ABSTRACT
This chapter deploys a sartorial sociology of sovereignty in which the dress codes of sovereignty are investigated as historically contingent and gendered symbolic practices through which sovereignty is made visible, and thus recognizable. As symbolic form, sovereignty becomes a reality out of historically and culturally varying forms of symbolic embodiments. The relationship between fashion and sovereignty is anything but accidental, and goes beyond an ostentatious display of power and glory. The very ineffectuality of sumptuary laws only proves the political role of fashion in the establishment of social and political hierarchies. The spectacular display of divine and exalted status served Louis XIV in the symbolic production of a form of absolute sovereignty that recreated France as a centralized state, and demanded the subordination of the nobility under his rule at Versailles. Sartorial code and conduct become symbolic resources to recast and contest the ancien regime's symbolic form of sovereignty.
