The Fashion Police
Sumptuary Laws Encouraged Savings, but Reinforced Class Divisions

By Cynthia Crossen
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

The rich are very rich in America these days, and even the merely affluent can afford silk underwear and diamond dog collars. In earlier eras, the reaction to such conspicuous consumption might have been sumptuary laws.

Out of favor for the past few centuries, such laws were once considered not only desirable but actually divine. The laws, which were enacted in Europe and Asia from ancient times through the 18th century, prohibited common people from wearing flashy status symbols--jewels, silk or pointy-toed shoes, for example--and from spending too much on other extravagances, such as parties. For a time in ancient Rome, people weren't allowed to spend more than 100 asses--animals being the common currency then--to celebrate certain festivals. On nonfestival days, Roman citizens could invest only 10 donkeys in a party and serve no fowl except one hen--"and that not fattened for the purpose."

Good and Bad

Sumptuary laws had some laudable purposes, but they also had some reprehensible ones. On the good side, they reduced the obvious disparity of wealth between haves and have-nots; they discouraged farmers and laborers from throwing away their rent money on baubles; and they promoted--or tried to, anyway--selflessness.

The other side of the coin was not so shiny. Sumptuary laws, which didn't apply to royalty or the clergy, usually reinforced class distinctions by dictating a person's appearance based on the station he or she was born to. The ruling class didn't want to risk guessing another man's status, an inevitable result if everyone could wear leopard fur or taffeta jerkins. Before the laws were adopted in 14th-century England, wrote Henry Knighton in his chronicles of the period, "there was so much pride amongst the common people in vying with one another in dress and ornaments that it was scarce possible to distinguish the poor from the rich, the servant from the master, or a priest from other men."

Although often working at cross purposes, secular and spiritual leaders both promoted sumptuary laws for self-interested reasons: Money that their subjects or flocks spent on lace or long scabbards was money not available for tithe or taxation. "The clergy regarded expenditures on clothes or baubles as draining money from the church," wrote Barbara Tuchman in "A Distant Mirror." Meanwhile, the government believed that "if people could be made to save money, the king could obtain it if necessary."

Elizabeth I, who became England's queen in 1558, strongly advocated sumptuary laws, decrying the social confusion that resulted when the "meanest" were "as richly appareled as their betters." Furthermore, the desire for such clothes could so overwhelm "such inferior persons," she said, that they might be driven "to robbing and stealing by the highway." So outraged was Elizabeth by the "monstrous and outrageous" competition for most extravagant hosiery that she set a precise limit--a little more than a yard--on how much textile could be used for a pair of men's stockings.

The early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony frowned on vanity and frivolity. Yet some of them couldn't resist a bright color or fancy button. By 1651, the colony's government was officially "grieving" because of some people's "intolerable excess." The community should remember that the Lord "has been pleased to afford us unexpected blessings in this wilderness," the court said, counseling its members to use those blessings in moderation.

And when America's statesmen met in Philadelphia in 1787 to draft a constitution, a Virginia delegate, George Mason, urged that Congress have the right to enact sumptuary laws, arguing that a democracy could require "manners" from its constituents not in order to keep people from distinguishing themselves by appearance, but to guide them toward appropriate conduct.

Mason's proposal was unpopular. To the extent such things could be controlled, other delegates claimed, taxes and tariffs did so more efficiently. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts said, "The law of necessity is the best sumptuary law." He knew as well as anyone that few settlers had their own looms, and cloth was expensive to buy.

'Evasive Actions'

Even after sumptuary laws disappeared in the 19th century, many people still believed that excess in fashion was sinful. The wearing of costly apparel "naturally tends to breed, and increase, vanity," sermonized the Anglican clergyman John Wesley.

In the end, sumptuary laws could not defeat the forces of human creativity. "Whenever they prevented escalation in one form of spending," wrote Robert Frank in "Luxury Fever," "they almost always stimulated evasive actions that were at least as costly." After Florentine law limited the number of courses that could be served during an evening meal, for example, inventive cooks created the pastry-wrapped meat-and-pasta torte.

A century ago, a French historian, Etienne Giraudias, eulogized sumptuary laws for all time. "Everywhere, after a brief time, they have been abolished, evaded or ignored," he wrote. "Vanity will always invent more ways of distinguishing itself than the laws are able to forbid."