According to Richard Thompson Ford, dress codes are a Rosetta stone to decode social norms and political expression and resistance of a time and place.

For centuries, dress codes have been used to maintain specific social roles and hierarchies. But fashion and style have also traditionally served another purpose: to express new ideals of individual liberty, rationality and equality, says Ford, JD ’88, George E. Osborne Professor of Law, in his new book Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History (Simon & Schuster, 2021).

Civil rights activists in 1960s America wore their “Sunday best” at protests to demonstrate they were worthy of dignity and respect as they challenged the institutions that kept Black people at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Centuries earlier, during the Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a pared-down business suit symbolized a departure from the status-based opulence of previous aristocratic regimes. Wearing the same clothes as everyone else, regardless of one’s social status, was a way of espousing the period’s new values, such as sensibility, rationality, and even equality.

Law and Fashion

These are just two of the many examples Ford chronicles in Dress Codes, in which he argues that people have used dress codes throughout history to assert political control and challenge social hierarchies.

Sartorial style can also be wielded to offer new political ideals in place of existing norms. For example, the Black Panther movement rejected the more proper, formal Sunday best their civil rights predecessors had adopted and established a new kind of resistance, which they expressed through a military-style uniform of black leather jackets, berets, and dark glasses.

“It’s worth noting that the Black Panthers had a minister of culture, so they saw very clearly the importance of aesthetics in changing politics,” Ford says. “That developed into the ‘Black is beautiful’ movement, which focused quite explicitly on the political dimensions of racial aesthetics and changed dominant norms of beauty in order to incorporate and reflect the norms of the Black community.”

An earlier example of how fashion reveals the politics of an era is the development of the business suit, which Ford traces back to the 1700s.

“As late as the early 1700s, the typical clothing for someone of high status in most of European society was opulent and adorned with things like brocade and jewels—this was true for men and women,” he explains. “But as early as in the 17th century, things were beginning to change. In England, this involved the execution of King Charles I, who styled himself as an absolute monarch, and the rise of the Commonwealth. After the Commonwealth ended, the monarchy was restored, but the old absolutist ambitions of the monarch didn’t come back. Instead, what emerged was a new kind of aristocracy in which the aristocrats—the people with a high place in society—dressed in a more toned-down, subtle and utilitarian fashion.”

Ford argues that parallel to a history of fashion runs a history of liberal individualism.

“In the modern sense, fashion involves clothing that is highly expressive; it can be a sign of individual personality,” he says. “This kind of clothing emerged around the same time the ideal of individualism began to emerge in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Clothing reflected new social and political ideals: the importance of the individual as opposed to the group-based statuses of aristocratic class and religious affinity. Fashion in this sense developed alongside other changes in the arts, philosophy, and science: Literature began to focus on individual psychology more than grand classical epics, prefiguring the transformation from epic to the novel.”

But, Ford points out that fashion both reflected these changes and helped shape them by conditioning people to view themselves first and foremost as unique individuals. “In a sense, fashion lets people not only express their individuality but also experience it on their bodies.”

The spark for the book came from Ford’s law school courses. “I teach employment discrimination and civil rights law, and a surprising number of legal disputes have involved people challenging a dress code of some kind. For instance, women challenging workplace dress codes that required high heels or makeup or people of color challenging dress codes that outlawed preferred hairstyles that are suitable to the texture of their hair, like braids or locks,” he explains. Ford was struck by the intensity with which people fought the various dress codes. “People were willing to lose their jobs disputing workplace dress code,” he says, “and employers were willing to lose valued employees trying to impose such dress codes. I wanted to understand why people felt so strongly about clothing, fashion, and self-presentation.”

Looking ahead, Ford expects that changes in dress codes will relate to gender norms. “We’re already seeing such dramatic changes in terms of the recognition of the transgender community and people who are gender nonbinary. That’s a remarkable challenge to a centuries- old set of conventions in which men’s and women’s clothing diverged and were considered to be symbolic opposites,” he says. “I expect that how people choose to dress will continue to be a political statement as much as it is an expression of who they are as individuals” SL

This article was adapted from a Q&A by Stanford News staff writer Melissa De Witte that ran in Stanford Report.