MODA. — From the Latin modus (form, manner, measure), it differs from usage, custom, and convention,
because it changes almost daily and constitutes the model to be pursued, so that things in fashion are done because others do them.
Fashion accompanies, one might say, every manifestation of human activity: artistic and craftsmanlike forms, literary activities; even public opinion obeys fashion, just as do styles of dress and ornament, although these, especially today, undergo more rapid changes.
It is therefore more particularly to their variations that the term fashion is applied; associated with it are those accessories that complete it: jewels, more or less rich and costly fabrics, furs, furnishings of the home, products of the minor arts (wrought iron, crystalware, lamps, coachwork)—in short, luxury (v.), which is a foremost element in the development of fashion. Fashion, in turn, is linked to the prosperity of the various social classes and to the changes that new discoveries introduce into ordinary life (such as motoring, metallurgy, mechanics, etc.). Fashion may more or less seriously injure Christian principles, both through the thoughtless squandering of goods (when it is not proportionate to one’s circumstances, or causes more important needs of body or soul to be neglected, or becomes fanaticism or tyranny, mortifying higher ideals) that constitutes an insult to public misery, and through the baneful influence that, with its audacities, it may exert on public morality (when it exceeds the limits of modesty, or assumes the character and purpose of an art that entices to vice, or tends, consciously or even through frivolity, to disturb and overthrow the instincts). As early as Christian antiquity, ecclesiastical writers often rose up harshly and bluntly against the frivolities of fashion from which recent converts, especially women, were unable to abstain. As early as the end of the Middle Ages, attempts were made to resist the excesses of fashion and luxury through sumptuary laws. Dante bitterly stigmatizes the shamelessness of the Florentine women of his age (Purg., XXIII, 94-108), and in the eighteenth century, in Rome, measures had to be taken to repress the excess of women’s low necklines displayed even in church. S. Antonino di Firenze (cf. Summa moralis, Verona 1740, p. 236 sgg.; Confessionale in vulgari, s. l. 1483, ff. 9-10), s. Bernardino da Siena (cf. Due prediche sulla vanità delle donne e sulla viduità, ed. L. Marri Martini, in La Diana, 1-2 [1930], p. 1 sgg.; P. Bargellini, S. Bernardino da Siena, Brescia 1942, pp. 15-24), and Savonarola (cf. Pastor, III, pp. 84 sgg., 166 sgg. e passim) attempted to restrain the immoralities of fashion through the celebrated burnings of vanities. It is therefore no wonder that subsequently the Church, through the voice of her ministers, found herself compelled to resort to the means at her disposal to repress the excesses of a paganizing morality that finds in fashion an accomplice difficult to defeat (cf. among other things the decree of the S. Congregazione del Concilio, 12 genn. 1930).