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Suiting Oneself
| Article
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13276 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1987 |
1,674 Words |
| Author
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Elgy Gillespie
Elgy Gillespie is a free-lance writer living in San Francisco,
California. |
The bespoke suit accompanied the beginning of the industrial age, conferring the camouflage of white-collar status upon whomever wore it. Practical and egalitarian, it concealed the potbelly and spindly legs of the inactive and unathletic. It spoke of commerce and bourgeois values and became as much a necessity of postindustrial urban living as the car.
Compared to women's clothing, men's suits are sadly lacking in color and seduction. But this is because the suit must reflect the metropolitan landscape, sounding the keynotes of function and practicality. It was not always so; in the early nineteenth century, the Beau Brummells of the dandified classes tried to outstrip females in ever more extravagant and outrageous costumes.
When and why did men opt for conformity and uniformity? It was in the mid to late nineteenth century, when they often worked more in offices, and could buy affordable off-the-rack ready-mades.
The lounge or sack suit began its life as leisure attire emphasizing practicality and masculine "detachment" from the "feminine" interest in fashion. No more foppishness for the modern man! Some sociologists, like George Darwin, even tried to match cultural Darwinism with the suit, saying that it was a sign of progress in its uniformity and drabness (1872).
Very acceptable modernity
It has been a long haul to the eighties' suits worn with red braces and bow ties with flying ducks, however. Jo Barraclough Paoletti, fashion historian at the University of Maryland, charts a direct relationship between discreet monotones and mores of the time in her thesis "Changes in the Masculine Image in the U.S., 1880-1940." She says the suit persists as a symbol of modern man as the brainworker and manager, as it has done ever since superseding the frock coat, dress coat and morning jacket in the 1880s.
"The wearing of the business suit acquired a positive image of very acceptable modernity and masculinity around then after traditional clothing and the morning coat had fallen into disuse and even disfavor," she says.
"Peacockery" had ended for men's fashion in 1846, after centuries of narcissistic self-display, when a Saville Row outfitter named Poole's announced that its future frock coats would be made only in blue, gray, brown or black - a
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