Fashion and Disease

Fashion can kill and make people sick, but fashions, fashionable changes, and eventually even fashion systems may also rise from death, illness, and destruction. This paper focusses on six great epidemics in the course of 1600 years – the plague, the cocoliztli, syphilis, tuberculosis, AIDS/HIV, and COVID-19. The epidemics and pandemics have been chosen selectively, focusing on those that have had noticeable fashion consequences, whether direct or more complex and obscure. As we will see, some of the pandemic effects have been visible and visual, while other have been structural and less immediately obvious. Although cloth, accessories, and garments have been (more or less successfully) used against disease, too, such as flannel waistcoats during the nineteenth century Cholera pandemic, here the focus is on the fashion consequences of contagious illnesses. The list of diseases is by no means exclusive, or exhaustive of the severe pandemics the world has gone through.