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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. For histories of the development of the department store, see Pasdermadjian’s Department Store and Miller’s groundbreaking study The Bon Marché. 2. Men’s acknowledged relation to consumption is predominantly limited to bigticket items such as automobiles and stereos (Damon-Moore, 201). 3. In 1930, pioneering fashion theorist J. C. Flugel contended, “Men’s dress is less ‘modish’ and more ‘fixed’ than women’s. . . . [T]here is some small individual choice in minor details (the shape of a collar or the size and colour of a tie), but none at all as regards general cut, proportions, or design” (144). Nearly fifty years later, fashion historians Christina Walkley and Vanda Foster similarly maintained, “Men’s clothes changed relatively little during the sixty-four years of Victoria’s reign. It is true that their cut and construction showed a certain amount of variation, but while women’s clothes ran through a dazzling succession of styles, fabrics and colours, men retained the same basic garments, the same colours and fabrics, and approximately the same outline. A coat, waistcoat and trousers, not necessarily matching, and a white shirt, were worn throughout the period.The coat and trousers, and increasingly the waistcoat , were usually made of a woollen cloth, and the shirt, which had above all to be washable, was always of linen or cotton. Nor did the colours vary: a study of the fashion plates of the ’forties and ’fifties shows a predominance of black and dark blue, with occasional ventures into brown and green, while Complete Etiquette for Gentlemen , published in about 1880, remarks that ‘the four staple colours for men’s wear are black, blue, brown, and olive.’” (127). 4. Several other important twentieth-century studies—including Laver’s Taste and Fashion, Adburgham’s Shops and Shopping, Wilson’s Adorned in Dreams, Steele’s Fashion and Eroticism , Bowlby’s Just Looking, and Benson’s Counter Cultures—examine nineteenth-century fashion solely or mainly in terms of female social history. 5. In her 1885 tract The Science of Dress inTheory and Practice, dress reform activist Ada Ballin attacked the “masher collar” as a preposterous excess of the current fashion, claiming that it caused “fainting, heat-stroke, and apoplexy” (259–61). The men’s monthly Fashion warned in July 1898 of the danger of asphyxiation from high collars and reported the death of a wealthy Frenchman as a result of strangulation by his collar (Brummel, Dress News Collected and Dissected, 19). 199 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. 6. Anne M. Buck notes that far fewer articles of men’s clothing than of women’s clothing from theVictorian era have survived (184). 7. Jo Barraclough Paoletti, Christopher Breward, and Frank Mort have all acknowledged that surviving primary sources pertaining to the appearance and consumption of Victorian (and twentieth-century) men are meager and spotty. Paoletti observes, “Compared with the avalanche of information of women’s clothing that occurs [in nineteenth-century popular periodical literature] . . . , men’s clothing seems hardly to have been noticed.The occasional article on men’s dress which appeared in the newspapers or in ladies’ magazines usually began with the remark that there had been little change before proceeding with the list of that season’s variations in colours, fabrics, and cut. Larger changes are seldom mentioned, as are questions of changing usage” (127). As we shall see later, this is not entirely accurate. 8. Both Mort and Edwards analyze advertising imagery and particularly the recent advent of men’s lifestyle magazines to explore how the new interest in men’s consumer markets since the mid-1980s has transformed male consumerism, masculine identity, and sexual politics. Stratton’s Desirable Body similarly examines representations of masculinity through the new attention paid to men in advertising during the 1960s and ’70s, the cultivation of the men’s fashion market in the 1980s, and the explosive popularity of the testosterone-heavy “New Lad” magazines in the 1990s. 9. I often use the term “Victorian” or “late Victorian” somewhat inaccurately to describe the period from 1860 to 1914. 10. Historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (1982) argue that a dramatic consumer revolution occurred in the eighteenth century in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution and that ready-made clothing, mass-manufactured goods, fashion magazines, social emulation of the upper...