.
With 1789 as starting point, Laver provides a chronological background of fashion
in the first half of his book, discussing influences and sociological trends for changes
in fashions and tastes. In the last chapter he develops his theory on fashion change
and its connection to changes in taste in interiors and architecture. According to
Laver, clothes serve two purposes – self-assertion and self-protection. The clothing
of each period in history reflects the zeitgeist of that period.

*1937. Young, A.B. (1937). Recurring cycles of fashion. New York: Harper and
Brothers.
Young’s book is a statistical study of trends in women’s fashions. According to Young,
changes in women’s fashion follow fixed and predictable patterns. By tracing historical
evidence in fashion plates and magazines, she proposes a series of three well-defined
and recurring cycles in skirt silhouettes of 38 to 40 years each. Young proposes that
the psychological benefits of fashion change are to satisfy such needs as social position
and recognition, and women’s competition for male sexual attraction.

1938. Harms, E. (1938). The psychology of clothes. American Journal of Sociology,

44, 239–250.
Harms discusses several motives for dressing the body. He discusses modesty,
protection, and adornment as fundamental motives. His argument is that while these
motives offer some explanation, the fundamental motivation is the environment.
Although the purpose of clothing is determined by environmental conditions, its
form is determined by human characteristics and mental traits.

1939. Hawes, E. (1939). Fashion is spinach. New York: Random House.

Hawes outlines the apparel industry in Paris from her position as a copyist. She
notes the French governmental support of the industry and notes that the United
States does not support the apparel industry in the same way. She reflects on the
type and amount of difficulties she experiences with apparel manufacturers in the
United States.

1938. Meiklejohn, H.E. (1938). Dresses – The impact of fashion on a business. In

W.H. Hamilton (Ed.), Price and price policies (pp. 299-393). New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Meiklejohn is addressing the question of value. How is the value of an object
determined? As she answers her question she takes into account the impact of
production on pricing and the impact of fashion. She calls for reform of the fashion
industry.

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*1939. Blumer, H. (1939). Fashion movements. In Robert Ezra Park (Ed.), From
collective behavior: An outline of the principles of sociology (pp. 275-277). New
York: Barnes and Noble.
The excerpt is taken from a larger chapter on social movements in Blumer’s book. It
is presented in its entirety.

*1939. Hiler, H. & Hiler, M. (1939). Bibliography of costume. New York: H.W.
Wilson.
This extensive bibliography was drawn from a total of over 8400 works on dress,
jewelry, and body modifications. It has an international scope and was written in a
dictionary catalog format. In the preface and introduction, the authors discuss the
origins of and motives for wearing clothing, and present the psychological, social,
and ideological implications of dress.

1940. Crawford, M.D.C. (1940). Philosophy in clothing. New York: Brooklyn

Museum.
This publication was written as a catalog for an exhibition of historic dress at the
Brooklyn Museum. A major reason for the exhibition and Crawford’s contribution
was to establish a more fruitful relationship between the museum collection and the
apparel industry. Crawford addresses the impact of the history of technology on the
fashion industry and important American contributions such as the invention of the
sewing machine.

1940. Richardson, J. & Kroeber, A.L. (1940). Three centuries of women’s dress
fashions. Anthropological Records, 5.
Richardson and Kroeber report on their quantitative research designed to explain
style trends. They build upon the work of Kroeber (1919) and use data covering
332 years. They present their data in both tables and graphs.

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 Index
adolescence 111 circulation 57
development 112 class distinction 101, 105
adornment 12, 19, 20, 94 claustraphobias 44
aesthetics 18, 19, 40, 71, 130 clothing
impulse 138 as artificial skin 38
sense, 103 as communication, 1, 10, 76
value, 134 as protection, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 19, 28, 29,
amulets 31 42, 63, 65, 66, 47,
anthropomorphic elements 106 origins, 31, 34, 93, 115
appearance 110 philosophy 8, 18, 20
management, 69, 71 protection hypothesis 24, 26
personal 106 second skin 23
applied psychology of clothing 11, 12, 37, selection 93
38, collective behavior 91, 94, 136
attitude 137, 138, 139 collective unconscious 9
comfort 16, 38, 62, 138
Ballin, A. 13, 14 conformity 136, 137 , 138
Barr, E. De Young 95, 136 consciousness 42
beauty 63, 64 body 12, 86
ideal 94 clothes 12, 47, 86
standard 13 somatic 43
Benedict, R. 10 conspicuous waste, 70, 81 135
Bergson, H. 9, 19 consumer behavior 91
Bliss, S.H. 8, 9, 12 consumption
Bloomer, A. 13 conspicuous 133
Blumer, H. 94 wasteful 133
body corporeal existence 46
action 39 corseting 13
concealment 24 costume 11, 31
modification 1, 13, 92 bloomer 13, 14, 61
painting 27, 28 national 70, 77
supplements 13, 21 sanitary 59
temperature 39 couturier 116
thinness 64 Crawley, A. 8, 9, 10, 12 35,
culture
Carlyle, T. 19 pecuniary 132
caste 36, 64 custom 8, 15, 137
castration fear 35 ceremonial 29

