Men and Menswear

Sartorial Consumption in Britain 1880–1939

Laura Ugolini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351918251
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Despite increasing academic interest in both the study of masculinity and the history of consumption, there are still few published studies that bring together both concerns. By investigating the changing nature of the retailing of menswear, this book illuminates wider aspects of masculine identity as well as patterns of male consumption between the years 1880 and 1939. While previous historical studies of masculinity have focused overwhelmingly on the moral, spiritual and physical characteristics associated with notions of 'manliness', this book considers the relationship between men and activities which were widely considered to be at least potentially 'unmanly' - selling, as well as buying clothes - thus shedding new light on men's lives and identities in this period.

PART I
Consuming Menswear

Chapter 1
Identities, 1880–1939

Writing in 1930, J. Lewis May described his dismay at finding out that his wife had exchanged his beloved twenty-five-year-old Norfolk coat for a pot plant. What to her had simply been a ‘shabby, fusty old thing’, to him had been the repository of all sorts of precious memories of his past life.¹ Clothes, both old and new, could possess powerful but hidden meanings, which an outside observer might easily be unaware of. Their look and feel could also be the source of private pleasure, without the need for an ‘audience’, admiring or otherwise. In the late 1930s, a young engineering worker described a typical weekday for Mass Observation. After work, he changed from his stained overalls into his best suit, and went out to meet his girlfriend. He described his pleasure at being outdoors on a warm summer evening, after ‘the oily, fumy, sweaty atmosphere of the shops … I felt alive, I was clean and cool, clean vest, shirt and best suit, polished shoes and cool breeze through my hair as I walked quickly along’.²

More commonly, however, contemporaries saw clothes not as possessing deeply personal or secret meanings, but as having the more public role of broadcasting information about the wearer’s singular personality and character. In 1941, reminiscing about the country village where he was born and brought up, C.H. Middleton suggested that the ‘countrymen’ of the pre-First World War era had frequently adopted idiosyncratic clothing styles, especially in the matter of hats, thereby expressing their unique individualities and preferences. The village schoolmaster, for example, had always been known to wear a remarkable ‘square-topped bowler, which would have looked ridiculous on anybody else, but he would have looked ridiculous without it, because everybody had become accustomed to it’.³ Apart from revealing individual tastes, clothes were also occasionally described by contemporaries as providing the outward, and not always conscious, expression of a man’s ‘real’ self. Immediately after the First World War, the poet Siegfried Sassoon settled in Oxford, where, dressed in corduroy trousers and a bright red tie, he ‘went about exploiting my Labour Movement personality and my reputation as an anti-war poet’. Occasionally, however, he would revert to riding breeches and a ‘loud’ check cap, a style of dress that ‘caused me to be more my authentic self than I realised. For the fox-hunting man was irrepressible.’⁴

It is unsurprising, then, to find that clothes were regularly used as a means of judging people’s ‘worth’, despite the fact that it was well known that judgements made on the basis of an individual’s dress and looks could lead to misleading assumptions not only about his financial status,⁵ but also about his character and moral qualities (Figure 1.1). In the case of Dudley Carew’s great-uncle, a successful stockbroker, his ‘faultless’ attire never entirely seemed to fit him, being undermined by his air of ‘indefinable raciness’, and by the ‘hint … of decadence, of orgies, of chorus-girls drinking champagne out of their slippers’.⁶ Roughly half a century later, the ‘mystery’ lodger living with the McRobbies in a Glasgow slum in the 1930s, with his expensive-looking suits, well-tailored overcoat and polished shoes, may have ‘looked the image of a distinguished businessman’, but actually made a seedy living by selling pornographic photographs.⁷ Nonetheless, despite cautionary tales such as these, as Joanne Finkelstein points out, ‘the essential idea … that the image and appearance of the individual is somehow representative of character and sensibility’ remains a powerful, if generally tacit, one.⁸ ‘Not even the wisest of us’ wrote Hugh Stutfield in 1909, ‘can wholly get rid of the idea that the clay which lies hid under purple and fine linen is of finer quality than that which is covered by fustian or corduroy’.⁹

Figure 1.1 ‘Quotations on ’change’. Appearances could be deceptive. Judy, 5 August 1903. Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, N.2706 d.12.

