“A Curious Revolution Has Been Taking Place in the Dress of What Used To Be Called ‘The Workman'”: Walker Evans's Unpublished Article on Men's Fashion

Abstract

This article considers an unpublished photo story by Walker Evans, shot in 1963 and intended for publication in Fortune, Time Incorporated's business magazine, where Evans was employed as special photographic editor from 1945–65. Titled “The Clothes: A Note on Sartorial Actuality,” the assignment concerns the working dress of American men, and is shot on the streets of New York and the campus of Yale University, New Haven. Evans's intention was to reveal how the postwar concept of men's fashion was starting to infiltrate the representation of American men at work; attempting to capture a shift in the kinds of clothes worn by men for the purpose of work, noticeably influenced by the sphere of leisure. In correspondence with the editor of the magazine, Evans termed his work “documentary fashion photography” as an attempt to capture the readable quality of clothing in pictorial form. This article examines this body of work, paying particular attention to the hat as an item of apparel, once described by Evans as “a sort of defiant signature.”