Globalization Reconsidered: The Historical Geography of Modern Western Male Attire

Abstract

This venture into geographic terra incognita treats the historical geography of Modern Western Male Attire (MWMA). After tracing its evolution, from the fourteenth-century invention of Western Fashion and the introduction of form-fitting garments, we arrive at the Standard Suit in England and France ca. 1800 via the confluence of several cultural and political factors. The rationale for a sober, classless style is compatibility with the capitalist ethos. Even while MWMA was being widely implanted overseas via emigration, commerce, missionizing, and coercion, acceptance throughout Greater Europe and elsewhere by means of spatial and hierarchical diffusion was not complete until the twentieth century, but penetration is only partial in much of South Asia and the Middle East. In order to answer the question "Is MWMA globalized?" it is necessary to propose a novel definition of globalization as the long-distance operation of economic and cultural business within a deterritorialized social space. In its current manifestation—the earlier ones being Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam—globalization is an expression of the "Market Faith," a this-worldly belief system. The Standard Suit is characterized as one of a set of immutable entities that are universal, eternal, and unchanging, that sustain our current world system.