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Keywords

Fashion, Historical Politics, social custom, Satorial Manipulation

Abstract

Fashion's impact on the course of history largely unexplored. Herbert Blumer, a noted sociologist at UC Berkeley, accurately credits this oversight to

"a failure to observe and appreciate the wide range of operation of fashion; a false assumption that fashion has only nivial or peripheral significance; a mistaken idea that fashion falls in the area of the abnormal and irrational and thus is out of the mainsneam of human group life; and, finally, a misunderstanding of the nature of fashion."

Blumer was criticizing sociologists, but he may as well have been criticizing historians; scholarly works analyzing fashion's impact are rare enough within the sociological realm, but comparatively absent within the historical field. Economic sociologist Thorstein Veblen's theory of conspicuous consumption may have been the first to suggest that clothing (and other material wealth) was frequently manipulated to convey social status. Georg Simmel's 1904 sociological essay on fashion is perhaps the most influential scholarly work on the subject and argued that fashion acts as a means of unification and segregation: elites manipulate trivialities in adornment to set themselves apart from the lower classes, which then try to mimic the trivialities to reassert their status. Ferdinand Tonnies's Essay on Social Codes analyzed fashion's significance within social custom and determined that fashion can act as a means of communication. In 1965, two professors of sociology and anthropology decided to compile articles on clothing from disciplines including cultural anthropology, economics, sociology, social psychology and home economics into a single anthology. The result (Dress, Adornment and the Social Order) is the text from which are derived many of this paper's sociological sources. Herbert Blumer's 1969 response to Simmel's essay argues that fashion is less of a top-down divisive measure than an expression of collective taste. Aside from these few examples, little scholarly attention has been applied to fashion's impact on history and society.

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