Reviewed by: The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain 1860–1914 Elsie B. Michie (bio) The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain 1860–1914, by Brent Shannon; pp. xi + 252. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006, £31.95, £15.95 paper, $49.95, $24.95 paper. Brent Shannon's The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain 1860–1914 offers a profusion of verbal and visual information about men's fashion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: we see images of vests that look like crocodile skin and of suits worn over trousers to keep them from gathering dust while driving; we view the floor plans of Harrods and pictures of wardrobes with myriad compartments to keep men's garments from getting wrinkled; we learn that the proper costume for punting consists of "white flannel trousers without a belt or a cummerbund but pulled in with a small strap at the back. The trousers are turned up to show white cashmere or silk socks" (169). By providing these fascinating details, the results of lengthy archival work, Brent Shannon intends to alter our preconceptions about men and fashion in the Victorian era, to replace what is "merely an ideology" with "the actual sartorial practice of 'real-life' middle-class Englishmen" (26, 39). The first ideology that Shannon challenges is the theory, articulated by John Carl Flugel in 1930, that a "Great Masculine Renunciation" took place in the nineteenth century when, in reaction to the rise of industrialism and the emergence of the Protestant ethic, men gave up their interest in fashion and took to wearing the unimaginative and practical dark suit. Shannon attacks this preconception on two fronts. First he shows, in a move that might remind readers of Michel Foucault's arguments about sexuality and the [End Page 314] repressive hypothesis, that renouncing fashion necessarily involved extensive writing about renunciation. The act of renouncing did not mean a lack of concern about dress. It meant, in Shannon's words, that "'Renunciation' was, after all, just another fashion" (34). Second, he attacks the idea of male renunciation directly by showing, through conduct books, advertisements, department store plans, tailors' brochures, and excerpts from novels, that there was an extensive (and heretofore unexplored) nineteenth-century interest in men's dress. Providing this information is the heart of Shannon's critical intervention into our understanding of the history of fashion. Though The Cut of His Coat covers the period from 1860 to 1914, it is most detailed in discussing the 1890s and early 1900s. In chapter 3, the liveliest of the book, Shannon presents readers with his research into the periodical Fashion, which ran from 1898 to 1905 (including seventy-nine issues) and dealt with men's garments, fashionable behavior, and sartorial accoutrements. This periodical is a surprising late-nineteenth-century version of the men's fashion magazines that we assume, as Shannon points out in his epilogue, to be a modern phenomenon. While fashion historians have argued that such magazines emerged in the 1960s through vehicles like Playboy, Shannon demonstrates not just that the concern with men's fashion was already a nineteenth-century phenomenon but also that the Victorian approach to men's fashion was surprisingly open-minded. Reading Fashion in light of concerns with sexual inversion and effeminacy associated with Oscar Wilde, Shannon shows that, while the periodical takes pains to emphasize the "masculinity" of fashion by associating it with soldiers and athletes, it was also perfectly comfortable with paralleling men's obsession with fashion to women's. In its second half, The Cut of His Coat adds to its analysis of fashion and gender a consideration of the relation between men's fashion and class. Here again Shannon's aim is to challenge a canonized reading of nineteenth-century fashion and economics, the idea of "emulative spending," articulated by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 and picked up by Georg Simmel in his work on fashion in the early twentieth century. Beginning with a discussion of the masher and the dandy and then tracing the emergence of the three-piece suit that has become the uniform of...
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Mar 1, 2023
Tim Edwards 
Open Access