A few years ago, the Irish singer Samantha Mumba appeared at a celebrity event wearing a diamond-studded dress costing some millions of euro. If it had covered her properly it would have been worth many millions more!
By the same token it is difficult for the ordinary person to comprehend paying thousands of euro for a handbag. During the Celtic Tiger I learned that there were people who did, so I found out the brand and phoned a well-known Grafton Street store to enquire. This is a store that is known to the shopping cognoscenti only by its initials.
‘Yes sir.’ The superior assistant said over the ‘phone, ‘they range from € 4,000 to €12,000. It depends on what the lady likes.’ I felt like replying: ‘Her boiled egg lightly done,’ but didn’t.
‘There’s a waiting list of months or even years,’ she said.
‘Can you get fakes?’ I asked.
‘I believe so, sir,’
‘And have you got any?’ I enquired impishly.
‘No sir, we carry only the real thing,’ she replied.
As the fella’ said: ‘There should be a law against it.’ Well, believe it or not, there used to be.
Throughout history many cultures have had sumptuary laws. One definition describes these as: ‘laws that restrict the personal consumption of goods based on class, income, occupation, creed or any other equally arbitrary criterion.’ The term also includes laws that placed limits on displays of wealth with food.
In these days of ‘you are what you eat,’ we forget that, despite the poverty of their subjects, princes and lords throughout history displayed their wealth and status by means of banquets. Some of these feasts lasted for days and could include as many as 20 or 30 courses. The high point of the feast was often the placing on the table of vast pies. When the crust was broken, birds, animals or even little boys emerged. You remember the nursery rhyme: “Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,/ When the pie was opened the birds began to sing,/ Wasn’t that a dainty thing to set before a king.”
Dress, however, is the best known subject of sumptuary laws. St Paul, that bête noir of feminists, decreed that women should veil their heads when praying or prophesying but men should not, because man is in the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man.
In ancient Greece, amongst numerous sumptuary laws there were restrictions on elaborate house furniture and the possession of gold and silver.
There was an extensively developed system of sumptuary laws in ancient Rome. These laws governed the kinds of material that could be used in making garments, the number of guests that could attend entertainments and they forbade the consumption of certain foods. A woman could not possess more than a half an ounce of gold and there was also a limit on the amount of money that could be spent on funerals and burial monuments, and a good idea too.
In 14th and 15th century Europe wealthy merchants and bankers began to gain political power. When the old aristocracy became threatened they used sumptuary laws to restrict the prominence of merchants and bankers, who were becoming a threat to them. These merchants and bankers flaunted their wealth by bedecking their wives in finery and jewels. This was the equivalent of today’s wealthy man’s wife-at-the-golf-club syndrome. ‘Plus ca change…’ The wives of wealthy Renaissance men had a myriad of excuses to circumvent the law; e.g. they claimed that jewelled buttons were functional and necessary to ensure modesty!
In the past in some Arab countries high-born ladies were required to cover their heads and faces, while concubines, servants and slaves were forbidden to do so. In these cultures veiling was a badge of social status as well as a device for ensuring anonymity. In Italy where for centuries women wore veils, the problem arose that the anonymity afforded by the veil allowed women of inferior social status who could afford to, to imitate their social superiors. Whereas the Church favoured head covering and veiling as a matter of modesty, some saw concealment as alluring.
In England Queen Elizabeth I, issued a decree that only the nobility could wear clothes that included sable or clothes of satin, silk or cloth mixed with gold or silver. Furthermore in England as in many other societies the clothes that prostitutes wore were strictly controlled.
Specification of dress based on economic status was notorious in Japan. According to Irish Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn, poor women were not allowed to wear leather sandals, only sandals made of straw or wooden clogs. They could not wear silk hair ribbons or hair ornaments of tortoise-shell. They could wear wooden combs or combs of bone, but not of ivory. Wealth or lack of it determined what kind of house a Japanese man might build. The kind of wood to be used was laid down, the type of roofing; bamboo thatch or straw and whether he was allowed or forbidden to use floor mats.
In Ireland today, taking into account Samantha Mumba’s jewelled dress and the sale of handbags in Dublin for € 12,000, maybe one of our political parties will include in their manifesto for the next general election the passing of sumptuary laws!