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Chloe Chapin, "Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men" (Oxford UP, 2026)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Caleb Zakrin, CEO and publisher of the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with Chloe Chapin of Harvard University about her book the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men from Oxford University Press. Prior to getting a PhD, Chloe was a costume designer for Broadway shows and operas. Over the years, Chloe began to ask questions about the history of men's fashion with a particular focus on the suit, which has become the ubiquitous formal wear for western men for 200 plus years. As Chloe asks, why for so long have men dressed the same when women are told that their worst nightmare is showing up to a party in the same dress another woman is wearing? Through the history of the suit we see the forces of power, masculinity, democracy, pacific patriarchy, equality, and of course, fashion. To guide us through the story of menswear's most iconic outfit, I'm pleased today to have Chloe Chabin on the podcast. Chloe, thanks for joining me today on the New Books Network.
- [01:03]
B
Hey, thanks for having me.
- [01:05]
A
Really just fascinated by this topic for a number of reasons. As I mentioned to you at the start, I'm getting married soon. So of course marriage oftentimes for men means wearing suits. I'll be wearing other outfits as well over the course of it. But of course getting the suit right feels like this big almost pressured decision. Of course, it's kind of easier for men to figure it out because there is this almost expectation or this standard of wearing the black suit or maybe a slightly navy suit. And I was wondering if before we even talk about menswear, talk about men's suits, if you could just tell us a little about yourself and your career as a costume designer, how you got into fashion in the very first place.
- [01:51]
B
Yeah, that's a great question. The sort of prehistory is that I worked as a dresser, a volunteer dresser, working backstage at my local Shakespeare company when I was in high school. And I just absolutely loved it. It was so magical to me working on these plays with this like exciting exotic language and grown up actors wearing like the coolest costumes. And I got to walk in the stage, stage door and that was such a glamorous, exciting world. And then, and I really like to make stuff. I was a very, I was kind of a tomboy. I was more a like scene shop person than a costume shop person when I was in, in college. Once I went to art school to study theater. I really loved working backstage. So I had that like real embodied experience of working closely with both the garments themselves. And the actors, but also doing quick changes, doing the laundry, fixing stuff when it broke, fixing people's zippers when they were stuck in their jeans. And then as I started becoming a designer after college, I had to make a decision about how to make a living. And so I worked in scene shops like as a welder and a scenic painter to make rent. And then I was kind of a costume designer that supported my costume designer habit on the side. And then I walked to grad school and studied set and costume design there. And then I moved to New York City, the center of the theater universe, and did any kind of play I could get my hands on. You know, the like downtown experimental dance theater and the big Broadway musicals. And I loved it all. It was just amazing. It's such an exhilarating place and the people are so interesting and awesome and every day was a new adventure. And that kind of curiosity and the need to constantly be a really fast expert in a totally new world. Because every show is a different time period, a different geographical location, a different set of people's occupations and class and race and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, also including non realistic settings where you are going into the design meetings, being like, what is the world? Do we wear shoes here? Is there gender? Like, what is the, you know, sort of silhouette of this imaginary place that we're choosing to occupy? So those were some of the. That was my background of very non disciplined background that I had before coming back to graduate school, getting a PhD.
- [04:37]
A
And what inspired you to go back to school and study fashion and really dig into the history of it? Because this is a very rich history book.
