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dress may meet practical needs such as protection against climate and labour hazards, but it has also been a powerful tool in the maintenance of hierarchy through its reflection of status, and has served to distinguish occupation and faith as well as rank. It additionally mirrors fashion and permits expression of personal taste.
Sumptuous clothes are usually worn by the more privileged classes, to enforce authority,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], flaunt wealth, or merely dissociate themselves from menial labour: medieval and Tudor monarchs could not wear too many jewels or precious metals; outer clothing was slashed or looped to show underlying layers of expensive fabric; impractical footwear and incapacitating sleeves were signs of leisure,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], if not symbols of dignity. Sumptuary laws may have been framed to protect home industries by bans on foreign imports (clothes,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], cloth, wool) and internal trade controls, but they considerably enhanced, then maintained,[link widoczny dla zalogowanych], class distinctions.
Because of ‘the outragious and excessive apparel of divers peoples against their estate and degree’, dress for servants, handicraftsmen and yeomen, esquires and gentlemen, merchants and burgesses, knights, clerks, and ploughmen was firmly regulated in 1363 *via quality of cloth and permitted embellishment. Such distinctions were perpetuated in clauses forbidding velvet caps to any below the degree of knight (8 Eliz. c. 11) or demanding the Sunday wearing of woollen ‘statute’ caps (13 Eliz. c. 19) by all save the nobility, clergy, and London company wardens. Dress, according to Lord in 1745, was a very foolish thing, ‘yet it is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well dressed, according to his rank and way of life.