That said, it does not follow that clothing choices were either exclusively, or arguably even predominantly, a matter of satisfying and expressing one’s own preferences or individuality, so that these could be ‘communicated’ to others. Indeed, very few men would have dared or wished to adopt the idiosyncratic clothing styles presumably necessary to reflect their unique self. After all, as Joanne Entwistle observes: ‘The individual and very personal act of getting dressed is an act of preparing the body for the social world, making it appropriate, acceptable, indeed respectable and possibly even desirable also’.¹⁰ Clothes, this book will argue, acquired meaning and significance most powerfully when placed in a social context, where they could be seen, sometimes touched, and generally assessed by others. For most boys and men in the six decades before the outbreak of the Second World War, the choice (to the extent that a choice was available) of clothes they wore was primarily influenced by the pressure – and indeed often the desire – to fit into a particular ‘group’ of people, and into a particular mould of masculinity.¹¹ In a sense, the clothing choices of individuals were mediated through what Pierre Bourdieu has termed their habitus’, ‘the unconscious dispositions, the classificatory schemes, taken-for-granted preferences which are evident in the individual’s sense of the appropriateness and validity of his taste for cultural goods and practices’.¹² However, clothes did not simply reflect membership of a group and adherence to a particular model of masculinity; they also contributed to constituting and reinforcing both.¹³

In some cases, the relationship between certain garments and a particular male group was obvious: soldiers’ and policemen’s uniforms, clergymen’s vestments, or the items issued to workhouse inmates, were all intended to enable the accurate identification of the wearer.¹⁴ In other cases, the elements of clothing associated with a particular group were more fluid and less easy to pin down with any degree of precision. Nevertheless, even where there were no institutional rules governing the clothes worn by men and boys belonging to the same workplace, school, club or neighbourhood, conventions and expectations about an ‘appropriate’ appearance could operate equally powerfully, and could be enforced with some strictness, most often by ridicule, but sometimes even by violence. Sartorial choice – it will be argued – while by no means non-existent, was hedged in by often unspoken notions of what was acceptable in a particular context.

In a way, therefore, most men’s clothing choices may be described as ‘conformist’. However, such conformity was generally local and contingent in nature. Not only were male identities complex and diverse, but very few men were members of one single group throughout their lives, or even throughout their days. Conventions changed with the different stages of the male life-course, from childhood to old age, or even in the course of a single day, as men moved between workplace, home, pub, club, and so on. This means that there did not exist at any one time a single sartorial standard against which all men were judged. Rather, reflecting, and indeed reinforcing, the complexities of men’s identities and their membership to a multiplicity of ‘groups’, there existed a variety of male sartorial models that influenced choices about what to wear. Central to such models, it is argued here, were issues of gender, ethnicity, class, age and location in time and space. It is to these that the rest of this chapter will now turn, considering the influence of each (as far as it is possible, of course, to disentangle one from the others) on men’s sartorial decisions.

Gender and masculinity

Perhaps most fundamentally, male dress served to signal that a man belonged to the most comprehensive group of all: that of men. Indeed, clothing played a central role in asserting and reinforcing the boundary between men and women, between masculinity and femininity. As Robert Connell has observed of contemporary gender distinctions in Western dress and adornment: ‘They are part of a continuing effort to sustain the social definition of gender, an effort that is necessary precisely because the biological logic, and the inert practice that responds to it, cannot sustain the gender categories.’¹⁵ At least until the First World War, trousers represented an unambiguous signal of masculine identity. But perhaps more significantly, except in the context of theatrical masquerades, it would have been unthinkable for men to wear feminine long skirts: transvestism was associated with sexual transgression, or with the carnivalesque and riotous atmosphere of ‘the world turned upside down’.¹⁶ Wearing items associated with femininity could taint the wearer with effeminacy and unmanliness. Male corset-wearing, for example, was deeply suspect. One apparently scandalised commentator reported in 1889 that Prince Victor Albert was guilty of wearing such a garment, and expressed the hope that action would be taken ‘to prevent such effeminate habits from spreading among our young men … The Lord preserve the nation from a generation of male corset wearers.’¹⁷ The association of particular garments with masculinity or femininity provided a ready source for the caricaturist’s pen. In the popular press, men such as William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, whose manliness was seen as open to question, were portrayed as wearing ‘feminised’ garments, while ‘unwomanly’ women, such as Victorian and Edwardian feminists and suffrage activists, were portrayed as trouser-wearing viragos. Inter-war dress reformers, furthermore, were gleefully portrayed as advocating and wearing feminised garments.¹⁸

In practice, this meant that very few adult men would have wished or dared to dress in ‘feminine’ clothes. The insults and violence meted out to Quentin Crisp, and described in his famous autobiography The Naked Civil Servant, showed the dangers faced by a man who chose to openly express his homosexual identity by wearing idiosyncratically effeminate clothes.¹⁹ At least until the First World War, and possibly beyond, it remained the common practice across classes to dress both boys and girls under the ages of four...