Of Sumptuary Laws

There is something wonderfully presumptuous in the legislator who believes he can, by statute, govern the appetites of men. The sumptuary laws — those solemn enactments that prescribe what cloth a merchant’s wife may wear, how many dishes a count may set before his guests, what colours are reserved for princes — have never, in any country or any age, accomplished what they set out to do. Desire does not read the statute books. It does the opposite: wherever a thing is declared forbidden, it becomes at once more desirable than it ever was before.

I have observed this in small matters as well as great. Tell a man he may not wear velvet, and velvet becomes the very emblem of what he wishes to be. The nobleman who is accustomed to damask thinks nothing of it; but let the king declare that only the royal household may wear damask, and that same nobleman will feel the deprivation as a wound to his honour. We do not value things for what they are, but for what they signal — and prohibition is itself a kind of signal, pointing toward what is rare and therefore coveted.

“In the matter of dress, we are governed less by warmth or beauty than by the desire to be seen wearing what others cannot. The law that forbids a thing to some and permits it to others has not diminished the thing; it has made it a prize.”

The ancients understood this better than we do. The Romans, who made more sumptuary laws than any nation I know of, also produced the most extravagant displays of luxury the world has witnessed. Every new law provoked a new evasion; every evasion produced a stricter law; the whole enterprise became a game in which the rich and ingenious always won. Our French legislators have not done better. The silk merchants of Lyon have always found ways to clothe the wives of lawyers in the materials reserved for duchesses, and the duchesses have always wanted something newer and more costly still.

If we truly wished to moderate expenditure, the means are simpler and more honest: lead by example from the top, and let the natural working of fashion — which always tends to move on to the next novelty — do the rest. Luxury fashions run their own course; what was the ambition of one generation becomes the embarrassment of the next without any law being required. The legislator who reaches for the statute in such matters only proves that he understands neither human nature nor the strange mathematics of desire, by which prohibition multiplies what it intends to diminish.