- [04:47]
B
People keep asking me, like, as a historian, how did you discover the suit? And I'm like, oh no, I was a suit person before I discovered history. So as a costume designer, it was really obvious to me that there were so many books on women's fashion and like four books on menswear, like the entire history of menswear. And they would say, you know, suits changed so slowly, the differences were so nuanced, that it was these tiny little details that were so important. But then they would never say what those little details were. And as a costume designer, I was like, hey man, I really need to know the difference between a suit in the 1890s and a suit in the 1910s. But it was really hard to do that kind of research. And the Internet was still very new at the time when I was in graduate school, so there weren't as many immediate resources right at hand. So I thought. And I really just loved books, but not as a scholar, just as a reader. I was always kind of the. You know, in elementary school, I was the nerd who went to the library to read over recess instead of playing sports. And so I thought about writing a book. And initially I started a version of this book that was really just more like a popular history of suits that I kind of shelved and then went back to grad school, and it turned into something totally different. So that's a little bit of the early backstory, and then it really crystallized. I was doing research for this production of the opera La Traviata, where the first act takes place at a fancy dress ball. And so the whole male chorus is on stage, and the question was, what should they be wearing? And in operas, you have a lot of stuff in stock for the chorus. You've got your standard tuxedos, your black tie, and then your tails, your white tie. And usually you would just say, like, let's put them all in their tails. But this production was set a little bit earlier than usual, more around in the middle of the century, the 1850s, 1860s. And I was like, wait a minute. Didn't some of them still wear black vests in this period? Or black ties? You know, as a designer, you develop this, like, mental database of historical images. And so I was kind of trying to, like, scrape my mental database. And then I realized as I scrolled back in time, there was kind of a gap right before the 1850s. I was like, I don't. I can't really picture that period in my mind. So I went back to the 18th century, and I was like, wait a minute, hold on. Nobody is wearing black and white in this period. It's all, like, pinks and greens and floral patterns and beaded sequins and all this kind of stuff. But then by the 1850s, all men are wearing only black and white. This is weird. Like, so weird. And especially since that is still the case today. So that was really the. The thing that was like, this is a bigger problem than a costume design problem. This is a cultural phenomenon that no one has ever talked about. Why are there no books on tuxedos? It didn't make any sense to me. So initially, the whole book was supposed to be about tuxedos and the sort of origin story of that, and it just. Over the course of doing the research, it turned into a bigger, broader project.
- [08:03]
A
I mean, it's an extremely interesting symbol, the suit. I mean, in part because of its ubiquity. You have this photo in the book, I think it's of a G20 summit, which is basically where all the world leaders come together. And it's almost all, you know, it's mostly men. There's a couple, a few women. And with the exception of maybe the prime minister of India and the leader of Saudi Arabia that could be Crown Prince, everyone is wearing a black suit. And it is sort of stark to see this about how the suit has taken over as, like, the men's formal wear, not only in the United States, but in China and Japan and, you know, in all of Europe, of course. And it is sort of remarkable to think about how that has happened, because it is a strange outfit. I remember being a kid the very first time that I was, you know, sort of told to put on a suit for various events, being so perplexed, like, why is this what men wear? This is. This is so, like, I want to wear my. You know, or something. Something more comfortable. So it is, I think, such a fascinating question to try and unpack, like, why this happened. And your very first chapter, it has such a fantastic title. It's Peacocks to Penguins, which I think visually really does sort of describe what happened. And could you talk a little about what menswear was like before the suit started to become the ubiquitous expected formal wear in places like France, England, United States?
- [09:31]
B
Yeah, great question. So I think that an interesting way of thinking about it maybe is thinking more broadly, not just about menswear, but about fashion, because that's something that I think in our contemporary mindset, we don't totally understand what fashion is or how it works, and especially for Americans. So fashion was a system really closely related to the aristocracy. And different fashion historians will give you different definitions of what fashion is or when it began. But a kind of conventional beginning is in the 15th century Burgundian courts, when aristocracy starts changing their fashion at a kind of regular rate. And it was very much related to consumption and a sort of, like, pre capitalist way of thinking about things. And then by the 18th century, it was sort of baked into industry. So in the 18th century in France, the textile designers built a kind of sartorial obsolescence into their patterns that they would put out. So it would be very clear how dated something was. You know, another good cultural reference is the Devil Wears Prada and that blue cerulean sweater of Anne Hathaway's. That Meryl Streep, you know, sort of nails her to the wall, saying, like, you think that you just, like, picked out this random sweater, but Actually, it was sort of chosen for you, and it comes from, like, this Runway and this designer and a kind of trickle down thing. A similar thing was happening there where it was encoded into the world of the aristocracy, that you purchase new clothing on a regularly reliable basis to support national industry. And it was also seen as a way to kind of create sort of rivalry and infighting amongst the nobility to keep them having less money to form rebellions. You know, it's kind of a form of social control in a way. I used to teach fashion history at fit, the Fashion Institute of Technology. The way that I would describe the difference between clothing and fashion to my students was that clothing was a kind of covering of the body. It's more like practical. And it still signals things, right? Like it signals class and gender and things like that. But fashion is a kind of a different sort of thing where it's really about trends, because you can have fashions for house plants and intellectual ideas and cars and architecture and things like that too. Fashion isn't specifically tied just to clothing, but it's about this difference between the elite and the regular people, that it's a system that is designed to keep people purchasing things at a particular rate, designed by the elite to keep themselves perpetually elite. So you can read it in fashion as a kind of impracticality that things that get in your way or are harder to maintain make it clear that you're a part of the upper class. So that could include togas and high heels and giant hats and lacy sleeve cuffs and makeup and powdered wigs and velvet and light colors and anything like that that requires a lot of maintenance and that would get snagged on things if you wore them in the rain. And that was something that men and women both wore. Now, there were differences between men and women's clothing, and they both sort of changed over time, and they varied a little bit between one country and another country, but they were. There was more of a difference between rich people and poor people than there were between men's clothing and women's clothing. And in this change that I call the sartorial revolution, which I trace to roughly the 75 year period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, that idea of impracticality became much more associated with women's fashion than with the elite. So when men adopted suits, they kind of excused themselves from the burden of fashion and consumption. And menswear is sort of somehow suddenly defined not as fashion anymore in its plainness and uniformity. So to me, the sartorial Revolution is both that change from peacocks to penguins, from this, like, colorful, varied, more materially nuanced, more likely to change over time, to muted, dark, plain, unadorned, and much more uniform and unchanging. But it's also about this bigger cultural shift of how we see fashion and how fashion was associated much more with femininity and frivolity than it ever had been before.
