A little bit about personal cleanliness in history

This short interview of an author of a book on personal hygiene tells us some stuff we have heard before:

The book is a history of personal hygiene in the West from the 17th century to the recent past. It’s about how people have thought about their bodies and treated their bodies. 

In the 17th century, people didn’t have baths regularly. They thought that to be clean, it was enough to change their underwear and wash their underwear frequently. 

The first person I mention in the book is Louis XIV of France, who had two baths in his adult lifetime. They were both for medicinal reasons. He had headaches and his doctors recommended baths. It didn’t work to cure the headaches, so he lived another half century and never bathed again.

but this little detail about the underwear issue was new to me:

That takes the argument back to the 17th century: People appeared to be clean by wearing clean underwear that showed over their outer clothes through collars and cuffs. If you look at Dutch art, one of those marvelous Franz Hals portraits or really any other Dutch artist in the 17th century, you’ll see these people who are very somberly dressed. But they all have something white coming out over the tops of their outer garments: a collar, a cuff. There are often slashes in the outer garments that reveal white clothes next to the skin. 

What these people were doing were displaying their cleanliness. They were differentiating themselves from the poor, who in some cases didn’t wear a second layer of clothing and in other cases couldn’t afford to wash their underclothes. It was a social statement of a different time, one of social differentiation rather than social inclusion. But right now, we clean ourselves to make a statement of social inclusion. We’re making ourselves agreeable to each other.