The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850 (review)

Although this work is not about fashion per se, it does have a lot to say about how clothes make the man. The notion here is that men’s attire between 1550–1850 played a crucial role in defining masculinity. The author merely uses the three-piece suit, Charles II’s innovation, as a vehicle, even metaphor, for saying what he wants to say about this evolving ideology and the authority that it engendered.

Kuchta divides his Three Piece Suit into three chronological parts. The first, which he calls “The Old Sartorial Regime, 1550–1688,” focuses on the Tudor-Stuart court. Despite the railing of a Phillip Stubbes against magistrates “in silks, velvets, satins, damasks, taffetas, and such like,” splendid attire for legitimate courtiers was acceptable; for parvenus it was not. The stuff had to be “properly masculine, politically necessary, socially useful, ethically neutral, economically beneficial and consistent with aristocratic definitions of manliness” (p. 19). Although the ideology of masculinity was defined in this era by hierarchy, monarchy, Anglicanism, and mercantilism, a crisis loomed when Puritans began equating sartorial splendor with sin: good old English woolens replaced foreign trifles as acceptable wear. There must have been those who wondered whether Restoration manners and dissolute Charles II would affect the English mode. Well, he did—by introducing the modest three-piece suit. Even the Glorious Revolution did not really alter it; the English gentleman’s sartorial preferences were settled.

Kuchta’s second epoch, “The Age of Chivalry,” stretched from 1688–1832. During this period Whig aristocrats modestly attired in their three-piece suits utilized old ideas of hierarchy. Further, they gave legitimacy to an authority derived from what historians now call “gentlemanly capitalism” and “politeness”. Kuchta describes this Whig culture as one based on the “manly manners of an aristocratic republic.” Taking a cue from Burke, its model was, of course, the Glorious Revolution, not France’s Old Regime or deluge afterwards.

The final section on the book is labeled “The Making of the Self-Made Man, 1750–1850.” The author has relatively little to say about the self-made man’s apparel—what is there to say about frock coats and drab colors?—but quite a lot to say about the ideology of masculinity in a bourgeois age. As Kuchta puts it, “Between 1750–1850 middle class reformers transformed meanings of consumption—transformed relations between class, gender, and consumption in order to transform political culture and economic policy (p. 135).” The age of the Great Reform Act and abolition of the Corn Laws saw a new dominance, that of the middle class, and their tastes were those of inconspicuous consumption. The emblems of authority had changed mightily since the days of the Elizabethan courtier.

There is a lot to digest in this book and what fun it is to try. The author has appended a superb bibliography (pp. 253–93) and more than seventy pages of notes. While there is no question that Kuchta is possessed of a lively imagination and spins a good yarn, his generalizations about masculine character are often too sweeping. Regrettably, too, he spends little effort describing with any exactness the evolving clothing styles when doing so might well have buttressed his conclusions. This is especially the case regarding conspicuous consumption, luxury, effeminacy, the ideology of renunciation, and much else upon which he dwells. At a time when consumption has become almost a obsession with early modern social historians—he mentions Joan Thirsk, Neil McKendrick, Carole Shammas, and Lorna Weatherill—Kuchta uses it as a vehicle for pursuing a related but quite different and neglected theme. His touching on the increasingly popular motif of “politeness”—here he cites Lawrence Klein, John Barrell, Terry Eagleton, and Iain Pears—also seems germane to his theme. Despite its rambling features, this work makes a signal contribution to social history, especially in the areas of gender and consumption.