Dressing Up and Dressing Down: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Seventeenth-Century English Textile Industry

John Dunton's 1696 parable about the dangers of middle-class women dressing like "persons of quality" has its roots in the more or less endemic anxiety that prostitutes' "excellent Art . . . can easily turn a Sempstress into a waiting Gentlewoman." Recent scholarship on early modern prostitution and pornography interprets the time-honored conflation of women's bodies and the clothes they wear largely in economic terms, emphasizing English culture's treatment of prostitution as a degraded expression of capitalist production and consumption. But Dunton's allegory eludes this economic account of clothing's relationship to prostitution and pornography as he insists that clothing causes middle-class women's social and sexual degradation, rather than masking it. This insistence situates Dunton's warning within a half-century-long tradition of antidemocratic political pornographic satire that used clothing as a political rather than a social or economic signifier.