The Cut of His Coat

Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914

Brent Shannon

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780821417034
• eBook ISBN: 9780821442289
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behavior underwent a radical change. In The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914, Brent Shannon examines familiar novels by authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hughes, and H. G. Wells, as well as previously unexamined etiquette manuals, period advertisements, and fashion monthlies, to trace how new ideologies emerged as mass-produced clothes, sartorial markers, and consumer culture began to change.

While Victorian literature traditionally portrayed women as having sole control of class representations through dress and manners, Shannon argues that middle-class men participated vigorously in fashion. Public displays of their newly acquired mannerisms, hairstyles, clothing, and consumer goods redefined masculinity and class status for the Victorian era and beyond.

The Cut of His Coat probes the Victorian disavowal of men's interest in fashion and shopping to recover men's significant role in the representation of class through self-presentation and consumer practices.

1

“IT CANNOT BE SUPPOSED THAT MEN MAKE NO STUDY OF DRESS”

The “Disappearance”of Men’s Fashion and Consumption in Victorian Britain

Of course it will be thought that there cannot be much to say about men’s toilets, since they are supposed never to think about dress, nor talk about it, and rarely to change their fashion.

—Lady Gertrude Elizabeth Campbell, Etiquette of Good Society

The man who consciously pays no heed to fashion accepts its form just as much as the dude does, only he embodies it in another category, the former in that of exaggeration, the latter in that of negation. Indeed, it occasionally happens that it becomes fashionable in whole bodies of a large class to depart altogether from the standards set by fashion.

—Georg Simmel, “Fashion”

The human race, to my mind, is seen to dire disadvantage when admiring itself. Man is admirable only when unconscious. Exhibited in top-hatted and frock-coated droves, he suggests to the student of biology the dismal lowness of his origin. A few are aware of this and avoid the cake-walk; but those who have persuaded themselves that they are the best-dressed in London, enjoy themselves and their clothes at least as much as the prettiest girls in the most original gowns.

“Do you like fancy waistcoats?” my observant aunt inquired.

“Not at all,” said I.

“I’m not so sure,” she replied.

—Percy White, The West End

In August 1898, the men’s monthly Fashion printed an editorial by an anonymous female contributor pondering over the mysterious silence cast over the topic of fashion among men. “It cannot be supposed that men make no study of dress,” it began; “London society makes it quite apparent that they do study it pretty exhaustively. A man cannot be well dressed simply by going to a good tailor. He must abet the efforts of the tailor himself by exercising a careful choice of all the adjuncts of his costume. And yet men do not talk about dress— at least, in public. No woman overhears men in omnibuses and railway carriages discussing their ideas for a frock coat or their preferences in spats; whereas the public conveyances ring with women’s talk on a cognate theme” (“Queen,” 7).¹

This anonymous writer is not mistaken in her belief that men of the Victorian age did indeed study their clothing and appearance “pretty exhaustively.” But like the men she describes, the existing Victorian record is remarkably mute on the issue of men’s engagement with fashion, particularly when compared to the extensive writings that resound with breathless descriptions of women’s costume. The popular social norms of the era promoted a middle-class masculinity defined in direct contrast to the flamboyant sartorial display and profligate consumer habits of the frivolous aristocracy, women, and dandies. The Victorian notion of a “Great Masculine Renunciation,” in which middle-class males abandoned ornamentation and sartorial display for a sober, plain costume, idealized a practical, business-minded manhood immune to vanity and unconcerned with outward appearance. Further, the notion of “separate spheres”—which constructed men as producers and assigned women exclusively the task of shopping and household management—presumed that men were uninterested in clothing and fashionable consumption. Operating in tandem, these two social ideas sought to define a middle-class masculinity through the institution of stronger sanctions and taboos on male fashionable display and consumer desire. The ideals of the Great Masculine Renunciation and separate spheres were so ubiquitous in Victorian Britain, promoted endlessly by social commentators and the authors of conduct literature, that men’s real relationship with fashion and consumption has been rendered nearly invisible.

