Sumptuary Laws: Difference between revisions

Latest revision as of 09:57, 27 November 2012

Laws which tell people what to wear. This was to make sure that people from the lower classes did not dress above their station in life and that people did not waste their money on foreign products. Indirectly they secured the privileged cultural status of the elite. Some sumptuary laws also regulated the visibility of outsiders (e.g., Jews, heretics, prostitutes). The Elizabethan Statue of Apparel, for instance, declared:

"The excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares thereto belonging now of late years is grown by sufferance to such an extremity that the manifest decay of the whole realm generally is like to follow (by bringing into the realm such superfluities of silks, cloths of gold, silver, and other most vain devices of so great cost for the quantity thereof as of necessity the moneys and treasure of the realm is and must be yearly conveyed out of the same to answer the said excess) but also particularly the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen, otherwise serviceable, and others seeking by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen, who, allured by the vain show of those things, do not only consume themselves, their goods, and lands which their parents left unto them, but also run into such debts and shifts as they cannot live out of danger of laws without attempting unlawful acts, whereby they are not any ways serviceable to their country as otherwise they might be" (http://elizabethan.org/sumptuary/who-wears-what.html)

As the laws already indicate, in the 16th and especially the 17th centuries, people no longer obeyed them and aimed at expressing status, wealth and sometimes only the aspirations to belong to the elite by their clothes. After the Restoration the Sumptuary Laws lapsed. Now the way people dressed started to change rapidly and people used fashion to demonstrate their social status.

Sources

http://elizabethan.org/sumptuary/
Christian Huck. "Fashioning Society. Introduction." Journal for the Study of British Cultures 14/2 (2007). 89-99.

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 As the laws already indicate, in the 16th and especially the 17th centuries, people no longer obeyed them and aimed at expressing status, wealth and sometimes only the aspirations to belong to the elite by their clothes. After the [[Restoration]] the Sumptuary Laws lapsed. Now the way people dressed started to change rapidly and people used fashion to demonstrate their social status.
-Sources:
+== Sources ==
+* http://elizabethan.org/sumptuary/
-http://elizabethan.org/sumptuary/
+* Christian Huck. "Fashioning Society. Introduction." ''Journal for the Study of British Cultures'' 14/2 (2007). 89-99.
-Christian Huck. „Fashioning Society. Introduction“. ''Journal for the Study of British Cultures'' 14/2 (2007). 89-99.