Richard Thompson Ford A tailored history of who wears what and why TED
Transcriber:
In 1565, a man named Richard Walweyn
was arrested in London
for wearing what the authorities described
as a “very monstrous
and great outrageous pair of trunk hose.”
(Laughter)
For those of you who don’t already have
a pair of these in your closet,
trunk hose are these puffy trousers,
and they were all the rage
in men’s fashion in Renaissance England.
But they could get you into trouble.
Walweyn had his pants
confiscated by the authorities
and exhibited in a public place,
as, I quote, “an example
of extreme folly.”
(Laughter)
Laws like this weren’t unique
to Tudor-era England.
In fact, the fashion police
were hard at work all over Europe
at this period in history.
In England, France, Spain
and in cities up and down
the Italian peninsula.
The authorities were passing laws
about what people could wear,
sometimes dozens in a single year,
in order to keep up with
ever changing fashions.
Now, OK, I imagine you’re all thinking,
well, that’s an interesting
history lesson.
But what does it have to do with us today?
That’s like bloodletting
or trial by ordeal.
It’s not the sort of thing we do
in today’s enlightened society.
But actually we do.
In fact, even in the 21st century,
people regularly lose their jobs,
kids are sent home from school,
people are kept off airplanes
and other types of public transportation,
and sometimes people are even jailed
for what they’re wearing.
A couple of examples.
In 2015, a high school student in Kentucky
named Stephanie Dunn
was sent home from school
for wearing a scandalously revealing top
that revealed her collarbones.
And in 2012,
an Alabama judge sentenced someone to jail
for wearing sagging pants.
“You are in contempt of court,”
the judge said,
“because you showed your butt in court.”
I’m a law professor,
and I work on questions of civil rights
and racial justice and gender equity.
And over the course of my career,
I’ve been surprised
at just how many legal disputes
involve what people are wearing.
And all of these lawsuits over dress
and dress codes got me thinking
that there’s a lot more
going on with our attire
than just making a fashion statement.
So I decided to look into the history
of rules and laws around clothing
to try to figure out
what’s really at stake.
And my research took me all the way
back to the late Middle Ages.
I found that these kinds of laws and rules
really got started
with the growth of cities
when strangers began to come together
and needed a way to size each other up
quickly and on sight.
And fashion became a kind of shorthand
for status and identity and belonging.
The elite used fashion
in order to assert
their social superiority
and high status and position.
And the average person used fashion
as a way to challenge authority
or to climb the social ladder.
Fashion was a type of credential,
and wearing the wrong clothing
could be considered a type of fraud.
For instance, the Florentine patriarch,
Cosimo de' Medici,
once said, “One can make a gentleman
from two yards of red silk.”
And this worry about
the fraudulent use of fashion
led the elite to pass laws
that held that only they could wear
the most high status
and luxurious fashions,
so things like jewels,
precious metals, fur and red silk
were restricted by law
to the aristocracy and royalty.
And in a way, it’s not
all that different today.
Even today, we used clothing and fashion
as a way to signal identity
and status and belonging,
whether it’s the expensive high fashions
you might find on Madison Avenue
or the edgy styles
of an urban street culture.
So maybe it’s not surprising
that we also judge each other in part
based on what we’re wearing.
The problem is that
we’re not always very good at it.
We could make serious mistakes
that can have real consequences.
So it works pretty good when we’re dealing
with people who are a lot like ourselves.
So I’m not bad at evaluating
the wardrobes of college professors,
lawyers, artsy types
who live in big cities.
But we’re not so good
when it comes to dealing with people
from other walks of life.
Here’s an example.
A former student of mine,
who was the first in her family
to attend college, told me this.
She got a job interview,
and she really wanted the job,
and so she wore her very best dress
to the interview.
Problem was when she got there,
the other people in the office thought
her dress looked like a party dress,
so they thought she was dressed up
to go clubbing afterwards,
later in the evening,
and wasn’t that serious about the job.
