Sumptuary Laws: When Purple Dye, Silk, and Gold Rings Were Crimes

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Under the seventh century BCE laws of the Locrians, drafted by Zaleucus, a freeborn woman in gold jewelry and a purple-bordered garment had legally declared herself a courtesan, and a man in a sheer Milesian cloak or a gold-studded ring was presumed bent on adultery. These were sumptuary laws, codes that told people what they could wear, eat, and display. This episode traces the two fears behind them. One was economic: imported silk and velvet drained silver from the realm. The other was social: once merchants grew richer than cash-poor nobles, anyone could buy the look of a lord, and the visual order of rank began to dissolve.

The tour runs from Rome, where wearing Tyrian purple without permission became treason and Pliny the Elder complained of the treasury emptied for silk, to Ming China, where the Hongwu Emperor fixed tomb decorations by bureaucratic rank, to Edo Japan, where rich merchants had to dress below indebted samurai. It also shows how badly the laws failed and how openly cynical they were. Historian Lorraine Daston calls them an extreme case of rule failure, Montaigne argued that bans only made luxuries more desirable, and Adam Smith mocked kings as the greatest spendthrifts in society.

• Florence created inspectors called the Officials of Women's Ornaments, yet in 1415 it let any woman ignore the luxury rules for a fee of 50 florins a year.
• England's Caps Act of 1571 required every male over six, nobility excepted, to wear an English wool flat cap on Sundays and holidays or pay three farthings a day.
• In Ming China, only top nobles and mandarins of the first three ranks could set their memorial stele on a carved stone tortoise. Lower ranks got a plain rectangular pedestal.
• Massachusetts Bay in 1634 required a fortune of 200 pounds to wear lace or gold thread, and South Carolina's 1712 slave codes barred enslaved people from any clothing finer than the coarsest cloth.
• The term lived on as an insult: William Howard Taft called Prohibition a bad sumptuary law in 1918, and Bhutan still regulates the color of ceremonial scarves by rank.