- [14:24]
A
Yeah, the symbolism of the suit is really interesting. And you talk about how the suit becomes more. I mean, it develops over time. There's no single inventor. It's not like the little black dress. And it's something that evolves over the course of the 18th century and by the beginning of the 19th century, then it kind of begins to establish itself as the typical men's formal wear. Obviously, this is a period of time, Age of Enlightenment values of democracy, anti monarchy. You were talking a little bit about, you know, sort of rebellion against, you know, kind of ostentatious displays of wealth. How. How did the. That the. The outfit intersect with the values of the time and the new kind of emerging ideals?
- [15:17]
B
This was something that really surprised me in my research. So I said, initially, the book was really focused on formal wear, which is what happens what. What men wear in the evenings, specifically black and white. But as I was doing my research, for a variety of reasons, I ended up finding a number of stories related to the Founding Fathers, who previously hadn't been included, because evening dress doesn't really get invented until after their generation, kind of around the 1820s. So once I started including the Founding Fathers, I had to pull my time period earlier. And it kind of got earlier and earlier until it hit the American Revolution. And then it couldn't be about just evening dress. It had to be about suits more broadly. And that was a big surprise to me was how much menswear was associated with this new. The birth of a nation and these new political ideals. And it wasn't the same suit as the suit we see, you know, by the mid 19th century, but they started that process. So, you know, there's stories of Benjamin Franklin rejecting the idea of court dress and wearing a plain suit to the court of Versailles to be presented to the king. It was still a purple silk suit. So it would seem very fashionable to us today, but at the time, it was like radically plain George Washington. There's a couple of instances where he was like, when he stops wearing his blue moire sash as a part of his military uniform, that was seen as a Republican gesture, even though he's still wearing these, like, Fancy gold epaulettes, like he's choosing some status items to retain that Americans will adopt in the same European style. And then other things he's rejecting probably as a result of circumstance and ability to get materials as much as anything else. But they are read almost in hindsight as Republican and then read as American in relation to that. Same with Benjamin Franklin. He was cited a number of times throughout the 19th century by diplomats who were forced to wear court dress or diplomatic dress being presented at foreign courts. And they always regretted that anything had ever changed since Benjamin Franklin.
- [17:43]
A
You look at the fashion sense of different kinds of countries and, you know, obviously the, you know, American Revolution, I mean, in a sense, it was a revolution of Englishmen against Englishmen. But, you know, the relationship, as you point out, between, you know, the US And France, it's very strong as well. How did men's fashion in America begin to differ from European and British fashion?
- [18:11]
B
Yeah, this was one of the hardest questions or challenges to tackle in this project was how is America, the American story, different than any other story? Because it's not like only men in America adopted suits. And that wasn't happening across the Western world. It was happening everywhere. But I just was convinced that the American story hadn't been told yet and that there was something interesting happening there, that suits meant something different to Americans than they did to people in France or England. And so that was the story that I tried to investigate. And it really seems to have played out that this relationship between plain, simple dress and ideas of rationality, Enlightenment, equality. Now those ideas were happening again all over the world or all over the Western world in this period. But. But in America, there was this practical application of the political idea of the republic. And of course, as we know today, their ideas of equality are different than our ideas of equality today. But what's interesting is that the people who they saw to be equal, who were mostly propertied white men, were the people wearing these suits. So they harnessed this idea of democracy and equality to the costume of the plain suit as a marker of the simple republican character, as they say. And I think that that has likely had ramifications on today who we think of as having political selfhood and also who is appropriate, who the suit is suitable to.
