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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Hrrrmmm.... tell me about the suit.

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Tryphena Absent

19:01 / 15.06.04

I am trying (god help me) to write a short article on the suit and the way that it articulates western democratic capitalism. Obviously my biggest problem is going to be editing the beast so it's happy and not a great, huge lecture. Anyway I was just wondering if anyone has anything good on early, suited up Dandy's? Or hey anything you can think of concerning suits- their structure, strange etiquette rules, preferably daywear- shower me with true information! Go on!

20:27 / 15.06.04

I don't know about dandies or capitalist uniform. Wasn't there a time when a suit was just what every man but the poorest wore?

What about having a look at some of the historical footage at www.britishpathe.com ?

Skeleton Camera

00:38 / 16.06.04

There's an excellent book out on the subject of the three-piece suit, but I can't remember the title right now.

Anyway, far as I know, the idea of the suit originated with one's SUIT of clothes. An assembly of pants, coat, and waistcoat. These were an assembly for nearly everyone, even the working poor, beginning in the (???) 17th Cent. (if I remember correctly). The basic idea evolved through various levels of ornateness or foppishness until reaching its "modern" origins in the early 19th Cent. Reacting against foppishness and romanticism the good Victorians began making suits in "straight" styles (ie drab colors, more plain cuts, no waist, etc etc) that eventually led to the corporate uniform of today. Interestingly enough, in a micro-macro sorta way, for every straightening and homogenization of the suit there has been an opposing decoration-oriented trend (such as the zoot suit in the 40s).

07:16 / 16.06.04

My knowledge/recall is limited, and you probably know most of this anyway, but just in case:

IIRC, the suit began to develop in the late C17 (as Seamus says). It was a result of the adoption in the court of Charles II of the 'Persian Vest', a long coat and long waistcoat type thing worn over knee-breeches (in place of the old doublet-and-hose combo). I think Pepys talks somewhere about going out in his new suit in this style... It was this, I think, that became the three-peice suit, over a couple of centuries. First the kind of wide-skirted coat, long waistcoat and knee-breeches of the earlier C18, then the blue coat, waistcoat and breeches of George III, then with pantaloons in the Regency period, then frock-coats, waistcoats and trousers in the mid-Victorian period, and eventually the adoption of lounge suits as appropriate daywear in the C20 (this is very potted, I expect Haus or someone else will be able to provide more detail). I am not sure when the waistcoat began to be made of the same fabric as the rest of the suit, but I think it must have been fairly recently - inter-war period?

I will try and find some pics of the earlier stuff but it is hard as most formal portraits are done in court dress, and of course court dress lags about 30 years behind the times...

07:20 / 16.06.04

As for dandies you might be interested in Beau Brummell, the Regency dandy who was largely responsible for the trend to simplify and neaten men's dress away from 1790s Macaronis, to concentrate on the exact fit of the coat, polish of the Hessian boots, fit and tightness of pantaloons, etc.

A bad picture:

07:23 / 16.06.04

Hmm, though given that that's from a cigarette card it may not be entirely accurate...

08:00 / 16.06.04

Here's what the Sunday Times' Chronicle of the Future predicts the Paul Smith suit will look like in 2007.

Paul Smith suits are to cream for. Oh yes.

Tryphena Absent

13:24 / 16.06.04

Hmm, this is all a bit too early, I actually want to start around the time of Brummell's death (1840) when the French dandy's started to wear a suit that would be instantly recognisable to us now. Naturally the most obvious aesthetic and visual point is totally overlooked (not here just generally) in favour of some nonsense about the 17th century. Why oh why is it okay to talk about clothes historically but not culturally or politically? It makes no sense, clothes aren't historical, we're still bloody wearing them.

See my article wants to be about industrialisation from the very start of the modern suit to democratic capitalism today and particularly the notion of unisex that makes itself current in the 1980's. Gosh that sounds complex but it's not, it's damn simple if only I could find some information.

13:48 / 16.06.04

Well, you asked for any info, I posted what I could remember... you should have been more specific about your requirements. My advice: ask Haus.

