The emergent middle class broke the old dress order by appropriating elite styles

Evidence

Had industrialization merely involved the transfer of power from one sort of elite group to another, the old appearential order might, with some modifications, have remained intact. As we have seen, the elites of the bourgeois were no less concerned with the visible display of status than were their aristocratic counterparts.But industrialization involved more than transfer; it also involved, to a degree, distribution. The preindustrial city had been largely divided between the very rich (aristocratic elites and bourgeois merchants) and the very poor. In the early industrial city, despite the continuation of grinding poverty among the majority of the population, the petit bourgeois, the notso-wealthy middle class, had begun seriously to emerge. These shopkeepers and tradesmen and clerks and their families shared in the riches that industrialization was making possible. As their numbers increased, they also began to collect a share of the power that industrialization had torn from the landed aristocracy. They too were concerned with status and, helped along by technological innovations (discussed below), they saw less and less reason for expressing their “proper place” through dress. With this group, we see the beginning on a massive scale of what is by now a common characteristic of modern life: the appropriation by one group of the dress style of another. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 312

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’: the classic-mechanism here is that dress-code breakdown follows when a rising class acquires means to imitate elite styles — gives that essay a structural (not just moral-panic) cause.