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Expenditures for the extravagant costuming were very high and the results meant to be appreciated. Moreover, the audience members were dressed to make a fine, if not always truthful, impression on one another; thus, the masque and its conventions turn the entire company, audience included, into part of the performance.
After the Renaissance, literary dress still insists on its (tricky) connection with status, as an upper-class appearance remains part of a project to join or maintain membership there. In addition, clothing now comes to speak for an interior state, a moral condition—fashionability can signal an interior too little concerned with the spiritual—indeed, an excessive interest in fashion is often presented as a potential catalyst for ruin. In some literary works, this tension between the newly justified desire to dress “up” a class and the desire to show oneself as above the need to display one’s status costs the protagonist, usually a woman, not just money, but crises of indecision. Dressing can be seen as a task of hewing the line between fashion and respectability.
Ruth Mayer shows American Puritans writing with great concern about the wars with Algonquians in “‘[I]ntollerable excesse and bravery’: On Dressing Up in Puritan New England.” Commentators like Increase Mather see the causes of their war with the Native Americans as divine displeasure with Puritans dressing above their rank in a spiritually weak pursuit of status and the fashions that communicate it—the display of undeserved status exposing depravity. Clothing’s capacity for theatricality and its inextricable connections with commerce prompt calls for spiritual reform as well as juridical enforcement of sumptuary codes.
There are of course responses: following the simplified dress of the Puritan era, the hoop petticoat, for example, marks an extravagant visual display, raising questions about female sexuality. In “‘Let your Apparel manifest your Mind’: Dress and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature,” Jennie Batchelor examines fashion’s power to reveal an interior identity.