Rich merchants, not the poor, challenged aristocratic dress codes — but only wanted membership.

Evidence

As we saw in the last chapter, the maintenance of appearential ordering, or at least those aspects of it relating to the visibility of status, was largely in the interest of the aristocratic elites. They were its watchdogs, its righteous guardians. We saw also that this guardianship had, for centuries, been no easy job. The assault had not come from the masses. They were much too poor to even consider aping the dress of their “betters.” No, the assault had come from that minority in the old feudal orders who had been able to accumulate great wealth: the merchant bourgeois. This is not to suggest that this group was ideologically opposed to the visible display of status distinctions. Exactly the opposite. Where they were in control, as in Colonial America, they took great pains to institute costuming regulations quite similar to those extant in Europe. What this group wanted, rather, was merely to display an elite status which they felt, by right of wealth, they deserved. However, as long as the major economic base of the larger society was agricultural, and as long as the aristocratic elites controlled this base, the princes of commerce could be held at bay. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 309

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article on sumptuary law and class/identity signaling in dress.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supplements the immodesty article’s discussion of sumptuary laws with the merchant-bourgeois motive for assaulting aristocratic dress order.