That can happen, but it’s more of a gradual thing:
“Anne the queen wears yellow, as she did when she first appeared at court, dancing in a masque: the year, 1521. Everyone remembers it, or they say they do: Boleyn’s second daughter with her bold dark eyes, her speed, her grace. The fashion for yellow had started among the wealthy in Basle; for a few months, if a draper could get hold of it, he could make a killing. And then suddenly it was everywhere, it sleeves and hose and even hair-bands for those who couldn’t afford more than a sliver. By the time of Anne’s debut it had slid down the scale abroad; in the domains of the Emperor, you’d see a woman in a brothel hoisting her fat dugs and tight-lacing her yellow bodice.”
Hillary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
If the nouveau riche instantly devalued fashion, they wouldn’t be a social threat to the old aristocracy – the terrifying thing for the nobility was the way that they could blur the lines between noble and commoner, pass among the former while still being the latter, confusing what ought to be the most basic (and to people’s thinking, natural) visual distinction.
But the ability of the nobility to fight back to declaring things out of fashion is that time and distance conspire against them: there’s no group DMs or Slack channels or (going prehistoric here) email listservs to coordinate these decisions – eventually, there will be women’s magazines and the like, but that comes along a bit later and has a bit of a problem of needing to sell to mass, and thus, common audiences – you have to write letters and for a lot of this kind of stuff you really need to get everyone together in person, and that can be difficult. (Versailles was such a help in that regard.)
Because of this, there was this liminal space, whereby a sufficiently fashion-forward/culturally capitalled bourgeois could penetrate aristocratic spaces and snatch up titled husbands and wives before being detected, which is why it became such a major topic of literature.
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