14:09 / 16.06.04

Sorry, bit tetchy there. But, you know, you know a lot more about this sort of thing than many if not most people here - I certainly don't really know what you mean by the sorts of suits worn by French dandies in the 1840s, so have no idea whether it is or is not the most obvious visual and intellectual point, etc. - and I don't really understand what you mean by the 'modern suit' (the three-piece lounge suit?), or what links you think its development has with industrialisation and other forms of capitalism... the only thing I can think of to say, given my ignorance, is that the ability to own and wear a full suit of clothes, whether three-piece, doublet and hose, or whatever, of any quality or fashionability, is and has been a sign of wealth and status in European culture - so what is it that makes the 'modern suit' different? What is it that links it inextricably with capitalism? (Bearing in mind that neither the fashion in suits nor the fashion in economics are static things)

... I don't know...

Tryphena Absent

18:11 / 16.06.04

Well 1840 is about the time that shopping takes off in France, not any shopping but the arcades, department store kind of shopping. At the same time men wear three-piece suits for the first time, they look almost 1920's/40's, are a century ahead in design. The Middle Class starts to emerge as a dominant force, not only wrt money but also in terms of power and respectability. So the clothes are a sign of that, they signify the future and then much later in the 1980's women become a force in the workplace for the first time and what is the choice of clothing? The trousersuit with those big pads to make them look dominant and male. So that's what I want to write about but I can't find the resources to tell me more about the very beginning of this phenomenon, I know the bare bones but what I seek is a factual account and then I suppose anything from that beginning to now. So more recent history and I'm sorry I didn't mean to snipe, it's just frustration because it should be so well documented but fashion is just so fucking ignored. It's such an obvious window in to what's happened, you go to the Vivienne Westwood exhibition and the woman has given us a document of political change- there is not a more perfect example of the social difference between the 1970's and the 1990's in the UK but it's always overlooked as this fun, leisurely thing. It drives me hopping mad and I know why it's ignored... because people think anything aesthetic is loose, they just wash over the structure of a thing all the time, like it has to have a clear message to be worth something. Erk, sorry, sorry.

Tryphena Absent

18:19 / 16.06.04

I just could cry, all I want to do is fashion theory but there's no market for it at all and where do you start? I mean, you have to dig through twelve books to find three loose sentences to contribute to one article and the books are so difficult to find and then half of them were published in 1930 and aren't even particularly relevant. There's nothing that will draw solid parallels between fashion and social change and it's there all the time and it's ignored because it's not indicated by one solid thing or because some designers don't respond but that's bollocks. It's like saying that all Postmodernists have to have the same message. I just feel like this world is trying to kick me up the arse and even the most obscure fashion magazines don't have proper articles. Christ, it's so easy to look at a trend and draw a conclusion and no one does. Ever. This is not a soft art, there are even obvious schools of fucking fashion designers, why is it all ignored?

Tryphena Absent

18:34 / 16.06.04

Right okay, shut up Anna de L, the problem with the picture of Brummell is that the details are too early. So ignoring the puffed up stylisation of the following painting and substituting the white trousers for black ones, it's far more accurate. Note the difference between the waist and ankles. I hope you see what I mean by recognisability- Brummell's suit seems a little too effeminate to be truly and instinctively seen as a modern suit but the one below is beginning to get there.

Ex

19:03 / 16.06.04

There are a couple of books - Hardy Amies The Englishman's Suit (Quartet, London, 1994) covers everything practical: “An account of the development of the suit, from the seventeenth century to the present day, from the mysteries of button placement to the influences of princes and kings as early trend setters.” (if you believe Amazon). And I will PM you a review of The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550-1850 By David Kuchta if you like, because it seems to have more social commentary, and makes links with gender and capitalism:

The final section of the book is labelled "The Making of the Self-Made Man, 1750-1850." The author has relatively little to say about the self-made man's apparel—what is there to say about frock coats and drab colours?—but quite a lot to say about the ideology of masculinity in a bourgeois age. As Kuchta puts it, "Between 1750-1850 middle class reformers transformed meanings of consumption—transformed relations between class, gender, and consumption in order to transform political culture and economic policy (p. 135)."

