ABSTRACT
In the words of Elizabeth Wilson, clothing has a unique relationship with the human body, linking ‘the biological body to the social being, and public to private.’ Integral to our conception of gender, of class and even of nationality, clothing provides information about its wearer, without the need for other forms of communication.2 Throughout the history of Western culture, clothing has been used as a means of expressing identity. In both sixteenth-century England and France, for example, the passing of sumptuary laws prevented lay people from adopting certain clothes, a recognition of clothing’s power in designating social position. In the words of Richard Sennett, these laws ‘assigned to each station in the social hierarchy a set of “appropriate” clothes, and forbade people of any one station from wearing the clothes of people in another rank.’3 Clothing invests people with status and therefore articulates social hierarchies, however simplistic or complex these may be. What we see and react to is clothing, and it is via these clothes that we come to understand the status of those who are wearing them. Clothes, suggests Thomas Carlyle, are at the very core of human existence as social beings.4
