Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the Early Republic, 1760-1860

For much of the twentieth century, the Brooks Brothers men's clothing company seemed to offer a bastion of stability and tradition amid the frenetic, market-driven world of New York City clothiers. To its customers, members of New York's business classes, it offered elegant surroundings, gracious personal service, and impeccably made men's suits whose styles—heedless of fashion—never appeared to change. The suits all looked the same (and so did the men who wore them). But the firm conveyed the impression that each suit had been individually fitted for each customer. The brothers were craftsmen, not capitalists. To underscore that message, the firm commissioned an official corporate history which portrayed the founding brothers as members of a long line of fine tailors.

In fact, that history was based on a fiction, as Michael Zakin shows in this complex, richly argued study of the development of New York's men's clothing industry before the Civil War. Examining the economic, social, and cultural practices which accompanied this development, Zakin finds not an industry which evolved out of a timeless artisanal past, but one which wholeheartedly embraced (and did much to shape) modern capitalist labor, production, and marketing practices. The origins of the men's clothing business in America were neither elegant nor gracious, but were self-promoting, exploitative, and crass. Moreover, Zakin suggests, the industry played a role in enforcing (albeit without appearing to do so) a kind of male conformity which helped to strengthen and consolidate the hegemony of market capitalism.

Zakin begins his story by exploring ideas about fashion during the American revolutionary era. Revolutionary leaders, to encourage rebellion against the British mercantilist state, discouraged wealthy Americans from emulating British fashions. Fashion was a form of luxury which made them dependent on British imports, especially imported manufactured cloth. The revolutionaries' "homespun ideology," Zakin argues, had democratizing potential, since to reject fancy textiles was to reject the sartorial emblem of class differences in American society. But after the Revolution, promoters of industrial development quickly began to extol the virtues of American manufactured cloth over homespun, realizing that republican exhortations to frugality could hinder the development of consumer-driven commerce.

After 1815, the American economy grew and the business of clothing production in New York City began to be transformed. Entrepreneurs began to offer ready-made clothing for sale at cheap prices. One of these businessmen was Henry Brooks, father of the Brooks brothers—and a grocer, not a tailor. He and others began to modernize the process of clothing manufacture, encouraging mass production and standardization as a way to lower costs. As ready-made clothing became associated with shoddy quality, tailors presented their own businesses as more high class and refined—yet tailors were also transforming their own business practices just as dramatically. To cut costs, they abolished credit, standardized the measuring and sizing of suits, and outsourced production. As work in the garment industry was rationalized, then parceled out for the lowest possible wage, the large mass of garment workers became not craftsmen but a proletarian labor force. Most of the workers at the bottom of the wage scale were female: women living on their own without male support, or wives and daughters earning their own wages within male-headed households.

In the book's most interesting and original chapters, Zakin explores cultural changes associated (sometimes loosely) with changes in the garment industry. As he points out, the new capitalist economy created social problems not previously faced in American society. A man's social status became defined by his ability to make a profit, rather than by his place in a historical lineage or his capacity to produce goods. It was hard to tell who a man was or how he fit into the social order. Traditional, coercive forms of social control stopped working. But the sober, modest, standardized suit provided a new form of public reassurance that the man who wore it could control his own impulses without external controls. Moreover, Zakin asserts intriguingly, standardization in the production of suits contributed to "rationalizing... the human body"(95), which in turn helped solve the problem of how to integrate individuals into the new capitalist social order. Though men no longer fit into the social hierarchy of the old world, their similar-looking suits allowed them to fit into a new social world. Here, uniformity offered a reassuring new form of stability and predictability.

The capitalist economy also created the problem of the female wage worker, who threatened patriarchal order because of her independence. But (analyzing literary conventions used in nineteenth century American sentimental fiction) Zakin argues that bourgeois writers used the image of the poor seamstress in order to put women back in their places in a new, redefined gender system. They used the image of the poor, exploited seamstress to suggest that women were naturally unfit for wage work, helpless without familial protection. They told stories of poor seamstresses driven by their poverty into prostitution, in order to draw a contrast between the corrupt sphere of the marketplace and the pure, virtuous sphere of the middle class home.

Zakin's final chapters suggest that by the 1850's, men's fashion had acquired a new place in American culture. No longer criticized as the antithesis of virtue, men's fashion now functioned to help produce social order without overt coercion. The autonomous individual was not required to follow fashion, but he did so in order to avoid being ridiculed for his bad taste. Fashion was a form of majority rule which helped to enforce uniformity. By naturalizing the assumption that the abstract universal citizen was male, middle class, and a wholehearted supporter of consumer capitalism, men's fashion ensured that men would not engage in class-conscious rebellion.

This is a creative book, full of original and often brilliantly expressed insights. Skeptical readers may wonder if Zakin is putting more historical weight on the men's suit than it can actually bear. But his central point about the relationship between fashion, democracy, and the culture of capitalism in nineteenth century America is plausible and important.