CHAPTER THREE Testing the Limits The Menace of Fashion he time-honored signifier of social difference is clothing. In Thorstein Veblen's words, "Our apparel is always in evi- dence and affords an indication of our pecuniary standing to r 1 all observers at first glance." But by the second half of the nine- T teenth century, clothing had become more uniform, and, as a conse- quence, people (especially men in their monochrome costumes) began to look increasingly alike. The difficulty of reading clothing accurately did not, however, prevent exercises in cos- tume detection from becoming obsessions (this was also the age of Sherlock Holmes). As clothing became a less accurate (or at least less easily read) guide to social standing, people began to worry over it more and to take its role as an index of character more seriously.2 The personal quality that the male inquisitor might have wanted to ascertain most from a female's appearance was sexual morality: What was the woman's moral character? Was she a femme honnete or perhaps a filled This decoding was particularly tricky in the case of a woman being observed, because female appearance was apparently especially hard to judge and confu- sion could result in considerable distress and embarrassment. (Look again at fig. 4, "Paris Re- generated," for example.) Jean Quidam's "A Man Who Follows Women" of 1879 (fig. 31) recounts the story of a man who struggles, unsuccessfully, to determine accurately the sexual propriety of a strange woman encountered on the street. The city police knew that misjudging the integrity of respectable women was a problem, but rather than try to establish a system for labeling prostitutes, they complicated matters considerably by insisting that all women resemble one another. The police regulations governing the appearance of the card-carrying indecent woman, the fille isolee or fille en carte, forbade her to wear any distinctive clothing or accessories. Nothing on her exterior was to offend public morality by calling attention to her indecent interior. The elusory goal of 3 the mandate was the uniform appearance of all women. No less an authority than Parent- Duchatelet reckoned, however, that even if all women's clothing were identical, men in need of a prostitute would always be able to recognize one (in spite of the contrary evidence of confu- sion on such matters in a journalistic picture like Quidam's). The other side of the widespread perplexity over female appearance was that, as a conse- quence of the belief that moral meanings were immanent in mien, women attempted to control 6 4 5 the image they were transmitting. For some, this resulted in a fear or virtual suspension of