But industrialization involved more than transfer; it also involved, to a degree, distribution. The preindustrial city had been largely divided between the very rich (aristocratic elites and bourgeois merchants) and the very poor. In the early industrial city, despite the continuation of grinding poverty among the majority of the population, the petit bourgeois, the notso-wealthy middle class, had begun seriously to emerge. These shopkeepers and tradesmen and clerks and their families shared in the riches that industrialization was making possible. As their numbers increased, they also began to collect a share of the power that industrialization had torn from the landed aristocracy. They too were concerned with status and, helped along by technological innovations (discussed below), they saw less and less reason for expressing their "proper place" through dress. With this group, we see the beginning on a massive scale of what is by now a common characteristic of modern life: the appropriation by one group of the dress style of another.

XREF: Connects to the broader theme of dress as status marker and social appropriation that runs through this source and related work on fashion and class.

XREF: Connects to status-signaling and cultural appropriation literature; also fashion history narratives about class emulation.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 312