the rise of the superstar
At a broader level, in the high Victorian era people believed their clothes and their speech disclosed their personalities; they feared that these signs were equally beyond their power to mold, but would instead be manifest to others in involuntary tricks of speech, body gesture, or even how they adorned themselves.
The result was that the line between private feeling and public display of it could be erased beyond the power of the will to regulate. The boundary between public and private was no longer the work of a resolute human hand; thus, even as the separate reality of the public realm remained believable, its governance no longer seemed a social act. What is today popularly misnamed “unconscious” behavior was foreshadowed by these ideas of involuntary disclosure of character in public.
...
If one can’t help showing what one feels, and if the truth of any emotion, statement, or argument in public depends on the character of the person speaking, how are people ever to avoid being fathomed? The only sure defense is to try to keep oneself from feeling, to have no feelings to show. Today the repressiveness of Victorian society is condemned as a mixture of social snobbishness and sexual fear. But behind these motivations, there was something, if not more appealing, at least more understandable. In a milieu where sensation and feeling, once aroused, are thought to be displayed beyond the power of the will to conceal them, withdrawal from feeling is the only means of keeping some measure of invulnerability. For instance, people tried to shield their characters from others by wearing as little as possible jewelry, lace, or trimmings of an unusual kind, so as not to draw attention to themselves; this was one of the reasons why only a few machine dies for clothes were popular at any one time, although technically a variety of patterns might easily have been employed on the same machines.
At the same time that people sought to appear as unremarkable as possible, they began to demand that in the theater clothes be exact indicators of the characters, histories, and social positions of the dramatis personae.... More generally, in a performing art, unlike life, one was to see a person strongly declared, see personality regnant. The actor and musician rose in social status far beyond the level of servanthood which they occupied in the ancien régime. The performer’s social rise was based on his declaration of a forceful, exciting, morally suspect personality, wholly contrary to the style of ordinary bourgeois life, in which one tried to avoid being read as a person by suppressing one’s feelings.
--The Fall of Public Man Richard Sennett