EPISODE #36: Fashion Stories and the regulation of fashion throughout the ages (English version)

My Fashion Stories Box Podcast

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These past months news have been filled with articles on projects of laws, regulations aiming at limiting the consumption of fast fashion items, in the objective to counterbalance their negative impacts on the environment and the acceleration of the climate change crisis. This tendency gave me the will to investigate the past to see if this process of consumption control was specific to our modern society or if, on the contrary, there have already been examples of laws, edicts supervising the access as well as the consumption of goods linked with looks and appearance.

In this new episode of My Fashion Stories Box Podcast :

• We will travel back in time to the first antique civilisations in the look for the first occurrences of sumptuary laws ;
• We will take a look at the practices in Europe during the Middle Ages on that matter and their impacts on the social hierarchy of these times ;
• We will then go on our time travel to the Renaissance, the 17th century and the 18th century ;
• We will go in Imperial China to see if Sumptuary laws were more universal and not just a European particularity;
• We will study to which extend the Industrial Revolution and the 19th century society changed the rules;
• We will come closer to our modern times and analyze how the two world conflits of the 20th century regulated clothing access for economic purposes;
• And, to conclude this episode, we will debate on the actual effectiveness of these kind of laws and other consumption restrictions.

Follow me in this new episode of My Fashion Stories Box Podcast to learn more on how appearance, fashion and luxury have been perceived and their access regulated over the centuries.

Links to the sources mentioned in this episode:

• Documentary The True Cost
• Documentary Inside the Shein Machine
• BBC documentary Guilty Pleasures

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