I'm not a historian, I'm a tailor, but let me take a whack at it and see if I can write a worthy answer. One example that comes to mind is the incroyables and merveilleuses of the very late 18th Century, during the Directoire period of the French Revolution.

In the early Revolutionary period clothing became highly politicized. The excesses of the Ancien Regime were given highly visible physical form in the extravagant dress of the aristocracy. Upper class dresses, made entirely of silk and decorated with exquisite embroidery and lace (all of course done entirely by hand), constructed with nearly architectural structures that made the wearer's hips nearly as wide as she was tall, topped with wigs and coiffures of sometimes breathtaking elaborateness, cost enormous sums of money. Rose Bertin, dressmaker to Marie Antoinette (sometimes called "Madame Deficit" for her extravagant spending) charged the Queen bills of over 87,000 livres in one year -- and that's just one dressmaker out of many, though the most famous and influential. Men's suits, also often made of colorful silk taffeta or satin, and equally decorated with brocade and emboidery, including on the culottes or knee-length breeches, were nearly as expensive. Some of the flights of fancy sound like something out of a science fiction novel: "I tried on for the first time something quite in fashion, but very unwieldy: small, flat bottles curved to fit the shape of the head, containing a little water for real flowers that could be kept fresh in the hairdo. This did not always work, but when it was mastered, it was charming. Spring on one's head, in the midst of powdered snow, produced an uncommon effect," the Baroness of Oberkirch wrote. There was an elaborate symbolism of colored ribbons showing one's allegiance to this or that court faction, not too much unlike K-pop stans of today with their team colors.

But there was beginning to be a backlash against these kinds of things, even preceeding the Revolution. These things are in the air. The Enlightenment values of rationalism and freedom were intellectually en vogue, and the "simplicity" of rustic life, kinda-sorta with the influence of Rousseau and his "State of Nature", was so appealing that Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon included a Disneyland style farm, complete with playacting peasants, she could play at agriculture in (while the chateau itself had planned mechanical tables so the servants could set them without being seen by the Queen or her guests.) Practical English-style riding coats, gallicized as redingotes, became popular for men, though still worn with culottes and stockings.

So Paris was to some extent primed by fashion for the change, but nevertheless the sans-culottes were a new kind of player on the scene when they arrived with the fall of the monarchy. These were lower-class working men who wore trousers, not culottes, and who made up the bulk of the most radical, militant factions of revolutionaries, and both paramilitary and military forces. They wore a distinct kind of costume: not only the trousers and clogs or boots and boxy jackets called carmagnoles, showing their working-class identity, but also the Phyrgian cap, the headgear of a freed slave in Ancient Rome, and a tricolor cockade -- a red-white-and-blue ribbon worn on the hat, the inheritance of the colored-ribbon symbolism of the old system. No wigs, and short-cropped hair. Non-lower-class bourgeois etc who sympathized with the sans-culottes' radically democratic ideals and demands adopted the costume as well, although even radical politicians like the Jacobin leader Robespierre tended toward fancier duds. During the so-called Reign of Terror, some people wore a sans-culotte outfit just to avoid persecution.