Dress and Morality

In 747, Saint Boniface declared that wide stripes and scarlet borders in dress were a dangerous incitement of lust and ruination of the soul. A thousand years later the Jesuit Father Bernard Vaughan, in his book The Sins of Society, claimed that immodest dress led to paganism, while the popular v-shaped necklines of fashionable tops (referred to by some doctors as 'pneumonia necklines') were denounced as immoral by religious critics, along with short skirts.