Dress, Ideology, and Control: The Regulation of Clothing in Early Modern English Utopian Texts, 1516–1656

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes English utopian texts written by the educated elite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to identify attitudes toward, or social dreaming about, clothing, fashion, and society in early modern England. From Thomas More's Utopia to Sir Balthazar Gerbier's “Loix,” clothes are repeatedly deployed in governance to enforce legal, political, religious, gender, and social hierarchies and to impose social controls. These texts reveal their authors' largely unexamined attitudes toward dress and the great importance placed by them on the codification of clothing as a primary tool for societal control and the maintenance of social hierarchies.