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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.3 (2003) 450-451



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The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850. By David Kuchta (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002) 299pp. $45.00

In 1666, Charles II set a fashion trend and made an unequivocal political statement about the nature of elite masculinity. With his donning of a vest—in place of a doublet, stiff collar, and, cloak—he ushered in the era of the three-piece suit and, hence, the style of modern men's clothing that has persisted ever since. Ever aware of the power of display and emulation, Charles sought to project a new value system linked to modesty, plainness, and sameness, the very traits that the three-piece suit signifies today. Ironically, as Kuchta points out, the suit has "become all too obvious, so obvious as to be unnoticed, unquestioned, second nature, practically synonymous with manliness itself" (2). Kuchta's book makes what may seem nearly invisible to the historian, the semiotics of fashion, visible, illustrating its keenly political, cultural, religious, class-conscious, and gendered meanings. His book studies the habits of men's clothing consumption from 1550 to 1850, examining how ideologies of manly display and consumption created a new aesthetics of masculinity during the late seventeenth century, how this ideology was maintained and reinforced during the eighteenth century, and finally how it became attached to middle-class ethics and identity in the nineteenth century. [End Page 450]

This is a rich, beautifully written, and thoroughly researched study. It is difficult to characterize and easy to underestimate. It is at once a study of fashion, "an in-depth history of the superficial" (6)—a man's outward appearance—and an exhaustive analysis of what the "superficial" has meant to men (and women) for more than 200 years. During what Kuchta labels "the old sartorial regime" (1550-1688), which defended the conspicuous consumption and display of the aristocracy, elite men sought to make social distinctions abundantly clear. Thus, the military and political power of the aristocracy was signified through the wearing of fine apparel, gold and silver, in a natural, graceful, and unaffected manner. The clothes did not make the man; rather, the man inside them rendered such apparel significant. Only upstarts who crossed cultural, legal, and economic class boundaries and destabilized the social order looked foppish, vain, and effeminate in the lavish dress of the elite.

But things changed in the course of the seventeenth century as the country weathered a series of religious and political crises. With these changes came a new aesthetic of manly appearance. Not surprisingly, the proponents of this creed were the critics of the court—Puritans, religious dissenters, and Whigs—who condemned the supposed luxury and immorality of the Restoration court and, in particular, the hegemony of French modes of fashion (which they saw as going hand-in-hand with French modes of politics). For the court's critics, masculine values were to be projected in modest apparel. Their ideal gentleman stayed on his country estate, away from the corrupt and "Frenchified" court, wore English wool, ate English beef, and drank English ale. Conscious of his critics, Charles II sought to reign in the extravagant dress of his courtiers, thus ending the era of lavish doublets and hose. This new code of masculine modesty came to dominate the gentleman's culture of the eighteenth century and became a prerequisite to political legitimacy. By the Victorian era, the plainly dressed middle-class man competed with the aristocrat to display his disdain for display through increasingly modest dress.

This book should have wide appeal and generate plenty of discussion. It is not only a significant contribution to the history of fashion and masculinity, it is essential reading for scholars interested in the histories of material culture, of consumption and trade, of manners, and of political philosophy and national identities. Kuchta covers so much territory in this study that some quibbling with his broad characterizations of various group ideologies must be expected, but it will hardly detract from his vivid study...

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