Some general ideas about fashion.
In the 1860's if you were a rich woman you had plenty of calories to eat and could sit indoors all day long or cover yourself so that the sun didn't burn your skin. White plump women were the rage. Slender tanned women were looked down upon as wretched farm slaves, stupid low class sluts. Very unfashionable to be tanned and slender.
In the 1960's if a woman was fat and pale she was probably on welfare living on gubmint cheese with your macaroni and sitting inside watching TV all day on welfare.
If a woman was slender and tanned she was skiing at Gstadd and eating a healthy macrobiotic diet because she was rich, successful. Fashion came to despise the fat and pale and adore the slender and tanned.
During the French Revolution at the height of the terror it became fashionable to dress in filthy rags out of nothing less than fear of the envious angry mob.
During the Thermidorian Reaction after Robespierre was guillotined on 9 Thermidor putting an end to the Terror suddenly there was an odd efflorescence of fashion among the Mervielleuse et Incroyables, the reascendant nobility but with a twist; they dressed as prosperous criminal classes, dandified coachmen and the women dressed in transparent gauzy gowns that left nothing to the imagination, like whores. They were differentiating their status from the tight assed bourgeois genteel by being audacious, as aristocrats will. This was quickly picked up in England during the Regency by the Regency bucks who added prize fighters to the inspiration for their fashions.
By the mid 1800's men dressed with tall hats like smokestacks, they smoked cigars and wore stovepipe trousers as though emulating the factories in fashion that enriched them.
Tom Wolfe goes deep into the language of fashion in great detail in his journalism, analyzing its role as signifiers of status and wealth.
