A Chicago judge ruled in 1908 that a nightgown was a luxury, not a necessity, and .thereupon issued a restraining order forbidding an eighteen-year-old girl from buying one against her father’s wishes. “The only possible use of a nightgown,” the judge explained, “is to keep off flies and mosquitoes, and the bedclothes will do just as well.” The father testified: “She never wore a nightgown in her life, and neither did her parents. She’s been associating with nifty people, that’s the trouble with her.” Clearly, as recently as this century, all Americans did not enjoy freedom of dress.

By the 1920s, however, production and distribution of ready-to-wear clothing had reached a stage that enabled most men and women to dress stylishly at moderate cost. As a Midwestern businessman observed, "1 used to be able to tell something about the background of a girl applying for a job as a stenographer by her clothes, but today I often have to wait till she speaks, shows a gold tooth or otherwise gives me a second clew.” This egalitarian confusion of class distinctions would seem to reflect the ideals of the early Republic, but in fact, it had evolved only gradually. For much of our history, according to Claudia Kidwell, the head curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s Costume Division, “Clothing’s most pervading function has been to declare status.” From the beginning Americans have loved fine clothes. In 1676 Hannah Lyman and thirty-five other young women of Northampton, Massachusetts, were arrested for overdressing—specifically for wearing hoods. A defiant Hannah appeared in court in the offending garment and was censured and fined on the spot for “wearing silk in a fflonting manner, in an offensive way. . . .” Along with their style of dress, the colonists had brought from England laws like the 1621 Virginia resolution to “supress excess in cloaths” and to prevent anyone but high government officials from wearing “gold in their cloaths.”

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