Virtual Event: Richard Thompson Ford

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes RICHARD THOMPSON FORD—George E. Osborne Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and author of the acclaimed book Rights Gone Wrong: How Law Corrupts the Struggle for Equality—for a discussion of his latest book, Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History. He will be joined in conversation by JEANNIE SUK GERSEN, the John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Contribute to Support Harvard Book Store

While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $3 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of Dress Codes on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Dress Codes

Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants who dressed like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility and ballooning pants called “trunk hose” could be considered a menace to good order. The Renaissance era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, “One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth.” Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status. In the 1700s, South Carolina’s “Negro Act” made it illegal for Black people to dress “above their condition.” In the 1920s, the bobbed hair and form-fitting dresses worn by free-spirited flappers were banned in workplaces throughout the United States and in the 1940s the baggy zoot suits favored by Black and Latino men caused riots in cities from coast to coast.

Even in today’s more informal world, dress codes still determine what we wear, when we wear it—and what our clothing means. People lose their jobs for wearing braided hair, long fingernails, large earrings, beards, and tattoos or refusing to wear a suit and tie or make-up and high heels. In some cities, wearing sagging pants is a crime. And even when there are no written rules, implicit dress codes still influence opportunities and social mobility. Silicon Valley CEOs wear t-shirts and flip flops, setting the tone for an entire industry: women wearing fashionable dresses or high heels face ridicule in the tech world and some venture capitalists refuse to invest in any company run by someone wearing a suit.

In Dress Codes, law professor and cultural critic Richard Thompson Ford presents an insightful and entertaining history of the laws of fashion from the middle ages to the present day, a walk down history’s red carpet to uncover and examine the canons, mores, and customs of clothing—rules that we often take for granted. After reading Dress Codes, you’ll never think of fashion as superficial again—and getting dressed will never be the same.

Praise for Dress Codes

“Dress Codes explores how for centuries fashion has marked a pathway for personal liberation and social critique even when it sought to reinforce class, race, and gender hierarchies. From nuns’ habits to flappers’ fringe to burkinis and hijabs, from Joan of Arc’s armor to Martin Luther King’s Sunday best, Richard Thompson Ford reveals a history of individual imagination capable of outwitting and recasting even the strictest rules. Ford’s writing is sharp, witty, and brilliant, with the elegance and craft of a bespoke suit." —Daniel Sharfstein, Professor at Vanderbilt University and author of Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War

“I think that Dress Codes is long overdue. Clothing is at the heart of culture; indeed, it is almost a definition of what we mean by the term culture, a constructed but ever changing expression of social relationships, beliefs and ideologies. We should all, as Richard Thompson Ford does so magnificently within this book, be taking fashion much more seriously.” —Ruth Goodman, author of How to be a Victorian and The Domestic Revolution

"We all abide by dress codes, whether required to do so or not. The author’s discussion embraces a vast body of knowledge, from what might be called fashion anthropology to a philosophy of sartorial splendor, and he’s an assured, genial narrator. He has an acute eye for detail, too . . . For the clotheshorse and the jeans-clad alike, a lucid, entertaining exploration of how and why we dress as we do." —Kirkus (Starred)