- [19:59]
A
There's this interesting sort of aside or section in the. The book on. On American Fashion about how, you know, European settlers encountered Native Americans. They would exchange occasionally linens and other fashion items. And you. You have this really interesting sort of dual portraits that show both a Native American man in Slightly formal, almost European style wear with some. Some Native American clothing as well. And then also a. A European man in slightly wearing some sort of Native American furs and clothes. And you almost imagine, like it's sort of a different world where there was a kind of a combination of the fashion senses. Can you talk a little about the, you know, the sort of. The lost potential influence of Native clothing on American fashion?
- [20:52]
B
Yeah. So the idea of cultural blending is inextricable from the history of fashion because people are always traveling and encountering other cultures and then bringing evidence or samples of that culture back home. And because it is different, it's interesting. And so fashion is always borrowing things that are interesting from other classes, from other cultures, from other genders. Like, there's always this borrowing and mixing. That's what fashion does. And so it's very possible that when new people arrived in the new world, that there could have been more of a blending of cultures, both politically, socially, and sartorially. I'm focused here on the sartorial story. And you could see based on these pictures that that was happening. You know, that fashion and textiles was always a huge component to trade goods. You live in New York. Look at the New York state seal. There's a beaver on it. It's not because people loved the beaver being their neighbors. It's because beavers were a really important export in New York. And the reason why people wanted beavers is because. For fur, and fur felt in particular, I think, of the beaver hat. It was popular, I mean, like cavalier hats. That is essential to the 17th century masculine identity. Those huge, wide brimmed hats. Or then you get the, you know, free quartered hats of the revolutionary period. So just thinking about how important trade goods were to both the economics and also the political exchange of different cultures. And there very well could have been an America that was much more rooted in Native American forms of dress rather than inherited European forms of dress. I think those portraits help kind of unknow what we know about current faction and think back to, you know, an alternative imagined future.
- [23:03]
A
Yeah. And I think so much of the story, too, that you're telling is suggesting that there wasn't necessarily an inevitability of the suit as the sort of staple of men's fashion that there. That because it developed over time, there were alternative pathways that people pointed to at various times, then maybe turned back for various. For various reasons.
- [23:25]
B
So I want to say something about that because I think that's really interesting. The thing about fashion is that nothing new should ever surprise Us, because fashion is always about surprise, indifference. Just like I was saying a second ago that fashion always wants to adopt new things or push boundaries, be radical, be offensive. Right. People are always mad at fashion. So. But, but that means that nothing that ever happens in fashion should ever be shocking, because that's sort of the point of fashion. So the fact that men at one point, you know, wore black, say in the Dutch golden age or the Spanish golden age, lots of black. Black. It was very fashionable then. And then they stopped wearing it during the 18th century when like the courts of Versailles were sort of the center of the fashion universe. And then they started wearing it again, both in America and in Europe. None of that should ever be weird because fashion is just always changing, and especially lice extremes. You know, you go from wide toed shoes to pointy toed shoes, or you go from a high waist to a dropped waist. That's always what fashion loves to do. So the fact that men started wearing black and white, or they adopted this very narrow color palette or uniformity and style, that all seems very normal. The weird thing is when fashion stops changing, that's the thing that's strange. It's an outlier. And so those are the things that we should really pay attention to. And I've been noticing you've been saying the suit, that's really weird because we don't say the dress or the hat or the shoe, but there is this particular kind of garment that is so regulated, so normative, so uniformified, that it has turned into almost a symbolic. The other really good example of that you also mentioned, which is the little black dress. Now there's a lot more variety in little black dresses than there are in suits. But it's really interesting that there's this sort of cultural phenomenon that arises that becomes so ubiquitous that it has a particular name. It sort of crystallized in our imagination as a thing and not a lot of things. And that was actually a real writing challenge in the book on a very, you know, sort of scale of grammar is when to use the suit and when to talk about suits. Because those are two different arguments. And trying to parse that was an unforeseen writing challenge in this project.
