The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914

Chapter 2

52 2 outfitting the gent The Emergence of the Male Consumer and the Commodification of the Male Body Men are properly said to be clothed with Authority, clothed with Beauty, with Curses, and the like. Nay, if you consider it, what is Man himself, and his whole terrestrial Life, but an Emblem; a Clothing or visible Garment for that divine Me of his, cast hither, like a light-particle, down from Heaven? Thus is he said also to be clothed with a Body. —Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus That your dress is approved by a man is nothing;—you cannot enjoy the high satisfaction of being perfectly comme il faut, until your performance has received the seal of a woman’s approbation. —Etiquette for Gentlemen (1838)
n 1890, the tailoring trade journal Gentleman’s Magazine of Fashion positioned reporter T. H. Holding on St. James’s Street to take an informal eyewitness survey of what London’s men were wearing. Holding reports disappointedly on the sartorial uniformity of Clubland. “There is a remarkable sameness at all times, and perhaps in all centres, between the dress of one of these stylish young gentlemen and another,” he writes; “Whatever is the run and the rage, that they all go for; no matter whether it be a black vicuna frock, the doublebreasted reefer, or the short waist and long-tailed morning coat of half a generation ago—they must all dress alike” (Holding, “Men’s,” 7). While the Great Masculine Renunciation may still have been the reigning ideology regarding masculinity and dress, many late-Victorian sources voiced a restlessness with these confining prescriptions of male sartorial reserve and conformity. Our Miss Gibbs, Adrian Ross and Percy Greenbank’s 1909 musical satire of Harrods, similarly satirizes the mindless submission to “correct” dress practiced by a “Chorus of Dudes”: You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. A fashionable band of brothers Are we, You see! Whatever one has done the others Must do, It, too! Our clothes and hats are made to match, They show it, We have one bill for all the batch, And owe it! For we’re correct In every respect, And you note the effect! In daytime or in night-time, The right thing at the right time, We mayn’t be great in intellect, But we are so correct! (15) The LondonTailor lamented in 1899, “There never was a time in history when everybody was dressed so alike” (305). In the final decades of the nineteenth century , the cry was heard more and more that the sartorial standards of understatement and reserve that had defined the proper dress of the business-minded middleclass Englishman had rendered male costume bland and predictable. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), OscarWilde has Lord HenryWotton complain, “The costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real colour-element left in modern life” (28). And indeed, to conservative social critics, sin came in the form of the growing diversions from the reserved dictates of the Great Masculine Renunciation. Anne Hollander contends that fashion changes are meant to create a “disequilibrium”— to upset a sartorial (and social) status quo that has become “too easy to take. Contrary to folklore, most changes are not rebellions against unbearable modes, but against all too bearable ones. Tedium in fashion is much more unbearable than any sort of physical discomfort” (49). The widespread protests against the tedious uniformity of male dress cited above suggest that the Great Masculine Renunciation was not the only sartorial masculine ideal of the lateVictorian age and that some men had grown restless under its confines. For many middle-class Outfitting the Gent 53 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Englishmen of the second half of the nineteenth century, fashion became a highly visual means by which to subvert the rigid and confining dictates that defined proper masculine behavior generally, as the growing sartorial options expanded the landscape of acceptable masculinities as well, a phenomenon I explore in the following chapters. The transformations in retailing...