Unfortunately he cuts out just before the period you wanted to look at – and Katrina Honeyman cuts in with some interesting stuff about Leeds tailors persuading men to become consumers after the first World War. Sorry about the chronological gap.

22:54 / 16.06.04

Is there anything anywhere to refute the idea that a suit only became a capitalist uniform after casual dress became fashionable?

Lilly Nowhere Late

14:06 / 17.06.04

Good point Linus.
ADL, why don't you WRITE the book you are looking for. Then make a living off it while millions of other people copy it and no one will have to go through the suffering you are going through now, ever again. Publishers will publish these things.

Plus there are tons and tons of hair "history" books which cover most of the fashion issues as well.

Plus look at what other than fashion mags have to offer regarding the history bit. "Time", "Life", "New Yorker", etc. They always do the "fashion representing culture/politics/economy" blah blah blah stories.

You are onto something my pretty, follow yourself.

14:19 / 17.06.04

I was gonna say, if anything was the uniform of industrialization, it was jeans and t-shirts.

I mean, jeans started out as being like three times as thick as they are now because they were work pants -- that's why the Levi's logo has a team of horses on it (they supposedly hitched two teams up to a pair of jeans and had them try to pull in different directions, but the jeans never tore).

In other words, you can't really wear a tie on a factory floor. They get snagged in the equipment.

Which brings up the other thing that I think is missing. What about the evolution of the necktie? I mean, to me, that's the one item that says "management," or at least, "white collar work." I (think I) know it started out as a scarf in the Middle Ages, got all wrapped around the neck in the 1700s, then started loosening through the 1800s to the weird strip of fabric we see today. I *think* that Medieval guilds used scarfs as markers of rank or profession, but I may have that all confused. I know that nowadays, they're still used to mark things like the school you attended, in the UK at least, aren't they? Not here, not here. The badge of rank, worn like an iron collar.

I'm also very curious (sorry for being scattershot) about the relationship between civilian clothes and military uniforms. The bit about the buttons on the sleeves of a Navy blazer - that's a military thing, right? Why do civilians wear them now?

Restraint around the neck... military uniform fetish... are suits really just institutionalized fetish gear?

Ex

15:50 / 17.06.04

No! Fetish gear is just an exaggerated suit.
Or:
Yes! Both the suit and the fetish outfit draw on a similar cultural pool of bodily and garment symbolism to connote power, authority, fishcakes.
Or:
Both!

Skeleton Camera

18:59 / 17.06.04

As far as I understand it the necktie came from the original cravat, which dates to the 1700s and was worn to cover an open shirt front. Ruffles served this purpose as well, and sometimes the two were worn together. Gradually, with the un-dandying of the suit, ruffles were done away with. The cravat gradually became more and more of a "modern" tie as we think of it.

ADL, I wish I knew more about the exact transition period you're dealing with - it sounds FASCINATING and I definately agree that you should write this book! As for "what is the capitalist uniform," the question is one of class. Jeans and tees became the WORKING MAN'S uniform, all pretentions as to a suit done away with (which took well into the 1800s to happen). The suit itself, then, morphed away from being a widely used item of clothing and became the uniform of power. Those who had power wore suits. Those who put them in power wore jeans-tees. Not that clear-cut of course, which is part of the interest. Look at the hundred variations of the suit, or at least the trousers-blazer combo, that have emerged since industro-capitalism began. All sorts of people were (and are) trying to affect possession or power in their various directions.
Which, agains, brings to mind "deviant suits" such as the zoot suit, or pimp suits, or Oscar Wilde's multicolored ensembles. Taking the power-structure uniform in a deviant, but no less powerful, direction...

