Using a corpus of 40 influential conduct books published in Italy in the long nineteenth century, we apply current insights in the role of values for the emergence and maintenance of conventions developed within the pragmatics of politeness to the prescriptive discourse on fashion, because in these sources norms for verbal and non-verbal behaviour are justified in a similar way. We argue that fashion choices are always said to communicate moral values. Most conduct books reinforce fashion norms by anchoring them in moral values because the authors expect their readers to be morally evaluated in terms of the clothes they wear. We will give an overview of rules regulating bodily hygiene, adornment, dress choice and fashion, and analyse which values are explicitly cited to justify the rules. The positive values such as diligence and parsimony show that fashion morality is seen as a means of self-improvement for the petty bourgeoisie whilst excesses (avarice and laziness on one end and vanity and frivolity on the other) lead to poverty. Our sources predominantly regulate fashion with personal, ego-centered values. This is markedly different from the current debate on sustainable fashion, led by social values such as compassion and altruism. With this historical paper we hope to contribute to the discussion of new approaches for the analysis of moralising discourse in fashion communication.

In 1802 Melchiorre Gioja published the Nuovo Galateo (‘New Galateo’), a treatise that supplants the aristocratic model based on conventional ceremonies with a model based on ragione sociale ‘social reason’. The word and its morphological derived lexemes play an important role in the argumentative architecture of the treatise. We hypothesize that reason can be considered an argumentative keyword of the treatise, i.e. a word that evokes beliefs and values that function as endoxa. We examine the collocations and the constructions in which ragione and its derived lexemes enter, and we demonstrate how different key-constructions based on ragione are used to argumentatively justify politeness evaluations. This investigation not only confirms the argumentative keyness of the reason-related constructions, but also casts light on the utilitarian nature of the social reason underlying Gioja’s view of politeness.

This article presents the Nineteenth-Century dispute arising from the criticism that the Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini expressed against the arguments that the statesman Melchiorre Gioja supported in defense of fashion in his Apologia della moda ‘Apology of Fashion’ (1822) and against the utilitarian ideology that permeates the text. Gioja’s aggressive answer (in 1827) leads Rosmini to write a treatise on polite manners writers must have in public debate, thus offering an interesting ethical treatise. We aim to analyze the controversy adopting an interdisciplinary approach that investigates metapragmatic evaluative comments from the point of view of argumentation in order to reconstruct the argumentative justification behind each evaluation of (im)politeness and to show the principles defended by the disputants.