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dress codes worked
to cement a social hierarchy by
using a tire as a sign of status
choices around fashion are
always embedded in a social structure in
which there are expectations
and some of those expectations are
reasonable and legitimate and some of
them
are unjust
i teach civil rights and i was surprised
how many cases involved dress codes
where women would resist for instance
rules that require makeup
or high-heeled shoes dress codes that
prohibited hairstyles
like braided hairstyles that are
typically worn by african-american women
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before this period of time much of the
clothing of elites in particular was
draped clothing
although it could signify status as well
could only do so in fairly limited ways
but when you got
tailoring and tailoring began to advance
clothing became much more expressive so
if you look at someone
like queen elizabeth for instance with
these very elaborate sumptuous gowns
but they're also quite constructed so
that her body seems to be a different
kind of body
than the body of the typical person
there was a way to communicate
the authority and the majesty of royalty
and aristocrats they wanted to make sure
that only people that they authorized
to use this symbol of power were able to
use it so we started to get a lot of
dress codes
sumptuary laws throughout europe that
regulated clothing according to social
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rank
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you had a class of merchants and trades
people who were making a lot of money
and those people started to want to use
these symbols
of status for their own purposes but
even if they had the means they were
prohibited by these laws
before you would see men in jewels men
and feathers
makeup powdered wigs which up till that
time had been a symbol of status and
power for both men and women but during
the great masculine renunciation
men begin to adopt this much more
streamlined
sober style of clothing that evolution
expresses new egalitarian sentiments
that we now associate with the
enlightenment
social hierarchy gets reintroduced in a
much more subtle way
where the way social status is expressed
is through
savoir faire through knowing the right
cut the right fabric
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right up until the early 20th century
woman wearing a pair of pants would be
in some places
subject to arrest so we don't really get
what we might describe as a great
feminine renunciation
until the 1920s when the flappers
begin to develop this streamlined attire
and the flappers which we
you know in today's environment we often
think of as kind of superficial
and frivolous we're in fact often
working women
and they were adopting clothing that was
more suitable to not only
work but also to do political ideals
so this is going on at the same time the
movements for women suffrage and
movements for women's equality from
conventional domestic social roles
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in the 1740s for instance there were
laws in the united states that
outlawed or forbade africa americans or
slaves from dressing
above their condition and so the
well-dressed
black person was early on seen as threat
to the social order
so when you move forward to the civil
rights movement in the mid-20th century
the well-dressed african-american was a
visual and symbolic repudiation of white
supremacy
dignified dress was a way of demanding
dignity and so that
kind of attire was an important part of
the civil rights movement
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some then dressed in workwear or
overalls with the black panthers for
instance it's a new sort of black
aesthetic it's a an attempt to reject
certain of the norms of beauty and
professionalism
that were advanced by white society in
favor of something new
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the silicon valley aesthetic you know
the gray t-shirt the hoodie sweatshirt
in one sense this is the logical
continuation of the great masculine
renunciation
some have said never invest in a tech
company where the ceo wears a suit so
that's not expressing
indifference that's expressing a new
kind of a dress code the
white man in a hoodie sweatshirt is
going to be taken for
someone working intact the black man
wearing a hoodie sweatshirt might be
taken for a thug
or a criminal
there's no feminine version of a lot of
these new dressed down
types of attire and these completely
casual outfits just don't
carry the same symbolic meaning for
women
conola harris needs to even more than
a white male exhibit the symbolism of
power
given the difficulties already in
conveying that kind of image
for a woman and for a woman of color it
was reasonable for people to object that
that
dressed down casual image kind of
undermined her and undermined her
authority
people are looking for something that
seems unassuming
that seems kind of natural but also
still communicates status
and refinement another thing that you
see on zoom is judgment about not just
the clothing because you can only see me
from here up now
but um the background people work really
hard now to stage
a bookshelf in the background that
perhaps has the right books
that kind of judgment's also in a way a
form of a dress code except now it's
extended to
your whole home so we've accomplished a
lot but we're not that different
from people in the past
you