15:19 / 18.06.04

Yes, I was going to say: the absence of any material on what you want to discuss suggests that you have a whole lovely new field all to yourself, and can define your own terms. So why not discard the secondary material, and do your own polemic basid solely on the clothes? You will have fun I bet. There is very little more depressing than poking about for ages in books etc. knowing that you are likely to find very little and finding... very little...

go on go on

19:02 / 18.06.04

Those who had power wore suits. Those who put them in power wore jeans-tees. Not that clear-cut of course, which is part of the interest. Look at the hundred variations of the suit, or at least the trousers-blazer combo, that have emerged since industro-capitalism began.

Actually, there were some pretty interesting suits in the 1880s that took off among, I dunno, non-menial workers, non-management types. There's a name for 'em and it's run away from me. Checked vests? I was just looking up kid's clothes for my step-son's school project, and fell into this look. The kids in "Oliver!" kind of had it, but not really, and the historical pictures I found were all of teens & grown-ups.

----------

This collection of collar ads could be really useful -- it's organized chronologically, so you can see the evolution of the suit in pictures.

Here is a sociological essay on changes in fashion. Could also be valuable.

Quote: Only in the 19th century with its conservatism and romanticism was the idea of women belonging in the house and nowhere else developed. A society made up mainly of hard-working peasants and artisans would never even have dreamed of dispensing with the working power of half the population.

Now women were perceived as having exactly two functions: a) to bear children, and b) to represent. Doing sensible things was decidedly out of the question. Only lowerclass women worked, so if a family didn't want to be counted among them, the wife had to stay home and have servants for the dirty work.

As women weren't taken serious, they didn't have to wear "serious" clothing.

And here's a cult studs look at women's fashion from the same era.

-------

A ha! After digging all that up, I finally find the term I was looking for: the sack suit!

Quote: A banker would wear a sack suit to a picnic, and a cowboy or farmer would wear it to church.

Other images, from 1910 and not the 1870s, here.

Tryphena Absent

21:44 / 18.06.04

I was gonna say, if anything was the uniform of industrialization, it was jeans and t-shirts.

Okay so think about it this way, you walk down a street in an urban area, on a work day now and what do you see?

Jeans and t-shirts are the uniform of the proletariat and my point is that the proles don't have any power. The Middle Classes are predominant in the kind of world that we live in, that's certainly true of Britain and even those of us who don't wear suits usually wear some kind of clothing based vaguely around its structure. You think smart casual, you take a suit and water it down 56%. So yes it might have been the uniform at the time but the point is that the suit has lasted as a vital piece of structured clothing and what are jeans and t-shirts- clothes that casual workers and people on leisure time wear.

17:52 / 21.06.04

Okay so think about it this way, you walk down a street in an urban area, on a work day now and what do you see?

I'm a little out-of-the-ordinary on this, possibly -- nobody wears suits where I work, not even the CEO. The execs tend to wear golf shirts and khakis. I'm wearing a T-shirt and black Dockers.

Actually, one of my strongest impressions of London last time I was there was "Whoah! Look at all the suits!" Especially that thing with the blue shirts. I'd never seen so many blue shirts. In Beijing more recently, it was fucking cold, so all I saw on the streets were down jackets. People may have been wearing suits under them, I don't know. Now that I think of it, indoors I do remember lots of golf shirts there, too, on administrative types in gov't offices, but I'm more apt to notice that. Maybe because I still think of it as unusual in an "official" setting.

Anyway, the golf shirt look seems to be a synthesis of Tshirt-jeans + business suit.

What interests me about the sack suit is that it seemed to be a similar synthesis between casual/proletarian & formal/bourgeois wear. I'm not familiar enough with the history of fashion to say for sure, though.

12:33 / 23.06.04

I think it's a bit more complicated than just 'jeans and t-shirts being the uniform of the proletariat', isn't it? I think it depends on the jeans... what I am trying to say, is, does a comparison between the wealth and status of

a) an office worker wearing a chain-store suit because s/he has to dress smartly for the office

b) a lawyer (for example) wearing an expensive bespoke suit

c) a creative wearing say Sass & Bide or Paper jeans Antoni & Alison t-shirt (or whoever's cool these days, I dunno)

d) Factory worker wearing jeans and a t-shirt because they're easy to wear under his overalls

indicate that perhaps there's a more complex dynamic going on? I remember reading some Desmond Morris book or other (yeah, yeah, I know) which commented on the way in which young people of high status tended to dress in expensive versions of working staples such as denim. I think they can be as much a symbol of having sufficient status to not have to conform to oppressive office culture these days - just as wearing vintage can be a symbol of having endless leisure to 'source' clothes as much as it can be down to having no money and having to buy second-hand stuff (or having principles and preferring to buy second-hand stuff, of course...)

