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

Chapter 5

5 ready to wear Class Performance and the Triumph of Middle-Class Sartorial Taste The clothes of the gentility do not say “I am a man—and how!” but “I am a gentleman , and I hope to attract women not by asserting my masculinity but by demonstrating my membership of a social class.” —James Laver, Dandies There is a wide and deep philosophy of clothes, asTeufelsdröckh has shown us; and we may even go so far as to say that the habits and disposition of a nation are shown in its style of dress. Look at our English costumes of the present day. Are they not those of an active, majestic, vigorous people, who delight in bodily exercises, and travel wide and far? —The Glass of Fashion (1881) There is now no single fashion, nor has there ever really been. —Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits
ad you strolled along a London street—perhaps one of the fashionable rows of theWest End or one of the bustling corridors of the City district—during the waning decades of the nineteenth century, you would have borne witness to a striking transformation of the male costume that had characterized the earlier Victorian era. Disappearing were the traditional long frock coats, top hats, tailcoats, and the rigid observance of the sartorial rules of London ’s wealthyWest End and sober City business, replaced by shorter loose-fitting coats, lighter fabrics, an expanding variety of hats, and a general embrace of informality and robust sportiness.The streets were peppered with men wearing the increasingly ubiquitous lounge suits—popularly called “dittoes” because jacket, trousers, and waistcoat were of the same material. A reporter observing what the men of the St. James’s Street clubs were wearing in 1890 was “bound to confess to having noticed more men walking about town in suits of dittoes than I have ever beheld during the many years I have known London” (Holding, “Men’s,” 7). 161 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. Seven years later, another observer, having stationed himself near Charing Cross, reported, “There were nearly two Lounges to one Morning Coat, and quite three Lounges to one Frock Coat, the proportions per thousand working out as follows : Lounges 530, Morning Coats 320, and Frock Coats 150” (Tailor and Cutter, 20 May 1897). By the 1890s, some men had also abandoned traditional formal evening dress for lounge suits and sports jackets. The lounge suit was becoming so socially accepted at the dawn of the twentieth century that even infamously conservative conduct book authors had to concede its dominance. In 1902 Mrs. C. E. Humphry’s Etiquette for Every Day recommended “a lounge suit, all three garments made of the same material” for business and morning wear (283). And in 1910, John Wanamaker, author of The Etiquette of an Englishman’s Dress, declared, “Nowadays more business is done in the city in lounge suits than in tail coats. Heads of firms think nothing of turning up at their offices in short jackets” (6). While many aristocrats and older men clung to the traditional uniform of the regal top hat and dignified frock coat well into the 1920s and ’30s, the younger, professional , middle-class set eagerly took up the new taste for practical, sporty, less formal, fashionable male attire. As the one commodity always on display by the consumer, clothing serves as the most immediate and most visible cultural marker of one’s social status. Fashion has therefore historically been rooted in the formation and maintenance of class and social distinctions. Cultural theorists, historians, and economists have most often apprehended fashion in terms of a “trickle-down” model of class and consumer hierarchies, in which the lower classes invariably strive to imitate the clothing of the upper classes.This notion of “social emulation” was first posited in 1899 by American economist Thorstein Veblen, who argued that all material wants are motivated by a desire to emulate the consumer behaviors of others. Consumption is never simply a matter of satisfying basic needs, but rather a means of improving social status.Veblen’s socioeconomic framework assumes that those at the bottom or middle invariably seek to improve their status by mimicking the consumption of those at the top of the social hierarchy. Five years later, in 1904, German sociologist Georg Simmel delineated...