![]() 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. Send me updates about Slate special offers.ĭress Codes traces nearly 600 years of fashion law and social norms, detailing how style and attempts to control it have shaped history. As law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford writes in his new book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History, “Trunk hose were the parachute pants of their day Richard Walweyn, a Renaissance-era MC Hammer.” Walweyn, a servant, was arrested for wearing “a very monsterous and outraygeous great payre of hose” and ordered to be detained until he could prove he had some other hose “of a decent & lawfull facyon.” The garment that caused such an uproar was a pair of trunk hose, basically baglike shorts that billow out from the waist and taper midthigh, giving the impression of the wearer having two balloons strapped to his legs. On a late January day in 1565 London, a man named Richard Walweyn found himself imprisoned for committing what was, for all intents and purposes, a crime of fashion. ![]() Slate has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication. ![]()
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