20 Fashion Laws From History With Brutal Consequences

In July of 1645, Regent Dorgon, who ruled Qing China on behalf of its child emperor, ordered Han Chinese men to shave the front of their heads within ten days and tie the remainder into a queue, a long braided ponytail. And this was no matter of choosing whether the hairstyle suited you. Confucian tradition held that hair was inherited from parents and could never be cut. In cities like Jiading and Jiangyin, which had refused to obey the order, Qing troops carried out massacres.

One day, King Ptolemy of Mauretania, a client king and grandson of Mark Antony, wore an admired purple cloak to games in Rome. Emperor Caligula had him executed. Why? Well, Tyrian purple, the most expensive dye in the empire, was increasingly used exclusively by the emperor under treason law. Being better dressed than the emperor was clearly not worth the compliment. Fashion, in his case, was fatal.

In 1698, Tsar Peter I returned from his tour of Western Europe and began shaving his noblemen’s beards himself. In 1705, the tsar made it official, establishing a “Beard Tax” which could run up to 100 rubles a year for merchants (who got stamped tokens stating “the beard is a superfluous burden”) and was levied on peasants each time they entered a town. If you were attached to your facial hair, you quite literally had to pay for the privilege. It wasn’t abolished until 1772 by Catherine the Great.

In 215 BCE, shortly after Rome’s devastating loss at the Battle of Cannae, Roman tribune Marcus Oppius passed the Lex Oppia, which restricted women to no more than a half-ounce of gold, prohibited wearing multicolored or purple-trimmed clothes, and forbade carriage rides within the city. By 195 BCE, with the war won, Roman women blockaded the Forum and surrounded senators’ homes, demanding that the law be repealed. In the face of such protest, the Senate capitulated despite the vociferous protests of the Roman statesman Cato the Elder.

After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, Britain passed the Act of Proscription, which outlawed kilts, tartan, and other forms of Highland dress for males in the Scottish Highlands between August 1747 and 1782. Punishment for a first offense was imprisonment for six months without bail; a second conviction would see transportation for seven years to the American colonies. The Act did not apply to women or members of the gentry. It also exempted those Highlanders who served in the British Army.

From September 1793, the tricolor cockade, a ribbon rosette worn on clothing or a hat, was mandatory in public during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror; the National Convention ruled that appearing in public without a tricolor cockade (or with a royalist white cockade or an aristocrat’s knee-breeches) could be interpreted as evidence of counter-revolutionary behavior, leading to arrest, trial by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and execution by the guillotine. The working class adopted long trousers and called themselves “sans-culottes,” “without knee-breeches.”

On January 8, 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran’s ruler at the time, decreed the “Kashf-e hijab,” a ban on all Islamic veils, both the headscarf and the full-body chador, in public. The police were instructed to rip them off women’s heads on the streets and beat up those who objected; their houses were raided. Some women did not even step outside their houses for years in order to avoid enforcement of the law, which lasted until Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in 1941.

In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council, a major church council convened by Pope Innocent III, decreed that Jews and Muslims residing within Christian territory must wear distinctive garments to avoid mingling with Christians. In France and England, a yellow felt badge was prescribed. In German lands, Jews were required to wear a conical hat, the Judenhut. England’s Statute of the Jewry, enacted in 1275, required Jews to wear the badge; penalties for not doing so included fines, beatings, and expulsion from England.

In November 1895, Korea’s king, Gojong, in line with the Japanese-influenced Gabo Reforms, issued a cabinet order, the Danbalryeong, or Short Hair Decree, for men to abandon the traditional topknot. In Neo-Confucian tradition, hair was considered a gift from one’s parents and could not be cut. Police would take men to the market square and cut off their hair. A haircut was suddenly a political act, whether you wanted it to be or not. Public outrage led to armed uprisings, and in February 1896, a mob lynched Prime Minister Kim Hong-jip.

By 1863, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors enacted a police ordinance outlawing appearing in public in “a dress not belonging to his or her sex.” The city code granted police discretion to arrest anyone suspected of being gender nonconforming. More than 100 such arrests were documented prior to 1900. Between 1848 and 1900, over 34 U.S. cities also adopted similar ordinances.

