"YOU ARE ADDRESSED THE WAY YOU DRESS"
The continual adoption of new fashions among the many styles of
available clothing is similar to Darwin's theory of natural selection.
The driving force for fashion change is the need for social groups to
express their unique identity through clothing, which fostered the rise
of the fashion industry in the Industrial Age. Fashion culture has
always been defined by change, its constant search for the newest
design, which gives it a formal similarity with other systems that rely
on continuous innovation (Purdy 1). Clothing, and more generally, style,
can be important non-verbal representations of an individual's status
in society.
Clothing has been used to distinguish among classes from the earliest
historical record. One early literary reference is the General Prologue
of Geoffrey Chaucer's
The Canterbury Tales, written in the
Fourteenth Century. Chaucer used a description of clothing to highlight
social differences which were important in the narrative of the
pilgrim's journey. Wealth and social stature was implied in the
description of the Doctor of Medicine's clothing, "he was dressed
entirely with taffeta and finest silk" (Chaucer 23). Chaucer then
contrasted the doctor with the Yeoman's bow and arrows, "the yeoman was
dressed in a coat and hood of green; beneath his belt he carefully
carried a sheaf of bright, green peacock-feathered arrows (well did he
know how to take care of his equipment: his arrows never dropped with
tired feathers!)" (Chaucer 7).
Fashion was an important mark of position in the rise of the leisure
class in post-industrial society. Adopting the latest fashion, such as
the high heel at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, can be
expensive, which serves to exclude the lower classes. Thorstein Veblen
observed in
The Theory of the Leisure Class that admission to the leisure class was at least partly through the culture of fashion.
