Fashion and Class

Rachel Worth

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780857854940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Modedesign

In what ways do changing notions of social class correspond with key developments in the history of fashion? Focusing on examples ranging from 18th-century Britain to aspects of the global fashion industry in the early 21st century, Fashion and Class examines the meaning and evolution of the term 'class', from its Marxist origins to modern day interpretations. Did industrialisation, technological change and developments in fashion retailing bring about a degree of 'class levelling' or in fact intensify class antagonism? And to what extent does modern mass consumption and cheap labour revive some of the ethical issues faced in 19th-century British textile factories? Exploring a variety of case studies that examine the changing relationships between fashion and class in different historical contexts, from the French revolutionaries of the 1780-90s through to the changing relationships between couture, designer and high-street fashion in the mid-20th century and onwards, Fashion and Class is essential reading for those wishing to understand the ways in which the fashion system is closely connected with ideas of class.

1

What’s in a name? The language of class in relation to fashion and fabrics

Adopting a sociological approach, Diana Crane revealed how, in pre-industrial societies, clothing indicated very precisely a person’s position in the social structure, revealing not only status and gender, but frequently occupation, religious affiliation and regional origin. However, as Western societies industrialised, the effect of social stratification on clothing ‘behaviour’ was such that ‘the expression of class and gender took precedence over the communication of other types of social information’.¹ This chapter explores how the evolution of the notion of class – originating from an essentially Marxist definition to one that has, almost imperceptibly, become a more general way of describing social stratification – can be related to a discussion about the politics, production, design, retailing and consumption of fashion. It also considers the ways in which ideas around class and taste were woven into theories that aim to explain changes in fashion. Often useful as insights into the time in which they were written, such theories offer, however, limited and mostly ‘top-down’ models of fashionable change.

Class is widely accepted as a quintessentially British fact of life, ‘a heritage and language that we can all share’.² Although definitions of class have evolved over time, the term endures in English common parlance and informs how we see ourselves in social, cultural and economic relations to others. The decline in the numbers engaged in domestic service in the first half of the twentieth century and of those working in the British textile industries over the course of the latter half of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries (due in part to outsourcing by powerful retailers) and the closing of mines, steelworks and shipyards – in other words the demise of those workplaces in which the British working classes were, to use historian E. P. Thompson’s phrase, ‘made’ – have together led to a decrease in the number of people who could, strictly speaking, be described as working class. In fact, it has been argued that white working-class men are probably ‘the most forgotten and ill-considered class in contemporary Britain’.³ However, the rise and dominance of service industries and the professions has resulted in the ‘middle classes’ (using the term loosely) gaining ascendancy in terms of relative numbers.

In the twentieth century, changes in the labour market and in occupations were not alone in impacting directly on class structures; there were other factors, such as wider social change and a degree of class levelling brought about by two world wars, greater equality for women and the impact of the labour movement and trade unions. Following the General Strike of 1928, the 1930s have been identified as a period of ‘class struggle’, with the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) becoming Britain’s largest union by 1939.⁴ The textile industry continued to be an arena for industrial dispute, just as it had been almost a century earlier: mass production conducted on assembly lines in factories was a radically new development in the 1930s. In 1931 workers engaged in hosiery production at Leicester’s Wolsey plant walked out en masse.⁵ However, class-consciousness was, arguably, considerably denuded with the erosion of the distinction between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor demonstrated by Aneurin Bevan’s support for universal welfare provision (not ‘policed’ by a means test) and Clement Attlee’s Labour government (1945–51).⁶ The latter saw the inauguration of a comprehensive welfare state and compulsory free secondary education for all children aged between eleven and fifteen. The provisions of the 1936 Education Act raised the school leaving age to fifteen in principle, but this was postponed until the 1944 Education Act was implemented in 1947. In 1972 the school leaving age was raised to sixteen.

Yet even with (relative) social levelling over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, the early twenty-first century saw continued material inequality, in a society in which the consumption of ‘stuff’ was heralded as the measure of (economic) well-being. Class today is perhaps less about political power, educational attainment or cultural identity, but more about how much we own, and the means by which we get what we own. Accordingly, the recession and cuts of the early twenty-first century have reaffirmed the relevance of class in contemporary Britain in which the richest 10 per cent are said to have become richer and the poorest 10 per cent poorer.

Even so, in the 1990s politicians of the left and right heralded the emergence of a classless society. Suzanne Moore, in an article in the Guardian, wrote: ‘The unleashing of the market has continued to undermine the post-war settlement, a way of organising society in which people identified themselves by class. Technology has further ruptured this class identification as people cluster in networks and not hierarchies.’⁷ But perceptions of class are significant, with the polls suggesting in the early twenty-first century that more than half of British people still considered themselves to be working class.⁸ ‘Class’, observes Danny Dorling, ‘is not simply your relation to the means of production, or a quantity that can be determined for you when you answer a few survey questions. It is also who you think you are.’⁹ Class is very much part of our collective historical consciousness, the latter both evidencing and perpetuating its existence. Furthermore, the history of the use of the term ‘class’ also evidences the way in which language ‘constructs our understanding of the world’.¹⁰

