This thesis examines how the changes that have occurred in modern Western society have changed the relationship between people and dress, building the basis for the development of a phenomenon known as fashion. In periods prior to modernity, especially in the Middle Ages and the Ancien Régime, we verified the existence of clothing as a social marking, prevailing the holistic conception of the world. In these periods, there was a hierarchical order, without social mobility, where the Sumptuary Laws prevailed, which aimed, among other things, control of clothing. Thus, clothing meant a condition, a quality, an instrument of political, social and economic regulation. Each person occupied a social place, wearing clothes according to his/her position. In the passage to modernity and to the individualistic conception of the world, thoughts, concepts and values were crossed by new perspectives that have been built over many centuries, from events not only remarkable, but structuring of a new period, drastically altering the relationship of Western society with clothing. Therefore, it starts from the premise that fashion is not the result of a linear and evolutionary historiography, but rather of a confluence of factors that enable its development and functioning as we currently understand it. In this sense, the reflection of the thesis is transported to the particularity of the Brazilian case, more precisely to the city of Rio de Janeiro, from the arrival of the Portuguese Court in 1808, realizing how the presence of the Royal Family established bases and structures own of a hierarchical mentality, increasing tensions that marked the period, where the clothes were the protagonist in the battle for prestigious social signs and their ways of use. Over the next decades, the events that occurred in the city highlighted the blossoming of characteristics typical of modernity, which developed in strides, leaving behind social plastering through clothing established previously with the Court and consolidating the fashion system in Rio de Janeiro.