- [25:58]
A
Yeah. And I think part of it is, you know, you have this very early on in the book, you have this kind of like a portrait gallery of famous American men, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to, you know, to Edgar Allan Poe. And it's. They're all wearing different suits with certain different, you know, slightly different looks. But I think what it serves to sort of show the. Show the similarity that even if there's maybe a couple extra buttons on one suit versus another, it's still, they're still quite, quite similar. And I think that is a really interesting question to sort of look at the absence of change as opposed to change, because sometimes there is a, you know, 10. It tends to be like the first question of history is like, how do things change versus how do things stay the same? It's much harder to answer the second question. And it's sometimes a much more interesting and revealing question when you start to ask it.
- [26:52]
B
I'll say a little bit about that kind of gallery because that was a really late breaking, but important maybe methodology in this project. And it was really in response to one of my dissertation advisors who typically was not an expert in fashion and so would ask these questions like, how do I know what you're saying is a trend is really a trend? How do I know you're not just cherry picking images? And my response to that was like, ugh, how dare you? You don't understand fashion. Everybody knows that that was a trend. But because we had such a good relationship and he was such a generous reader, I really tried to take all of his questions seriously. And so I started thinking about it and I was like, wait a minute, how do we prove trends? Like fashion historians have never been told to do that before, and how would we do that? It's similar to your question of showing a lack of change over time. It's very difficult to prove a trend aside from just here's an example of this thing that I'm saying is a trend. And so I developed a strategy of what I called a database or gallery of images, which is to just say, yes, there may have been change over time, and there may have been some variety, but look, all of the presidents for the first hundred years wore black suits. That has to be something happening here. And it's not even just the presidents, but like, look, all of these people from all walks of life and all different professions, from poets to philosophers to philanthropists to robber barons to politicians, they're all, all wearing black suits. So clearly it had visual significance in the world. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought, wow, the suit. Actually, there I am again saying the suit, right? Once you get to the G20, that is probably the most prevalent visual symbol in the world. But it's something we can't see. It's been so invisible because we just associate suits with the state of being a modern man. It's bananas.
- [29:02]
A
Yeah. Not to overly date this particular interview, because I do think there's an extremely evergreen quality to this history, but I was very struck by an image I saw on the COVID of the news today of Trump and Xi Jinping in China, and they're both wearing suits. And it's this sort of striking thing that it's like these two global superpowers that we think of as being so at odds are yet so aligned in terms of men's fashion. And I don't know if there's some acknowledgment of that. It's like, hey, we're both wearing suits. Why did that happen? I don't doubt that they're asking that question, but it is very striking to sort of think about this alignment.
- [29:43]
B
So question that came up for me during this research, which I don't address, but I would love for someone else to do this research, is what happens after this time period that I'm looking at? So I am around the Civil War, which is around the time where the suit, I find, really sort of crystallizes into the modern suit, where it turns into a kind of a uniform. And, yeah, it changes a little bit over time, but essentially, like, at that moment, we're sort of stuck with it. It's fixed at that point. And one of the things that's interesting is that is during the Civil War, and there's huge tension in the United States between the north and south, between the right and left politically. And one of the things that's interesting through the perspective of fashion, and this is a real costume designer question, clothing is really good at showing difference between men and women, between rich and poor, in between different sort of factions. It's like costume design 101. If you're designing Romeo and Juliet, the Capulets are in one color and the Montagues are in another color, and the Prince is somewhere neutral in between. It's just a really good visual way of telling stories. Sports fans understand this more than anyone. Right. You've got one color on one team and one color on the other team. You need it in military uniforms to, like, figure out who to stab in the face in the battlefield. Right. So it's really interesting that the biggest political difference in the United States is not marked in dress. And I wonder if there's a significance there, if there was something that was holding the nation together in a way, conceptually or philosophically, through the fact that they all dressed alike. And I think there was probably some difference in dress between the north and South. There Generally is in terms of region, if nothing else, because of climate. That climate really dictates dress in certain ways. And so I don't know, I think that that's a really interesting, fruitful thing to do. Some more investigation of is if you can't tell the difference visually in Washington, D.C. between Washington, between Democrats and Republicans, like, that's. It's really weird. It's an outlier. It's not a normal way that fashion works. And so, yeah, that seems like it would be worthy of future investigation.