Tryphena Absent

17:21 / 25.06.04

But doesn't the very existence of a suit hierachy back up my point?

I'm going to concede a little here while being a bit punchy...
I think that you probably can't define capitalism by the suit or by a jeans+t-shirt ensemble. In fact you can't really claim that jeans would exist without the suit, they are both symptoms of a society that has developed a huge middle class that is dominant and the suit was worn not only because of the destruction of class barriers but also because it was an easier, utilitarian type of dress. They belong to the same political institution. Secondly you need to grasp the idea that jeans began their life as leisure wear worn by the young who continued to wear them as they got older. They're far newer than the suit in terms of mass wear, so if you're going to ascribe them as uniform you need to explain why something so young gets to be labelled as a uniform. The suit's been around for as long as we've been working as a modern consumer society and one particular class has adopted that type of clothing as a constant.

12:18 / 28.06.04

It wasn't me who described jeans as a uniform, it was you...

... and please don't tell me that I 'need to grasp' something which is pretty obvious - it sounds (to my paranoid ears) as though you think I am too stupid to have realised that for myself, which I find rather wounding...

End of hoity-toity touchiness, and please accept my spologies if I have totally misconstrued your post.

But yeah, I wasn't trying to argue against your theory, just trying to suggest that the situation was a bit more complex than you had initially indicated - which I have no doubt you knew, but I thought it might benefit the discussion to draw it out a bit. And re: jeans, I was commenting not on the age of the people who wear them, but their origin as working clothes (I believe in America) which were then adopted for a different purpose. I don't think I'm really disagreeing with you at all...

I agree that we can't really define capitalism by jeans & t-shirt or suits, but if we're saying that capitalism is the animating principle of modern society, material and cultural artefacts such as items of clothing can be seen as products of and a part of that principle (isn't this what you meant anyway? I'm a bit lost).

I just think that, possibly as a result of the breakdown of traditional blue-collar/white-collar distinctions, the link between occupation, class and attire has changed a bit and am trying to articulate that feeling...

Tryphena Absent

13:58 / 28.06.04

Sorry, I should have added at the top that I was agreeing you and it was directed at grant. You'll have to forgive the tone as well, my mind was still in article land hence the use of words like grasp. More like, me attempting to grasp then anyone else needing too.

capitalism is the animating principle of modern society

I think we have to say that, just the amount we shop suggests it and hell, don't even get me started on the construction of supermarkets.

material and cultural artefacts such as items of clothing can be seen as products of and a part of that principle

Yes that is a little of what I'm trying to say but more that they visually symbolise (articulate?) that principle. Sorry I know I'm not explaining this well but I find it very difficult to separate modes of writing so I keep wanting to fall back in to explaining this to idiots who've never even grasped the idea that clothing might be at all political. Okay, the suit is a cultural artefact and it is a part of industrial capitalism and has become a product of it. It is also a product of the French Revolution because that event broke down class barriers and thus helped produce the suit which also began to break those down. So when you say...
the link between occupation, class and attire has changed a bit and am trying to articulate that feeling... . Actually I think that this garment articulates that too because it was really the visual beginning of that. To most fashion theorists it's the beginning of utilitarian clothing, the reason I cite the suit as the uniform is because it began the dressing down of society.

Oh this post is rubbish, I give up.

15:19 / 28.06.04

Sorry, I did misconstrue your post, didn't I? I thought I might have done. Sorry - I'm obviously a bit too touchy at the moment...

I didn't think that was a rubbish post, anyway. It's hard trying to find a way to talk about something where there's no precedent for it.