Perceptions of class have therefore clearly mutated over time. However, for most of the period covered by this study, the working classes, broadly defined, dominated in terms of sheer numbers. It has been calculated that by the end of the nineteenth century, they constituted the overwhelming majority in England (85 per cent) when compared with those in the United States (82 per cent) and France (73 per cent).¹¹ In the early twentieth century the so-called traditional working class – everyone who worked with their hands, whether actually in or out of work – still constituted the vast majority of Britons. Even by mid-century, if we include manual workers and their families, domestic servants and lower grade clerical workers – typists, secretaries, office boys, messengers – the proportion has been calculated to be more than three-quarters and more than half as late as 1991.¹² Of these, domestic servants – singled out in terms of dress because they often came into close contact with notions of high fashion and yet had to wear unpopular caps and aprons – constituted the largest single group of working people in Britain in 1910 and 1923.¹³

Social classes are not monolithic, however, and we need to be wary of using the concept too simplistically. The terms ‘working’, ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ class(es) should, strictly speaking, be used in the plural if we are to take account of the nuances existing within any one of these designations. In the nineteenth century, for example, the working class comprised skilled labourers at the top and criminals and paupers at the bottom, with a multitude in between.¹⁴ In his novel The Rainbow (1915), D. H. Lawrence, the son of a Nottinghamshire miner, referring probably to the 1880s, describes Will Brangwen – himself working class – tempted away from his wife one evening after a football match in Nottingham when he meets Jennie: ‘He noted the common accent. It pleased him. He knew what class she came of. Probably she was a warehouse lass. He was glad she was a common girl.’¹⁵ Brangwen’s startling class-consciousness illustrates the complexity of social stratification as well as the matter-of-fact articulation of class definitions and identities. Virginia Woolf’s description of the working classes in their ‘hideous clothes’ is also unashamedly class-conscious – elsewhere she speaks of the ‘shoddy old fetters of class’¹⁶ – but her perspective was from a middle-class standpoint, and her writing has a very different impact on the reader compared with that of Lawrence.

Evolution of the term ‘class’

This study covers the period from the latter decades of the eighteenth century to the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The former saw the dual impact on fashion and style as a result of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. However, class acquired currency in the nineteenth century and is specifically associated with the intensive industrialisation of that period which went hand in hand with the evolution of the British factory system. (While the middle-class characters of Jane Austen’s novels are very much aware of class, we will see that her world is far away from the industrial ‘context’ of Elizabeth Gaskell’s and Charles Dickens’s novels.) The latter created a new social structure based on the exploitation of large numbers of workers and their labour by a relatively small managerial and factory-owning elite: precisely the kind of model described by Elizabeth Gaskell in her novels Mary Barton (1848) and North and South (1855) and satirised in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854). The conflict in interests of, on the one hand, factory operatives, struggling to work and support themselves and their families and, on the other, the factory managers and owners – who, with few exceptions, were more interested in making a profit based on a crude cash-nexus model – lies at the centre of all of these novels. These opposing interests were famously described by E. P. Thompson in his pioneering account of the evolution of class and class-consciousness, The Making of the English Working Class (1963):

Class happens, when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared) feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.¹⁷

According to Peter Laslett, in pre-industrial society, there was a large number of status groups (the number of people enjoying or enduring the same social status) but only one body of persons capable of concerted action over the whole area of society, ‘only one class in fact’. ‘Class’ is defined by Laslett as ‘a number of people banded together in the exercise of collective power, political and economic’.¹⁸ According to the Oxford English Dictionary, its use in regard to a social division or grouping does not appear until 1772. Until then, ‘estate’, ‘order’, ‘rank’ and ‘degree’ (terms that originated in medieval times) continued to be used to describe social positions. The use of the word ‘class’ is therefore historically associated with the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, making it somewhat anachronistic to apply it to earlier systems of class division.¹⁹ The idea of class thus evolved with a Marxist tradition of historical interpretation that analyses and explains labour relations as resulting from industrial capitalism. Of course, social stratification had existed in England long before the industrialisation of the nineteenth century, but notions of ‘orders’ and ‘ranks’ were based on fundamentally different historical circumstances which had evolved over the centuries and were often closely related to patterns of landownership, and, in turn, the latter’s relationship to the monarchy. The nobility – including titles from earl down to gentry – constituted the most powerful but also the minority in terms of numbers. Meanwhile, according to Gregory King’s well-known analysis of the structure of English society for 1688, the largest group of families in England was made up of ‘cottagers and paupers’: 400,000 out of 1,350,000.²⁰ By contrast, of all the people alive in Tudor and Stuart England, at most one out of twenty (i.e. 5 per cent) belonged to the gentry and above.²¹ This hierarchical structure was justified by the widely held belief that the order of society was ordained by God. Modes of dress, as the most visible indications of social status in the pre-industrial era, were therefore seen and ‘read’ in direct relation to that structure and this justified the sumptuary legislation of the Early Modern period (Chapter 2).

If the development of class from the late eighteenth century as a category for defining opposing interests and relative economic status testified to ‘pervasive inequality’,²² ultimately the pre-existing demarcations that distinguished people visually gradually broke down: in other words, class would ultimately create, if not classlessness, then at least a degree of democratisation in dress. Historian Neil McKendrick considers dress to be ‘the most public manifestation of the blurring of class divisions which wa...