From Fashionable Frivolity to ‘Addicted Abandon’: The Changing Moral Discourse on Fashion’s Excess from the Middle Ages to Today
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Medieval and Puritan times, moralists framed the following of new fashions and the pursuit of novelties as frivolity, pride and excess, while today discourses about overconsumption, unsustainable industry practices, and distance from producers take on ethical and moral tones sometimes being attributed to greed or apathy. This research traces these moralizing discourses and the terms they use, comparing particular fashions or dress behaviours that were considered immoral on the basis of wastefulness of time and resources (including money) in each time period. In Medieval times, long trains and wide sleeves were often considered wasteful and frivolous by moralists. Likewise, in the Puritan era, the extravagant use of time in preparing complex appearances was condemned. Today, the Western world’s consumption patterns are seen to be problematic. This research looks for patterns and similarities among the damned fashion practices, and highlights the differences in ways the discourse is framed. For example, in Medieval and Puritan times, morality was framed in relation to God and sin, while present day discourses assume a common morality that overlooks God or religion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".