- [32:03]
A
Well, I was going to say, actually, I. I live. Used to live in D.C. and there. I did notice that there was. It wasn't necess. I didn't necessarily know if it was like a political divide, but I did see a divide between Southern men and Northern men in terms of what they wore. Northern men tended to wear black suits only, and Southern men were much more like peacocks, I would say. They wore. They wore, you know, bright, sometimes bright pink suits and all sorts of, you know, and it was very. It was very interesting to sort of see that divide because, you know, I was just so used to seeing men only in Navy or, you know, or black suits. Of course, like, we'll. We'll eventually get to the infamous tan suit, which might be the, you know, maybe the most famous suit of the 21st century. I'm sure that has to be in the Smithsonian somewhere. It must be. But I want to talk a little bit about materials because, of course, like, you know, clothing is made of materials. And we oftentimes, I think today we don't think about. I mean, a lot of people don't think about the materials or how. Where they get the materials. You know, they might have some vague sense of, you know, some factory being, you know, clothing produced in some factory somewhere. But, you know, in the 18th and 19th century, you know, it was very challenging and, you know, it was much more difficult to produce clothing. People had fewer items of clothing. And, you know, there was a whole culture around mending clothing as well. So how did the material developments or the Industrial Revolution also help to change and develop how menswear. Menswear evolved?
- [33:43]
B
Yeah, this is a great question, and I'll say that, you know, oftentimes when we look at fashion, we're. Sometimes we're telling either a visual story or a material story. And it was really important to me to do both. And that's one of the ways that I arrange the chapters thematically instead of chronologically because it was too complicated to try and do both of those stories at Once together. So all the chapters are sort of a different analytical lens, which kind of ends up mapping onto different kind of disciplinary analyses. So the material culture chapter, I go from, like, okay, so we've mapped out this visual story of peacocks to penguins. We've gone from colorful and varied to plain and uniform. But let's talk about, like, what the materiality is happening here. So it's a story of silk to wool, linen to cotton, handmade to manufactured. And each of those, there's other stories, too, like about black dye and the science of laundry and bleaching. There's all sorts of really fun parts of this. And what I found interesting in doing this research is that some of these stories became obvious only because I wasn't distracted by color, pattern and variety, that once you have just this plain black suit, all of a sudden the materiality is much more important. I was looking, for instance, at the difference between a portrait of George Washington and a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. If you were to describe them just by the colors, they would be almost identical. They're both wearing black suits with white shirts, but George Washington is wearing a velvet suit with a linen shirt, and Lincoln is wearing a wool suit with a cotton shirt. So why. Why did that change? So that's part of the story that I look at, is the way that Americans were thinking about industry and national products. And, you know, really, a lot of those questions were actually drivers of the revolution in the first place, that they didn't want to be beholden to the mother country and forced to purchase only things made in England out of raw products that were made and grown in the United States or in colonial America.
- [36:14]
A
Yeah.
- [36:15]
B
Answered your question.
- [36:15]
A
Yeah, no, that definitely answers it. I. I mean, I think I. I think we'll continue to talk about the. The materials as well as, like, an important point. Obviously, you know, you, You. You talk about the. You know, there's the change, the shift to not just the materials, but also the way that they are manufactured. You know, going from handmade to machine made is part of the story. And then also, you know, the, you know, more tools for actually, like, doing bespoke suiting, you know, fittings as well for people.
- [36:51]
B
That was a real question I had in that chapter was how much to talk about the Industrial Revolution. I had some reviewers say, everybody knows the story. You don't have to go into it. But it was important to me to kind of summarize it, because I didn't feel like mechanical and chemical stories of the American Revolution had really been explained together specifically. Through the lens of textiles, which is such a critical part of the Industrial Revolution, and especially from the American perspective, and how the story starts with the invention of machines in England and then comes to America and turns into the invention of kind of the factory system. And then there's a whole new level of introducing the chemical innovations which were really driven again by the textile industry and the need for better bleaching practices.
- [37:47]
A
One of the really interesting ideas that you look at is the notion of how masculinity evolved alongside the suit and that the suit. I'm saying the suit again, but the suit became a kind of a symbol of a type of masculinity and an approach to it. Almost like a, you know, a kind of the suit. Like quite literally, you know, part of when I was a kid, why I didn't understand why the suit was this thing that men were expected to wear is I felt like it was uncomfortable. I actually find now that I've had suits that, you know, fit me properly. You know, when you're a kid, you get a suit and then you're six months later, you know, it doesn't fit you anymore. But I was always wondering, like, why is this uncomfortable outfit the standard? And can you talk a little bit about what the suit was supposed to fit? Like how they. Why, you know, how it accorded with this idea of like what men were supposed to feel like on a day to day basis?
