Dress Codes, a history of fashion laws from the Tudors to the CROWN Act, reviewed.

"Dress Codes traces nearly 600 years of fashion law and social norms, detailing how style and attempts to control it have shaped history. Perhaps nowhere is the boundary between the personal and the political, the individual and the state, more blurred than in the clothes that we put on our bodies. Ford argues persuasively that fashion as we know it is largely the result of the Enlightenment-era school of thought leading to the concept of the modern individual “with personalities that transcend our social status, occupation and family heritage.” Individualism separated the symbolism of clothing from its tradition-bound roots: If a merchant’s wife could afford a crown, if a slave wore the same dress as an antebellum belle, or if a servant like Walweyn donned “monstrously extravagant” trunk hose usually reserved for the nobility—then the original meaning of the garment was undermined and transformed. “Fashion presented a distinctive opportunity because it alone could transform the body itself into a form of political persuasion,” Ford writes...."