Overall, it was claimed that if the public paid greater attention to the manner in which they dressed Thailand would become "the equal of civilized nations It is perhaps worth noting that the same type of reasoning was sardonically expressed in Gogol's nineteenth-century novel, Dead Souls, in a passage outlining the beliefs of a feudal lord: He attached great importance to dress: he said he was ready to stake his head that the level of culture and trade would rise and that a Golden Age would dawn in Russia as soon as half the Russian peasants had donned German trousers As was discussed previously, this desire to be "civilized" had been a feature of Thai social discourse since Mongkut's time. In the Phibun era, however, the question of social form became virtually an obsession of the state. It is in this regard that the regime had particularly close similarities with fascist Italy where, under Mussolini's rule, the image society presented to the world was seen to be more important than its actual substance.