They misread her clothing and therefore
they misread her motivations.
Another problem is that
a lot of our ideas about professionalism
were established
when large groups of people
were excluded from the professions.
And as a consequence,
those groups have a harder time
finding something that looks professional
and is appropriate for them.
Just think of all the grief
Hillary Clinton got about her pantsuits.
Bill Clinton never had those problems.
And women of color often suffer
under dress and grooming codes
that were based on the hair texture
common to white people.
So a lot of workplace dress codes
still forbid braids and locks,
styles that are well suited
to the texture of African-American’s hair.
And women in those workplaces
face a cruel choice.
They either need to straighten
their hair with harsh chemicals
or cut most of it off.
That’s just insulting,
and it requires the sacrifice
of these types of women
that other people never have to make
in order to be considered professional.
And finally, some of our ideas
about what’s appropriate
are based on stereotypes.
And so, for instance,
a lot of workplace dress codes
still require women
to wear high-heeled shoes.
And women from all over the world
have started to push back
against these kind of dress codes.
So, for instance, a woman in London
circulated a petition
against workplace dress codes
requiring high heels.
And it got all the way to Parliament.
Women at the Cannes Film Festival
went barefoot in order
to protest a dress code
that would require them
to wear high heels.
And women in Japan have
actually started a social movement
that has gotten the name #KuToo.
It’s kind of a nod to #MeToo,
but #KuToo means “shoe pain” in Japanese.
So, OK, at this point,
you’re probably thinking,
wouldn’t it be better
if no one cared about any of this stuff?
You know, maybe we should all
be like Mark Zuckerberg,
who just wears a gray T-shirt every day.
But here’s what he said
about why he wears that gray T-shirt.
He said, “I’m not doing my job
if I spend any of my energy
on things that are silly or frivolous.
And that’s my reason for wearing
a gray T-shirt every day.”
So that doesn’t quite sound
like somebody who doesn’t care
about what people are wearing.
Instead, it sounds like he’s saying
that people who dress fashionably
are silly and frivolous
and aren’t doing their jobs.
That gray T-shirt,
suddenly not a matter of indifference,
it’s become a signal
of moral virtue and the work ethic.
And that can just be
a new kind of dress code.
In fact, on cue, when Marissa Mayer,
the CEO of Yahoo!,
wore a fashionable dress
for a fashion magazine spread,
the response was harsh.
One commentator said she looks
like she’s relaxing and on vacation
while everyone else is doing work.
So pretending you don’t care
about what people wear
can turn into just a more subtle
and insidious form of dress code.
And in fact, getting rid
of the written dress code
sometimes leads to an unwritten dress code
that’s equally harsh
or maybe even more restrictive.
So, for instance,
the investment bank Goldman Sachs
got rid of its formal
business dress code in 2019,
but the management had to add this:
“We all know what is and is not
appropriate for the workplace.”
(Laughter)
And as a consequence,
some people started to think,
“Maybe getting rid of the dress code
is some kind of a test
to smoke out people
who aren’t savvy enough
to figure out what’s appropriate
all on their own.”
And in fact, a lot of people in banking,
after these dress codes went away,
gravitated toward
a new unwritten dress code
that was equally, if not more, uniform.
In fact, there’s an Instagram page –
you’ve seen these guys
walking around town, right?
There’s an Instagram page about it
called the Midtown Uniform.
There’s no dress code,
but everyone’s wearing
exactly the same thing
out of fear of looking like someone
who doesn’t know
what is or is not appropriate.
So, you know,
trying to pretend that we don’t care
about what people wear
when we so obviously do isn’t the answer.
And let’s face it,
sometimes it makes sense
to draw conclusions
from what people are wearing.
But our gut reactions
are often informed by stereotypes
and subconscious biases
and limited experiences
or limited perspectives.
So whether it’s writing a dress code
or evaluating a stranger,
let’s all try to check our biases
before we call the fashion police.
Thanks.
(Applause)