The government of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding president of the Republic of Turkey, passed Law No. 671 on November 25, 1925, which banned the Ottoman felt fez, a brimless hat traditionally associated with the Ottoman Empire, and prescribed Western brimmed hats as mandatory headgear for men. Riots erupted in the towns of Rize, Erzurum, and elsewhere. While many men who wore fezzes were fined or given short jail sentences, the Independence Tribunals sentenced more than a dozen riot leaders to death, including the Islamic scholar İskilipli Atıf Hoca.

Poulaines, shoes with long pointed toes that were stuffed with moss or wool, were fashionable among European elites in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In England, King Edward IV decreed in 1463 that the toes of any man not a lord should be no longer than two inches, with a fine of 20 shillings imposed on each offense. Two years later, the London city government forbade cobblers from cutting points of such length, and the church declared those who went to extremes subject to excommunication. Nobody was hanged for it.

Production of and access to murex-dyed purple silk called porphyra were tightly controlled by the empire, with the best colors reserved for the royal family. Children born to a reigning emperor in the purple bedchamber of the imperial palace were known as porphyrogenitus (“born in the purple”). Unauthorized manufacture, ownership, or sale of the highest quality purple silk was considered high treason against the emperor. Purple really was serious business.

Britain’s Parliament passed a law in 1723 addressing poachers known as Blacks who wore soot or burnt cork to conceal their identities while hunting in royal forests at night. The Black Act stated that appearing in a royal forest, chase, or highway wearing a blackened or otherwise disguised face was a capital felony and subject to death by hanging without the benefit of clergy, meaning the offender could not claim an old legal exemption that sometimes spared people from execution. The law remained on the books until 1823.

In the Edo period (1603-1868), the government maintained a strict social hierarchy, in which only samurai were officially permitted to wear silk—though wealthy merchants routinely ignored the rule. In 1683, the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi moved to formally outlaw merchants from wearing outer silk garments. Their penalty was confiscation, fines, a few weeks in handcuffs and fetters, or expulsion from Edo. To evade this law, merchants invented a garment called the uramasari, a plain, dark cotton coat with artwork sewn in silk fabric inside. Plain on the outside, luxury where the authorities couldn’t immediately see it.

On January 24, 1565, a London servant called Richard Walweyn was arrested for donning “monstrous and outrageous” padded hose, the heavily padded breeches fashionable at the time, in contravention of Queen Elizabeth I’s Statutes of Apparel, which sought to keep class distinctions visibly intact. In subsequent proclamations in 1580 and 1597, royal marshals were stationed at the gates of London, shears in hand, ready to snip any citizen whose ruff, the large pleated collar worn around the neck, was judged too wide.

A respectable married Roman woman did not wear a toga because she wore a long dress called a stola. Under the Lex Julia de adulteriis, the anti-adultery moral law passed in 18 BCE under the Emperor Augustus, a woman convicted of adultery was stripped of the right to wear this garment and was required to wear the toga of a prostitute in its place, made from dark-colored wool. Her punishment was designed to mark her as a convicted adulteress before she even said a word.

City governments across 14th- and 15th-century Europe required sex workers to wear particular insignia to distinguish themselves from other women: striped hoods in London; yellow scarves in Venice and Vienna; red caps in Zurich; bells attached to their hats in Florence. They were forbidden from wearing furs, silk, or veils. Anyone found donning clothing deemed inappropriate for their class was likely to be publicly stripped, whipped, fined, or exiled.

Through the Ming and Qing dynasties, from 1368 to 1912, Minghuang (bright imperial yellow silk cloth) was only available to the emperor and top-tier royalty. It was illegal to wear bright imperial yellow, which was considered an attempt to usurp the Dragon Throne or claim the emperor’s authority for yourself. Any tailor caught sewing clothing of bright imperial yellow could be banished or executed for being an accomplice.

In March 1942, the War Production Board, the U.S. agency responsible for directing wartime production, issued Conservation Order L-85, limiting fabric consumption. The order effectively banned the zoot suit. However, bootleg tailors continued to make them, and they were embraced by Mexican-American, Black, and Filipino youths. In June 1943, Los Angeles servicemen and police attacked youths wearing zoot suits, stripping them and burning their clothes in the street. Subsequently, the city council passed an ordinance making the wearing of a zoot suit a misdemeanor.

This content was created with the help of AI.