153
 Index

Darwin, C. 2, 3., 9, 18, 91 psychological 27

Darwin, G. 3, 91 social 7, 14, 21, 23, 95
Dearborn , G. 11, 12, 110 theory 91
deformity 51, 56 exhibitionism 115
democracy 70 exhibitionist 31
descent of man 98
disease 57 fad 64
dress fashion
as artificial covering 22 as change, 69, 91, 92, 93, 109, 113, 114,
as communication 95 116, 119 , 123
as concealment 65 concept, 93
as decoration 9, 10, 18, 32, 103 cyclic 137
as diffusion 104 defining, 2
as extending the body’s capabilities 9, as imitation, 69, 92, 137
10 imitation, 51, 73
as geographically differentiated, 32 innovation 73, 92
as habit 63 industry, 70
as modification 94 knowledge 138, 139
as self expression 137 leadership, 70
as temporally differentiated, 32 meaning, 2
as unhealthful 33 motivation, 112, 136, 104, 105, 106,
body 7 107, 109, 111, 139
ceremonial 92 origin, 51
court 92 selection 91,
definition 1 singularity 73
development 97, 98 system, 69,
economic expression, 95 vulgarity, 73
marking 10 first impressions, 110
morality 95 Flaccus, L. 69, 71, 110
origins and motives 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 18, Flower, W. H. 13, 14
21, 27 Freud, S. 35
rational 47 Fry, M. 69, 70, 77
reform 7, 13, 14, 65
ritual 92 gestalt, 136, 139
sexual 26 golden lily 53
survivals, 99
Dunlap, K. 14 , 31 Hall, G. S. 10, 12, 71, 110
Durkheim, E. 39 Haraucourt, E. 35
Hazlitt, W. 69, 74, 77
ego 45 health 7, 13, 14, 17, 57, 62, 63, 64
Eicher, J. B. 1 heraldic display 32, 36
Ellis, H. 35 Hiler, H. 11
erogenous zones 93 Hiler, M. 11
evolution 18, 23, 92, 94, 97 Hood, T. 39
creative 9 human ecological approach 13
human 22 expression, 107
of dress 25 Hurlock, E. 92
process 134 hygiene 51, 66

154
 Index

identity 14, 69, 70 physiological factors 85

immodest 39 physiological psychology of clothing 11, 37,
impulse 38, 39
clothing 19 pigmentation 22
decorative 23, 25 pleasure 42
erotic 32 psychical life 85
instinct 41 polity 16
human 31 positivistic 3
interpretative 3 power, 29, 69, 70
psychology of clothes, 71
Jenson, J. 35 prestige 36
Jung, C. 9
Radcliffe–Brown, A. 10, 11
laws 23 religion 16
manmade 8, 11, 12, 16 Roach-Higgins, M.E. 1
mechanical 23
natural 8 sanitarian 13
Laver, J. 93 Santayana 34
Lotze, R. H. 10, 12, 46, 47 Sapir, E. 93
satisfaction-efficiency ratio 37
magic, 31 scarification 27, 28
Main, H. 82 science
mass production 33 of clothes 37
material justification, 106 of dress 13
mental survivals 20 self 12, 48
menton 2 self-analysis, 137
Miller, E. S. 59 self-confidence, 111
modesty 9, 11, 14, 24, 27, 30, 42, 63, 115 self-consciousness 12, 13, 27, 45 , 47
false 24 self-display 32,
motive 138 self-decoration 30
Montaigne, M. 2, 8, 9, 11, 35 self-expression, 137, 138
morality 63 self-feeling 12, 23, 46, 47
Morton, G. 69, 71, 87 self, ideal 137
mutilation 20 self, libidinal 113
self, physical 7, 47
national dress system 13 self, sense of 27
natural selection 91, 99 sentient soul 40
nudity 30 sexual
attractiveness 27, 64, 70
ornament 10, 14, 20, 19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 29, competition 14, 63, 65, 66
47, 70, 92 , 102 , 104, 130 decoration 22
ornamentation 32, 42 modesty 65, 66
ornamentation hypothesis 24 morality 65, 66
protection 26
pecuniary possession 95 selection 14, 63, 93
personality, 69, 71, 88 , 139 sexuality 93
trait, 138 shame 31
physiological cues 86 Simmel, G. 92 107

155
 Index

skin 39, 40, 43, 44, 56, 57, 58 theory

garment, 101 amuletic 35
dress, 101 castration 36
Smith, A. 94 esthetic 35
social fashion change, 93
currency 10 mosaic 35
darwinism 2, 3, 7, 8, 9 possession 35
class 92, 94 protection, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32 , 115
display 9, 10 sexual attraction 10, 35
life 29 taboo 35
process 105 totemistic 35
system 131 trickle-down 92
value 28 Thomas, W. I. 69, 70, 81,
soul 44, 45 trophies 32,35
Spencer, H. 10 12 51, 92, 100, 104 turkish trousers 61
Stanton, E. C. 61
status 14, 32, 92 uniforms 92
nakedness 101
Steele, V. 91 value
Stone, L. 62 compensatory, 109
style Veblen, T. 70, 81, 95, 131, 132, 136
adoption, 137 theory, 109
change 137
suffragist 13 wardrobe consultant 71
suggestibilty 137 wool 56, 57
symbol woolen 58, 59
fertility 30 women’s rights 13
suffrage 62
tattooing 13
temperance 62 Young, A. B. 94

156