Dress Codes: how the laws of fashion made history (2024)

About the Event:

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearingbraided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants isa crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip flops,setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world and some venture capitalists refuse to invest inany company run by someone wearing a suit.

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, away to maintain political control. Merchants who dressed like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societiesstructured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet and fur were reserved for the nobility and ballooning pants called “trunk hose”could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when heremarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflectedstruggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hairand form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States and in the 1940s the baggy zoot suits favored by Blackand Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.

About the Speaker:

Richard Thompson Ford is Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He writes about law, social and cultural issues and race relations and has written forThe New York Times,The Washington Post,TheSan Francisco Chronicle, CNNandSlate.He is the author of theNew York TimesnotablebooksThe Race CardandRights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality. He has appeared onThe Colbert Report,The Rachel Maddow Show, andThe Dylan Rattigan Show. He is a member of the American Law Institute and serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.