While the Great Masculine Renunciation and separate spheres are social constructs now widely subject to debate, they nevertheless continue to obscure men’s fashionable consumption from contemporary historians who have all but ignored it, turning their attention instead to the much more well-documented and visually striking fashion and consumer practices of Victorian women. The seemingly monolithic nature of the renunciation has proven problematic for contemporary historians attempting to recover the social and consumer habits of the era and has hindered a nuanced, rigorous examination of nineteenth-century middle-class male engagement with clothing and shopping. Yet the ideals that Victorian advice literature and the popular press profess are not necessarily accurate reflections of the attitudes and behaviors of most middle-class Englishmen. Middle-class males’ participation in fashion and consumption did not disappear during the nineteenth century. Men continued to attend to their clothing and fuss over their appearance; they continued to purchase many goods and to desire others. And the existing evidence suggests that many did so with great eagerness.

The Great Masculine Renunciation

Most conventional histories posit that between 1800 and World War II, men’s consumption was suppressed and their sartorial display muted because of dramatic changes in societal concepts of both class and gender formation. In 1930, the psychologist J. C. Flugel popularized the theory of the “Great Masculine Renunciation,” a radical shift to sober male attire during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which he saw as having arisen from the sociopolitical upheavals of the French Revolution. The magnificent figure of the ancien régime aristocrat—decked out in lacy cuffs and collar, powdered wig and rouged face, delicate stockings and slippers—became distasteful to the new male revolutionaries and their democratic ideals (Flugel, 111–12). The revolution’s emphasis on the brotherhood of man promoted a uniformity of dress, intended to abolish those distinctions that separated wealthy from poor and to advance a simplification of dress that suggested democratic, plebeian values. As the revolution made labor respectable, work (or business) clothes became the new uniform of the new democratic man (112).

More contemporary readings of the social and sartorial history of the age by David Kuchta, Valerie Steele, and Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have generally adhered to Flugel’s description of the Great Masculine Renunciation. Kuchta, however, contends that the renunciation had much earlier English roots, originating as a struggle for political superiority between aristocratic and middle-class men who linked both the new image of a more modest and sober masculinity and the repudiation of conspicuous luxury to their political legitimacy beginning in 1688 and continuing into the early nineteenth century (62, 71). To critics and supporters of the aristocracy alike, the issue of consumption was central to the idea of political legitimacy, and thus the notion of what Kuchta calls “inconspicuous consumption” became central to the Great Masculine Renunciation, as aristocratic and middle-class men attempted to outdo each other’s attempts at displaying frugality, economic virtue, and a “well-regulated spirit of manliness and humility” (71). Steele asserts that extravagant and modish male attire in England came to be associated with “tyranny, political and moral corruption, and a ‘degenerate exotic effeminacy’” of the aristocracy, while plainer and soberer dress became increasingly associated with bourgeois notions of “liberty, patriotism, virtue, enterprise, and manliness” (52–53). The French Revolution only helped solidify these connotations, and the new sartorial ideals in the form of the plain frock coat—the direct ancestor of the modern man’s business suit—quickly proliferated through English, French, and American society (52–53). Though the ideology of “modest masculinity” may have first been employed by early-eighteenth-century aristocrats in an effort to justify their claims to speak on behalf of the nation, middle-class reformers had by the early nineteenth century turned this ideology against the elite by appropriating it for themselves and, simply put, by playing the part better (Kuchta, 70–71). Around the turn of the nineteenth century, this “democratization of clothing” manifested itself through the radical adoption of simpler, darker, more conservative male dress (Steele, 52; Kuchta, 55). Davidoff and Hall explain that within a time span of only thirty years, ornamental and effeminate hose, form-fitting breeches, powdered wigs, ruffles, lace, silk, and jewelry were replaced by drab colors, stiff collars, and loose-fitting trousers (410–12). Gradually, all male adornments and accessories were abandoned, save for the middle-class businessman’s ever-present pocket watch (412). Foster remarks that men’s clothing grew “increasingly standardized” during the nineteenth century, and by midcentury, men of the upper, middle, and even urban working classes had all begun to dress in the same uniform: a plain and somber coat and waistcoat, trousers, shirt, underclothes, and some kind of hat or cap (Foster, 12; Steele, 53).

