But there is a way in which this attitude can be read as subversive in terms of Church doctrine, especially when one considers the history of sumptuary laws in the Mormon Church. (There is a useful article in the Mormon periodical Dialogue that outlines the subject in more detail.) Though we might imagine the discourse on modesty to call back to the conservativism of the Einsenhower era, this is not the locus of the nostalgia for modest behavior-it is, in fact, its origin. Kimball extolled young, unmarried Mormon women to distinguish themselves from their non-member peers explicitly through a more conservative code of dress:
“There is no reason why women need to wear a low-cut or otherwise revealing gown just because it is the worldly style. We can create a style of our own.”
It is important to note that this address, given at a BYU devotional, was aimed mostly at unmarried young women.
Read moreThe first explicit call to modest dress occured in 1951, when Church authority Spencer W
