Sumptuary laws and the asparagus firing cannon

There’s a little tale - which we admit we can’t quite nail down right now - about the plethora of cutlery that sits upon an aristocratic dinner table. It doesn’t actually matter in the slightest which knife, which fork, is used to do what - nor even that they fire their asparagus at each other from cannons. What does matter is that they know and you don’t. That makes them inside the group, you outside it and that’s the purpose of the enterprise.

Still, nothing that can’t be solved by Madame Guillotine or by good manners (we are reminded of Prince Phillip eating with his fingers so that Lady Tebbitt did not feel awkward) but then those latter are rare enough.

But - the point is the definition of the ingroup and the outgroup.

At which point modern fashion:

But this is changing. With circularity now a cornerstone of mainstream strategies toward sustainability, consumers and brands are looking at clothes through a new lens. Circularity is focusing attention on the longevity of a garment’s appeal and its value in the future resale market. This is a radical departure for the value system of an industry that has historically hero-worshipped brand new clothes – preferably with tags on, and tissue-wrapped – and has tended to dismiss as irrelevant to the fashion conversation any clothes that have already been worn.

The history of capitalism can, in fact, be seen in clothing. As has been remarked we know that QE I had a pair of stockings, the day she received them is in her diary. It was capitalism that allowed the mill girl to also have a pair or two.

Fast forward to today and pretty much anyone can have a new outfit - of a type, to be sure - for an hour or two of work. New clothes simply do not work as a marker of distinction, of being part of the ingroup. It really is only very recently indeed that the wearing of the same outfit to a “do” or two was regarded as the most unfortunate gauchery. A new outfit for each was a minimum requirement of being fashionable. We even recall - and it really was only in recent years - breathless articles about how Kate or the like had “recycled” an outfit by wearing it more than once.

If everyone including the proles can have new clothing whenever then fashion isn’t performing its duty - of marking that ingroup and that outgroup. So, the definition of what is fashionable must change in order to preserve that function. Which is exactly what is happening.

One group arrowing in from one side wants to ban “fast fashion” in a modern version of sumptuary laws. Stop the proles from having access to cheap new clothes so as to preserve the distinction. From the other direction comes this insistence upon sustainability - change what fashion means away from having new clothes. For no other reason than that the proles can have new clothes so the marker of distinction has disappeared.

They’re firing asparagus at each other from cannons for no reason other than to mark that distinction between ingroup and outgroup. The rest of us should probably just leave them to it, pay them no mind. We can get on with enjoying what capitalism hath wrought, a world in which copious clean and new clothes are available to the entire population. It has, after all, taken us many millennia to get here.