Mass-produced imitation clothing destroyed the visual class-order of public space

Evidence

The third thing that was happening in the early industrial city involved technological advances in the manufacrure of cloth, and eventually, the mass production of clothing (Smelser, 1959; Lenski, 1970:313-315). 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

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s flâneur/observing-self project: cheap copied clothing is the material precondition making strangers visually illegible, which is exactly what forces Simmel’s blasé urban cognition and Lofland’s new categories of stranger-reading. — connects to: Public performance reveals the Other as a prenumerical look that decomposes when objectified; Aesthetic poverty afflicts the poor through forced embedding in cloned corporate environments — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1590
• SEED: Article angle: the sewing machine / mass clothing as the forgotten technology that killed legible class hierarchy in the street—costume as social graph collapsing once imitation becomes affordable.
• ADDENDUM: Ties to the reader-author’s standing interest in trees/infrastructure as worldbuilding and material conditions shaping order: here cheap cloth, not just architecture, is infrastructure of urban anonymity.