When you say that most fashion theorists see the suit as the beginning of utilitarian clothing (or did you mean jeans? I think the suit... sorry if not) that's interesting, because that seems to indicate that that's the first time utilitarian clothing became an object of fashionability (if you see what I mean - not used to writing like this so I may be garbled). I can think of previous instances of serving girls wearing their mistresses' cast-offs, and of coure there's Marie Antoinette dressing up as a shepherdess, but maybe this was the first time practical clothing had become fashionable in its own right rather than as an ornamental style for dilettantes...

On the other hand, perhaps not that practical, as your chap further up the thread looks very muchas if he is wearing stays (or a considerable amount of padding).

I don't think I'm being very helpful, am I? But it is only because I am interested...

17:51 / 28.06.04

I've read that in the years following the French Revolution, it was considered fashionable to have tattered clothes. Something like the de rigeur holes-in-jeans of the grunge years, only with a horrible war in the background to make it all make sense.

Anyway, I heard this thing on the radio about the Kurdish reaction to the hand-over of power to the interim Iraqi government, and they were ticked off because the new acting prime minister wears Arabic clothing to public events, instead of a more "neutral" business suit.

Which made me think that there's possibly hay to be made about the suit as the uniform of globalism (which is part of the whole Western industrialized democratic capitalism). I get two parallel images related to that.

The first is of Eisenhower, shedding his (suit-like) general's uniform in favor of a business suit to get elected president, and then create the military industrial complex, which seems like it has something important to do with the relationship between the suit and the military uniform... possibly the moment when the one replaced the other as the symbol of ultimate social power.

The second is of Japan's Emperor Hirohito and China's Emperor Pu Yi, both of whom (I think) were the first to appear in public in Western clothes... trading their robes in for a suit. (I could be wrong about that, but it's an impression I got from somewhere.)

You can see pictures of both Pu Yi and Hirohito here.

And here's more of Pu Yi.

But this kind of thing is the transition I'm talking about:

Hirohito in Japanese robes.

Hirohito in Western suit.

You can see more images of Hirohito in both modes of dress here.

18:03 / 28.06.04

I am covered in shame -- it's Emperor Meiji of Japan who started the whole "wearing Western clothes" thing, which was part of a broader social movement at the turn of the 19th century.

The only images of him I can find online are in a Western-style military uniform, though. (That's with high collar & epaulets, not the modern suit-uniforms.)

Anyway, this image of Hirohito and MacArthur seems to say a lot about the suit as a sign of colonization and imperial/imperialist power.

13:20 / 29.06.04

By the way, here's a wonderful history of the necktie.

Originally, it was part of the battle gear worn by Croatian footsoldiers... "Cravat" means "Croatian." They were used to identify Croatian regiments (who, it seems, might have been mercenaries -- they fought in France and Germany, anyway) and as badges of rank.

So the link between the business suit and the military uniform goes back farther than I had thought.

Don't miss the links to other areas of the site -- there's some really useful stuff about tie-as-cultural-statement and that. Apparently the site is linked to a documentary called "Tie."

21:01 / 29.06.04

If you can find them you might want to check out Alison Lurie's "The Language of Clothes" and Anne Hollander's "Sex and Suits."

It's been a while, but I believe both have a bit on the modern suit, its connection to modern capitalism and consumption, how it tends to masculinize out-of-shape upper class men while making fit working class men (without their own tailors) look grotesque, etc.

07:39 / 30.06.04

Although this is probably too early chronilogically to be of help specifically, I thought some people might find it interesting.

I remember reading in history that the cut and line of the modern business suit comes from the padding used to support the brestplate in a suit of armour. Also, neckties began to stop the metal chaffing the neck.

Either my googling ability is suffering today, no one's written about it at length or it's all rubbish as I can't find anything on it now!

09:39 / 01.07.04

(Kind of off topic, but I thought people might be interested)

The books evskig spoke about are on Amazon (The Language Of Clothes, Sex And Suits) but it looks like they're out of print as they're only available second hand.

01:10 / 13.07.04

So how'd this article go?

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