The third thing that was happening in the early industrial city involved technological advances in the manufacrure of cloth, and eventually, the mass production of clothing (Smelser, 1959; Lenski, 1970:313-315). I suspect that these advances dealt the most crucial blow to the dominance of the appearential order for they eventually made available to a broad spectrum of persons quite inexpensive clothing that copied in design, if not in quality, the fashions of the elites. Without the availability of such clothing, the masked heterogeneity of the modern city (to be discussed in Chapter Four) might never have been achieved.

XREF: Connects to Erving Goffman's work on presentation of self and the sociology of fashion and status display.

XREF: Connects to Thorstein Veblen's conspicuous consumption and the sociology of fashion as class signaling.

Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order a…, loc. 321