The Great Masculine Renunciation is widely understood to be a reflection of the triumph and dominance of conservative middle-class ideals during the Victorian age. A life based around labor and commerce rather than idle luxury called for a utilitarian uniform that reflected hard work, sobriety, and business-mindedness. “The gentleman becomes an essentially reforming concept, a middle-class call to seriousness which challenged the frivolity of fashionable life,” observes Robin Gilmour. “Gentlemanliness is on the side of decency, the values of family life, social responsibility, the true respectability of innate worth as opposed to the sham respectability of fashionable clothes” (11). Middle-class reformers and moralists successfully waged war against the powdered extravagances of the Georgian aristocrats and the starched fastidiousness of the Beau Brummell dandies of the 1810s and ‘20s. By midcentury, asserts James Laver, “the whole world of men, aristocrats as well as merchant bankers, had settled down to a drab uniformity of attire in which every manifestation of personal eccentricity was condemned as bad form” (Dandies, 80). It was this plain uniform symbolizing the middle-class man’s “devotion to the principles of duty, of renunciation, and of self-control” that emerged as the dominant idealized form of middle-class dress in the nineteenth century and that has endured more or less intact well through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century (Flugel, 113).

Significantly, the Great Masculine Renunciation also purportedly marks a major shift from a sartorial system based on distinctions of class to one based primarily on distinctions of gender. Previously, differences in sartorial display served to distinguish one class from another, as the brightly colored silks, lace trimmings, powdered wigs, and delicate slippers of the eighteenth century were common to both men and women of the upper classes. In their efforts to secure political participation and legitimacy, however, middle-class men disavowed luxury, vanity, and flamboyant self-display and reassigned them to the aristocracy and women. By midcentury, bright colors had been relegated mainly to women’s dress, while “most men wore some version of the plain, dark, uniform three-piece suit,” with all pieces fashioned from the same material and color (Steele, 52). For men, color, decoration, and fittedness remained only in military and evening wear (57). The straight lines, practical fabrics, dark tones, and loose fit of men’s dress—juxtaposed against the flowing lines, rich materials, fine detail, and constricting forms of women’s dress—had become a powerful sign system of gender segregation.

Many scholars therefore also popularly regard the Great Masculine Renunciation as a renunciation of men’s physicality—of a male sexual, visual self—in favor of what Anne Hollander and Davidoff and Hall identify as a “utilitarian male body” devoted to work rather than pleasure. Flugel famously asserts that beginning in the early decades of the nineteenth century, “man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at being only useful” (11). The baggy fit, boxy shape, and tubelike jacket sleeves and trouser legs of the ordinary man’s suit “tended to conceal any possible physical attractions or evidence of physical strength, other than sheer size and bulk” (Steele, 59). The baggy three-piece suit standardized men’s bodies in that it hid both muscles and paunches and obliterated the visible expression of the powerful, aggressive male body. This drabness and uniformity of men’s clothing eventually grew so normalized, according to Laver, as to suggest that “there was something morally reprehensible in a man who paid too much attention to his own clothes” (Dandies, 80). Thus, through the prescription of a sober, business-oriented male costume, the popular sartorial codes of the age defined legitimate bourgeois masculinity. The nineteenth-century middle-class male uniform both conveyed sobriety, pragmatism, frugality, and conservatism and consciously distinguished itself from that of the frivolous and idle aristocracy, coquettish and materialistic womanhood, and the vain and effeminate dandy whose preoccupation with his outer appearance represented both class and gender transgressions.

This chapter is not intended to suggest that the premise of the Great Masculine Renunciation is a purely twentieth-century construct. Unquestionably, between 1750 and 1850 men’s dress did indeed radically and permanently change, as powdered wigs, lace, knee breeches, and stockings gave way to dark frock coats, corduroy trousers, and thick boots. And, indeed, many late-Victorian sources acknowledged a major shift in male clothing arriving in the early decades of the nineteenth century.²The renunciation could never have brought about a complete disappearance of men’s fashion; after all, even antifashion—even nudity—is a fashion statement. Yet the dominance of the Great Masculine Renunciation in popular Victorian literature has effected a seeming disappearance of men’s very significant interest and participation in fashion from the historical record. However, the renunciation was merely an ideology, which, though extremely popular, did not necessarily reflect the actual sartorial behaviors of all or even most Englishmen. I argue that many middle-class men negotiated around the Great Masculine Renunciation, actively—even aggressively—pursuing fashion. What I wish to examine now is how the popular public discourse of Victorian prose and advice literature advanced a general repudiation of men’s interest and participation in fashion and how the renunciation’s ambiguities and paradoxes simultaneously complicated masculine ideals and made available certain avenues of male fashionable display.

