Fashion stench
In his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), Thorstein Veblen described how people set themselves apart, how those with the means put their social status on display with rare material goods. He was talking about the behavior of the wealthy he observed in the Gilded Age, but he applied what was known of prior generations, too. The core idea is that those with wealth and power will tend to want to put their wealth and power on display for everyone else to see through various obvious adornments, making clear that you’ve got excess wealth, time, and—by implication—power to flaunt.
Virginia Postrel recounts the civilizational history of chemistry as it pertains to coloring thread and cloth in The Fabric of Civilization (Basic Books, 2020). She tells of some of the earliest evidence of dyed cloth coming from the lost civilizations of coastal Peru dating back some six thousand years, discovered as fragments of ancient cotton cloth in the desert. She also describes early Eurasian dyes based on plants, like the blues from woad and indigo. But probably one of the more fascinating early colors she describes was Tyrian, or royal, purple in use since the time of the Phoenicians in the eastern Mediterranean over two millennia ago and for hundreds of years hence
Even more extreme than other fabric colors, this one required immense effort to produce—and we struggle to imagine how anyone ever came up with the methods to produce it, as well as to determine if it would stick to the threaded fibers. Tyrian purple, in fact, came from processing a particular species of murex Mediterranean sea snails. And what processing it involved!
Divers had to harvest the snails from the sea floor by the bushel, and the animals had to be cracked open or crushed so as to extract a particular gland from inside. The glands had to be cooked for days—weeks—in massive cauldrons at temperatures just below boiling (in an age long before thermometers), in which the material also had to steep. The resultant soup contained a mixture of salt, lime, and probably urine—and it reeked to the skies. So much so that archeologists have found the mounds of discarded murex shells from the procedure a good, safe distance away from and downwind of the nearest settlements. Apart from the hot, smelly soups, there were heaps of decaying snail carcasses rotting in the sun not far away.
The resultant color was not, as experience with modern dyes would lead us to believe, particularly bold or brilliant. But the process that yielded it caused the finished fabric to stink appreciably. While the wearer’s wealth and power were colorfully displayed, the light note of a pungent moldering corpse presumably gave the garments that extra oomph.
Yet it was also the stench of high status, since producing the color took such tremendous amounts of work, making it ridiculously expensive. Postrel:
Even the purple’s notorious stench conveyed prestige, because it proved the shade was the real thing, not an imitation fashioned from cheaper plant dyes.
For sellers, the high cost reflected how laborious and disgusting the dye was to produce […]. [p. 119]
Eventually, the ceaseless pursuit of better, more impressive fabric colors that were easier to produce led to the replacement of Tyrian purple, and to the loss of the art of its production. The pursuit of better fabric dyes would eventually lead to an industrial science of chemistry in the 18th and 19th centuries, too, which by today offers us such a cheap abundance of textiles that even the wealthiest of our ancestors never could have dreamed of, much less owned.
And we don’t even have to stink to dress handsomely. Dressing to stink is now entirely a matter of choice.
The Wikipedia article on Tyrian purple is quite detailed with several illustrations.
Well, seems I am in the minority here. I seem to be the only one who interpreted the OP as a commentary about the shallowness of judging people by the clothes they wear. But most of the replies are actually in favor of doing exactly that, of judging people who don't dress up as lazy bums who don't care about other people. It's not something I expected out of this comment section.
I’m giving you a 👍👍 for this one, Marque. How interesting, especially because I love color. I’m always looking at it. I have lots of paints, and there’s nothing like putting some beautiful, bright watercolor on a piece of white paper.
My SIL told me about a show (it’s free) on PBS that looks at how the Royals used clothing to distinguish themselves. There were rules for what others could wear! Elizabeth I started the trend, according to the narrator, and the fabric and colors were spectacular. I tried to take a quick look for the title, but PBS is always a pain to navigate!!
It’s funny that the “smell” was important because it signified that the cloth wad dyed from the real thing. I’m not sure why, but that reminds me of “The Emperor Wore No Clothes,” although I know that’s now what it was about.