Why did clothing become boring?
An investigation into when, how, and why everyone started dressing the same — and what it was like when they didn't
One of the reasons I’m a historian is that I find the strangeness of the past to be underrated. You can find something deeply, fascinatingly weird about virtually any aspect of any human culture prior to around the year 1880, provided you take the time to dig into it.
Here’s an example for you:
I stumbled on this image last week while reading the Wikipedia page for Terra Mariana, a medieval state which covered part of present day Latvia and Estonia. What strikes me about it is not just the incredible intricacy of these costumes — it’s that each one is so different from the other. Who in the world thought to do this sort of thing? What function did it serve? And why did we stop?
While mulling this over, it occurred to me that the creator of this image, the Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer, may have been exaggerating for artistic effect. Another potential objection: these three were wealthy noblewomen wearing their most ornate clothing. It’s reasonable to expect that ordinary people had much “flatter,” simpler modes of dress. To an extent, both points are true.
And yet… here is a print from the same period showing a wider range of people from Terra Mariana. The caption specifically flags that these costumes include both “bourgeois women” and “village women”:
How do residents of the same lands dress today? Well, for that I don’t need to give you an example. That’s because you, reader, are probably dressed much the same. Zara. Uniqlo. Nike. H&M. A cotton t-shirt from Amazon, a jacket drop-shipped from China that you found thanks to a targeted ad on Instagram.
You get the idea. From São Paulo to Riga to Seoul, people in the 2020s pretty much dress the same way.
The rest of this post is my attempt to think through the why, how, and when of this shift. If you zoom out, the flattening of personal adornment is actually one of the starkest differences between life today and life in the premodern world. And it’s still not entirely clear why it happened.
Bespoke all the way down
One key point to start with: material goods in the premodern world were handmade to a degree that is hard to fathom today. It was bespoke all the way down. One of my favorite roommates from when I lived in Austin was the apprentice to a master cowboy boot maker whose clientele included people like Willie Nelson. Each pair of boots took dozens of hours to make, and naturally everything was done by hand. But it was still done with a modern supply chain, precision tools, and electricity.
Imagine the process without all that — a world where, in order to craft your only pair of shoes, you also had to fletch arrows which you would then use to kill and skin a deer, or cut down a tree to yield a block of wood out of which you would hand carve a pair of miserably uncomfortable (but also beautiful) clogs.
Now imagine that every item you own is produced in this same incredibly laborious way. This is not item crafting in an open world video game. Its thousands of hours of physical labor. Add it together, and the products we find in elite burials of the premodern world represent the accumulated work of multiple human lifetimes.
And that leads to one explanation — the most obvious, perhaps — for why our clothes got boring. They got much, much less expensive.
Clothing and the Industrial Revolution
… is far too big of a topic to cover here. But for our purposes, one key shift that occurred in the past two centuries is that mass production of goods meant cheaper goods. This, in turn, meant that even those who were not wealthy could expect to own, say, a dozen sets of clothing as opposed to just one or two.
Some of the oddities of William Shakespeare’s last will and testament — namely his gift of his “second best bed” to his wife, and of his clothing to his sister Joan — become less odd when we remember just how valuable clothing used to be. Today, when imagining what we might bequeath to loved ones, few of us make plans for who will inherit our bed sheets or our underwear. But in the premodern world, textiles like this were among the most valuable things that anyone outside of the super-rich could ever hope to own.
The nineteenth century was the century of interchangeable parts. And so it makes sense that clothing, too, became more interchangeable at this time. A factory-woven shirt or dress made with a sewing machine was simpler and less durable than what had come before. But it was also orders of magnitude less expensive, and this meant that people had less of an emotional investment in individual articles of clothing.
Lower emotional investment and lower value = lower complexity and more homogeneity.
This makes sense to me. But there is a big problem with simply pointing to “industrialization” as the reason for the flattening out of global fashion.
That’s because the initial flattening predates, rather than follows, the Industrial Revolution itself.
Beau Brummels and “the Great Male Renunciation”
For almost a century now, historians have been arguing for some version of the following claim: during the late eighteenth century — possibly influenced by egalitarian ideals of the Revolutionary Enlightenment — wealthy men across Europe began to abandon elaborate clothing in favor of muted colors and simple cuts. The modern business suit was born out of this stylistic earthquake. In fact, perhaps the whole concept of minimalism was, too.
Many have argued that the famous Beau Brummell, a notorious London dandy of the 1810s, was the instigator. Certainly juxtapositions like the one below (with a 17th century nobleman at left, and Brummell circa 1805 at right) certainly do make it look like he was up to something genuinely new.
I’m skeptical of this, however. Long before Brummell’s black suit, there was the “Spanish style” of 17th century Castille. It’s an extremely sober, stripped-down fashion that you might recognize from Velazquez portraits, which typically feature clothing almost entirely in tones of black and gray:
More importantly: the “Brummell look” and the Spanish style are shifts in fashions among specific social classes and in specific places. It seems to me that if we are searching for the larger cause of why clothes became boring, we can’t pin it on a single person or even a single group of people. It has to be something more structural and more global.
The true culprit: individuality?
The Livonian women that began this post were members of the nobility. But it’s a striking fact that even portraits of immigrants to Ellis Island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries — people from humble backgrounds, without much material wealth — reveal costumes that are almost as elaborate. Take these two friends from Hungary, for instance:
Or these women from the island of Guadalupe, who arrived at Ellis Island in April, 1911:
Or this brother and sister from Sweden:
There is not much we can say about the people in these three photographs with any certainty. But I will venture one guess: all of these people had severe limitations on what society allowed them to do, think, and say. Prior to the twentieth century, the vast majority of people lived in legal and social regimes which controlled not just the clothes they were allowed to wear but the choice of whether they would have children, who they would marry, and what jobs they would perform. The idea that you choose your partner, your profession, your educational path, your hobbies, and your friends is a surprisingly recent one.
But humans are both adaptable and vain. And although certain aspects of dress have typically been strictly regulated (such as the right to wear lace or silk or carry a sword) each peasant costume or regional fashion of the premodern world also allowed for considerable individual expression. For example, even poor women in many cultures would’ve been able to hand embroider their clothing to their liking, so long as they stayed within certain constraints. For a long time, for a large swathe of humanity, clothing was one of the only ways of publicly expressing your individuality, your inner life.
That began to break down in the decades shortly after these photos were taken. First in the aftermath of World War I. Then with accelerating intensity in the combination of globalization and transformed social customs and gender norms which marked the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s (something my book Tripping on Utopia is partially about).
Suddenly, you didn’t need to use clothing to express yourself. Even non-elite people began to have other means of doing so.
This, then, is my own personal theory for why clothes became boring: everything else became more interesting.
Weekly links
• “Evidence of the use of silk by bronze age civilization for sacrificial purposes in the Yangtze River basin of China” (Nature)
• “He also presented the Emperor with gifts including 110 specimens of slime molds kept in empty taffy boxes” (from the Wikipedia page for Minakata Kumagusu)
• DNA analysis of the victims of the 79 CE volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii raises a lot of new questions (Current Biology)
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