Fine Lines: The Peformativity of Male Sartorial Renunciation

The ideals of the renunciation were promoted endlessly throughout the era by social commentators both in the popular press and in conduct books. Widely successful in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advice literature genre disappeared in the early decades of the nineteenth century,³ only to find during the Victorian age a renewed popularity that lasted well into the twentieth century. Its significant role in promulgating and maintaining dominant social constructs of femininity has been well documented,⁴ yet conduct manuals, often tiny and slim enough not to ruin the smooth line of a coat and to be consulted on the sly during potential social dilemmas, were also instrumental in promoting the bourgeois ideals of gentlemanly reserve that drove the ethos of the Great Masculine Renunciation. What most distinctly defined a true gentleman in Victorian eyes was his behavior, and the era’s conduct book authors consistently stressed a male deportment based on a combination of reserved understatement and relaxed effortlessness. Advice commentators increasingly emphasized the proper gentleman’s complete absence of self-consciousness. Apparently oblivious to the paradox their advice created, they regularly urged their readers to make a conscious, concerted, premeditated effort to be natural, artless, and unaffected. The author of The Art of Conversing (1897), for example, strongly emphasized naturalness and a total lack of self-consciousness in conversation—despite the fact that the book is primarily composed of conversation models and recommended responses for all occasions and settings.

How anxious male readers between 1860 and 1914 grappled with such confounding tenets is unclear, as with modern hindsight the dilemma seems at best vexing and at worst preposterously illogical. This paradox naturally crossed over into advice regarding dress as well. The connection between proper masculine behavior and proper masculine dress was an obvious one for etiquette authors, as a man’s dress was a visible, outward reflection of his inner qualities. One’s manly reserve extended to all elements of dress, and the ideals of self-control and sobriety, so vital to Victorian middle-class notions of sociopolitical power, manifested themselves in the popular promotion of a discreet “natural” elegance that became the very ethic of nineteenth-century costume. The contradictions, fine lines, and double binds inherent in conduct literature’s ambiguous instruction regarding men’s dress forced the middle-class man to walk an ever-narrowing gauntlet of supposed sartorial threats to both his gender and his class status.

Conduct literature of the period 1860–1914 recited that the sartorial understatement characteristic of the proper gentleman was best achieved through the dark fabrics and muted colors familiarly associated with the Great Masculine Renunciation. Advice writers repeatedly instructed middle-class male readers to select sober shades described as “quiet” and therefore not liable to draw the improper attention eagerly sought by the upper-class dandy and the working-class masher. The Glass of Fashion, a conduct manual of 1881, advises, “Do not indulge in violent colours; let your walking-dress be a ‘quiet’ tweed uniform shade, with a tie of neutral tint and a black hat” (176), while Mrs. Burton Kingsland’s Etiquette for All Occasions (1901) claims, “The best dressed men are only conspicuous because of the extreme quietness of their attire” (343).⁵ Another conduct book allows that colored shirts could be worn only in the morning, though “they should be small in pattern and quiet in colour. Fancy cloths of conspicuous patterns are exceedingly objectionable” (Mixing, 129). Historian John Harvey notes that muted, dark, and especially black dress provided “good cover” for the upwardly mobile middle-class man who hoped to rise, in part unobserved, into the elite classes (147). This notion of an understated, discreet, inconspicuous male uniform became the ideal of gentlemanly dress for the countless advice authors and journalists writing in the nineteenth century. Adam Blenkinsop’s 1850 conduct manual, A Shilling’s-Worth of Advice on Manners, Behaviour and Dress, instructs that “a gentl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “It cannot be supposed that men make no study of dress”
• 2. Outfitting the Gent
• 3. “Really there is much more to be said about men’s fashions than I had imagined”
• 4. From Dandy to Masher to Consumer
• 5. Ready to Wear
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index