‘You’re not going out dressed like that!’
Who doesn’t remember that moment? An irate parent at the foot of the stairs, challenging our right to wear what we like.
One of the wonderful things about adulthood is being able to choose what you wear (though obviously that isn’t possible for everyone, everywhere, and particularly for women). For most of us in the UK, it’s a right we take for granted.
But just imagine…
Imagine if you risked being fined for wearing the lovely dress you’ve bought to go to your son’s wedding. A man with a beard arrives at your door, telling you he’s heard about it, and you’ve got to hand it over to the court.
You’re not important enough to be able to wear it. It’s ’above your station’.
The cut! The colour! Who do you think you are?
You try to shut the door in his face, but he puts his foot in the gap and carries on venting. This time, he rants about your husband’s doublet and hose. You take a huge breath in to shout right back and gag at the smell of horse manure behind him.
It’s at that point you realise you’ve time-travelled to Tudor England.
You try to tell them they’ve got it wrong, you’re from 2026 and you’re allowed to wear anything you can afford to buy. But nobody’s listening. You’re dragged off to a hearing, fined, and paraded back home through the streets, with everyone laughing at you. You’ve missed the wedding. And the most awful thing is, you can guess which neighbour reported you.
Before long, you’re proved right. That neighbour’s been down the pub wearing your dress!
Starting a colour analysis and styling business presents a wonderful opportunity for me to research and write about some of my favourite moments in history. I couldn’t wait any longer to write about the sumptuary laws.
The 1574 Proclamation Ordering Reform in Excess of Apparel was issued during the sixteenth year of Elizabeth I’s reign in England. Sumptuary laws limited conspicuous consumption on garments, drink and food, and household furnishings. Elites spent too much money importing foreign goods, argued Elizabeth 1’s ministers. Purple, silk and sable fur were all off limits to the lower orders.
It was all about control.
These laws signalled anxieties about traditional elites losing power. There was an earlier crackdown in the years following the plague epidemic at the end of the 1340s. There just weren’t enough hands to bring in the harvest, wait at table, hammer ploughshares, or tailor garments.
That moment created opportunities for some people to make money for the first time. Some of them decided to get some new clothes.
Panic stations. If the poor started wearing clothes as good as those of their social ‘betters’, it presented a threat to the established order. In the marketplaces or cathedrals of medieval towns and cities, you couldn’t hope to know everyone you met.
‘Fine feathers make fine birds.’
How could anyone tell if the woman in the velvet robe was a member of the aristocracy, a merchant’s daughter, or an alewife?
Interestingly, exceptions were often made for prostitutes so that they could signal their work and attract clients - the origin of the adjective ‘tarty’, shouted up the stairs to so many teenage girls.
Shaming women - sound familiar?
Sumptuary laws existed in Ancient Rome, colonial Massachusetts, and pre-Revolutionary France.
Nowadays, we don’t have actual laws. We’ve swapped feudalism for market capitalism. And a whole host of voices carry on telling us what we should and shouldn’t wear.
My work in colour analysis and personal styling aims to free women up from all this.
Some people see colour analysis as placing more rules, not fewer, around getting dressed. But it’s quite the opposite: you’ll know what suits your personal colouring - cutting through all the blandishments of the chain stores as they push whatever’s in fashion for five minutes.
Most importantly, you’ll start to dress from within. To suit your personality and tastes, not other people’s.
And when you get a new garment home, nobody’s going to try to stop you wearing it.