Uniform and Distinction: Symbolic Aspects of Officer Dress in the Eighteenth-Century Danish State

Abstract

Dressing early modern military officers in uniform was socially complicated. The history of Danish army officer uniforms during the long eighteenth century demonstrates how style of dress and lifestyle together were shaped by a number of social forces: signalling distinction and social superiority despite the core message of service and belonging transmitted by uniforms, reducing the stresses between individual desire for flexibility in dress and the love of uniformity of a heavily militarized and centralized absolute monarchy, and finally finding a way to maintain the distinction of the military man when civilian uniforms became common during the last decades of the century. Many of these developments reflected common European patterns, but others were shaped by the conditions of the heavily militarized northern European states or by the peculiar political and social mechanisms of the Danish monarchy.