Early sumptuary laws passed in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries protected the rights of the privileged classes to wear luxury clothing, furs, and jewels as emblems of their status and symbols of their superiority over peasants and tradesmen. The specificity of dress codes is summarized by Chandra Mukerji:

In the same way, craft works – what we would now call art works – expressed the purity of class interests throughout the Medieval period. Until the Renaissance, Johan Huizinga observes, art had no intrinsic worth as such; it was a means by which the taste for luxury could be satisfied and was used to impress upon others the importance of one's own social station. And just as the elite depended on the products of cultural workers for symbols of status, so cultural workers depended on the elite for they alone had sufficient resources and leisure to provide support and patronage.