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Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change and dress codes, a way to maintain political control. Merchants dressed like princes and butchers' wives in gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, the common people were forbidden to wear silk, velvet, or fur and ballooning pants called "trunk hose" were considered a menace to good order. The Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, "One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth." Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status.