Cheap mass-produced clothing enabled the modern city’s masked heterogeneity.

Evidence

I suspect that these advances dealt the most crucial blow to the dominance of the appearential order for they eventually made available to a broad spectrum of persons quite inexpensive clothing that copied in design, if not in quality, the fashions of the elites. Without the availability of such clothing, the masked heterogeneity of the modern city (to be discussed in Chapter Four) might never have been achieved. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 322

Categorization

• SEED: An angle: mass-produced imitation fashion as the material precondition for urban anonymity — dress could no longer be read as honest class signal.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s reading purpose: if appearance cannot be trusted to signal status, the street observer must rely on other, weaker cues — feeding Simmel’s blasé detachment and Lofland’s categorization problem. — connects to: Industrialization shifted urban stranger-identification from dress to location; Preindustrial urbanites signaled their identity through visible costuming; Industrial urbanization destroyed appearance as a reliable clue to strangers’ identities
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 322

Broader Connections

• Industrialization shifted urban stranger-identification from dress to location #expands (0.75)
• Industrial urbanization destroyed appearance as a reliable clue to strangers’ identities #expands (0.70)
• Preindustrial urbanites signaled their identity through visible costuming #complicates (0.60)