Masculinity, dress, and consumer culture in Britain, 1860--1910

Men's engagement with fashion and consumption has been long obscured by traditional readings that imagine middle-class women assumed sole control of class representations through dress and domestic management at the same time that men renounced their claims on sartorial display. "Masculinity, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860--1910" argues that middle-class men participated vigorously in fashion and the public display of their masculinity, sexuality, and class status through their clothing throughout the nineteenth century. The growing variety and availability of goods enabled England's middle-class males to reconfigure the markers of class membership and to expand definitions of acceptable masculinity, reappropriating formerly effeminate or deviant male consumer practices and public display into normative masculine behavior. And through the adoption of the three-piece business suit and sports-inspired casual wear, middle-class males pioneered a sartorial aesthetic that became the dominant image of British masculinity in the twentieth century.;"Masculinity, Dress, and Consumer Culture" reevaluates both familiar nineteenth-century novels and previously unexamined conduct books, advertising, tailoring trade monthlies, fashion plates, and department store promotional materials to examine what new ideologies of manhood were constructed through new kinds of mass-produced clothes, sartorial markers, and consumer values. My study probes the Victorian disavowal of men's interest in fashion and shopping in fiction, conduct books, and the popular press to recover their significant role in the representation of class through self-presentation and consumer practices. It helps decode the social semiotics of male dress in literature in terms of how they reflect changing Victorian constructions of masculinity in the later half of the nineteenth century.