21 - Fashionable Masculinities in England and Beyond

Summary

The design, production, selling, and wearing of men’s clothing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had a significant impact on the visual culture and social experience of the modern world. It has also determined many of the underlying influences that have contributed to the development and expansion of fashion more generally, not just in terms of the shaping of men’s bodies, but also in relation to the dress of women and children. Yet its examination has been relatively neglected for most of the period we might associate with the rise of dress and fashion history as a serious focus of scholarship. It is only over the course of the past two decades that we have seen a flowering of journals, exhibitions, and monographs addressing the role played by the male wardrobe in the fashioning of social relations, taste, and the experience of modernity. My own doctoral work in the 1990s and related publications at the time drew on the ‘cultural turn’ and a re-focusing of the history of gender to consider the formation of masculinities in relation to patriarchy in a more nuanced way, revealing overlooked patterns of masculine consumption.