Men and Menswear: Sartorial Consumption in Britain, 1880–1939 (review)

The purpose of Laura Ugolini’s thoughtful and well-argued volume Men and Menswear is to explore the relationship between men, manliness, and consumption of clothing items in Britain in the sixty years preceding World War II. Ugolini, the Director of the Centre for the History of Retailing and Distribution at the University of Wolverhampton (U.K.), examines how notions of manliness intersected with men’s wearing, selling, and purchasing of clothes, especially since fashion and consumption were strongly associated in popular consciousness with femininity.

The book’s three-part structure proves an effective one for exploring such issues. The first part deals with men’s wearing and use of clothing. These chapters demonstrate the ways in which clothing was central to male identities. Ugolini argues that men did not wear their chosen fashions simply for their own individual reasons, but rather to conform to particular groups (for instance, fellow students or co-workers). Indeed, Ugolini shows that men could become the subjects of derision for dressing outside the boundaries of commonly accepted masculine sartorial norms, such as appearing as a “dandy.” During the Great War, questions of masculinity and fashion became even more urgent as men who remained on the homefront had to confront the possibility of being identified as a “shirker” or profiteer—a determination made in no small part by one’s mode of dress. After war’s end, Ugolini shows, considerable points of distinction remained in men’s dress due to differences in factors such as class, age, and employment, despite the common presumption that a democratization of men’s fashions was taking place.

Part II turns to the men who sold clothes, mainly independent tailors. Ugolini demonstrates that their profession was popularly equated with low status, physical weakness, and effeminacy—in a word, unmanliness—to which tailors responded by asserting a more positive (and manly) identity for their profession by emphasizing the artistry and skill involved in it. World War I created great anxiety among tailors, who stood to suffer financially from citizens scaling back their consumption of nonessential goods. Ugolini explores how retailers tried to cope with the situation by turning to the production of military garments, or at least garments that could be marketed for civilians to buy and send to their loved ones at the front lines, as well as by assuring consumers that buying clothing in wartime was not unpatriotic. After the war, tailors struggled to stay afloat amidst the proliferation of “modern” consumer enterprises typified most visibly by the department store.

The third and final part of the book focuses on the male as consumer. Ugolini demonstrates the fallacy of the stereotype of the disinterested male consumer, noting men’s attention to and even enjoyment of sartorial acquisition. Further, this section of the text describes the elaborate processes involved in purchasing an item of clothing at an independent shop, from selecting styles and fabrics to being measured and fitted to payment on credit that frequently vexed tailors, who had difficulty collecting from their clientele following the delivery of ordered items.

The book’s source material constitutes one of its most obvious strengths. Ugolini has managed to assemble an impressive array of personal accounts and autobiographies that deal to some extent with clothing consumption. This is no small feat, for as Ugolini suggests, the act of clothing consumption, while clearly central to masculine identities in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was frequently not an activity about which men felt compelled to write in detail. Her achievement in pulling together a vast array of sources that do provide commentary in this regard is thus noteworthy. Using such sources, moreover, allows Ugolini to delve into the realities of lived experience, whereas many other similar studies, lacking this same source base, must rely more exclusively on the discursive elements of prescriptive literature. The book also includes a few dozen illustrations from sources such...