Style Wars: Fashion and the Class Struggle before Classes

The most active period of sumptuary regulation occurred between the demise of feudalism and the rise of manufacturing capitalism. That period is traversed by complex culturat economic and political struggles. The sumptuary laws were a part of those struggles. But precisely what part they played is important and potentially controversial. Before addressing this broad question some comments are needed about the way in which notions of ‘struggle’ and ‘class struggle’ will be employed. The period under consideration is marked by competitive struggles between social interests that at the very end of the period under consideration manifest themselves as social classes. By this I mean a notion of class that involves some self-consciousness of and identification with a relatively stable configuration of economic, political and cultural interests. In order to make use of the metaphor of classes and class struggle it is necessary to insist that much of the period under consideration is characterized by what E.P. Thompson has called ‘class struggle before classes’ (Thompson 1978). My usage involves an intentionally broad conception of classes. It is one that makes no assumptions that ‘classes’ have any necessary or preconstituted unity. There are important respects in which it might be desirable to avoid the term ‘class’ altogether, but no other term captures the sense of emergent recognition of collective interests and separation from other social aggregates.