From potlatch to Wal- Mart: courtly and capitalist hierarchies through dress

Cloth and clothing constitute an illuminating lens through which to consider the history of inequality-that is, social relations of vastly unequal wealth, status, and power. This is especially so if we take into account both the production and the consumption of these fundamentally important exemplars of material culture. An emphasis on consumption alone risks reproducing the simplistic notion that what one wears merely indexes and communicates one’s social position. Conversely, focusing only on production reproduces the triumphalist narrative of capitalist industrialization and marketing, a narrative in which the West dominates “the rest.”