- [38:46]
B
This is such a good question. And it's really the topic of the third chapter, which is, I think about it as being a chapter about the embodied nature of the suit and how does that map on to different academic disciplines. That's a little tricky, but it ends up becoming a story both of kind of the history of science, because I'm looking at innovations in the tailoring industry, like the development of the measuring tape, and then also a little bit of psychology thinking about how men feel in their clothes. And that chapter starts with this series of letters that George Washington wrote to his tailor back in London complaining about how his pants never fit. Which I just couldn't believe it when I found that this was one of the things that helped me move this story from evening dress in the early half of the 19th century to including the Founding fathers in the American Revolution. Is when I started doing research for this project for my dissertation was right at the beginning of the pandemic and all the archives were closed. And there I was, I was a fellow at the Smithsonian, one of the biggest archives in the world, and I didn't have access to the collection. I just was like, what do I do? I need primary sources. And I had spent a lot of time in fashion archives before, so I had done. I had been doing research on suits for years. But one of my goals in doing a PhD not in fashion studies, but in American Studies at a place like Harvard was to get into the quote, unquote, real archives and look at real history and just ask, what are other kinds of questions that we can ask with different kinds of source material. And so I was looking online for different kinds of sources that I could use that had been digitized. And at the time, it was also right at the height of the George Floyd protests and the MeToo movement and the sort of cultural reckoning. And the galleries were open at the National Portrait Gallery. And I would walk through the Presidential Gallery, and there would always be these high school kids running through yelling slave owners. And I was like, does anyone want to hear another story about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson? I don't know that they do, but, boy, those Founding fathers online archives sure are digitized and keyword searchable. And that was what I needed. And so I just thought, you know, I'll spend, like, a couple hours tomorrow afternoon, you know, looking through them, and that'll be enough. And I swear, in the first 20 minutes, I found all those letters from George Washington complaining about how his pants never fit. And I was like, this is like, the archival gem right here. I've been looking for this kind of thing for years because it's so hard to find evidence in historical archives about how men feel about their clothes. That's a really hard thing to find. And I know that men have feelings about their clothing because I talked to people like you, and I watched actors getting dressed and thinking about their clothes for years and years as a costume designer. So it was such a key piece of evidence for me. And that really shifted the whole story. So it starts off that chapter with thinking about fit and how things fit and how terrible it is to feel uncomfortable in clothes that don't fit. And that is very related to some of the developments in tailoring in the first half of the 19th century, where tailors are developing these patterning systems, which are very mathematical. It's a real. It's a very undervalued form of engineering that happens on the body. And what I found was that they were developing these sort of systems of ratios and kind of idealized ratios of what a body is like that started off as mathematical standards, but then turned into kind of ideological standards, where just this, like, you know, you need to convey to someone what's the drop of a suit, which is like the difference between the chest measurement and the waist measurement? Well, that might be standardized, or you might have like an average. Again, this is like a mathematical average. But this mathematical average then turns into an ideal standard in the same way today that we have, you know, like a size 40 regular as a sample size for menswear. But not all bodies come in the same shapes. And they started developing also the idea of standardized sizes around this time, maybe a little bit later in the century. But that is so ingrained in us that you can have different sizes, but size is only one of the ways that bodies vary. Shapes is another way. And you see that a little bit in some parts of contemporary fashion. Like, you know, in women's jeans, you have like the curvy fit or the slim fit. But in men's suits, you also have like the portly fit or the athletic fit, which is a different drop between the chest and the waist. But even those are kind of going out of fashion as fewer men are wearing suits and as suits become more sort of streamlined. So. But I think that, again, the way that people feel about their bodies, and because we are humans and humans wear clothes in this modern world, when we think about ourselves as bodies, we always have to remember that we're thinking about ourselves as dressed bodies. And clothing is always a part of that, even for men who tend to wear this ubiquitous standardized thing. But then what also happens is that once it's a uniform, there's competition within the narrow parameters. And I think anyone who ever went to a school where there was a school uniform or even in the military knows this better than anyone, that once there's a uniform, it's the little details like who has the. The more expensive shoes and who has fancy socks and who has what kind of watch and whose clothes are dry cleaned and all of those kind of really subtle sartorial cues about belonging and understanding etiquette and manners and who has money. So those are all parts of the same story.
- [45:11]
A
Yeah. You look at other elements of the suit. Obviously, you know, a lot of the focus that we've been talking about so far is the suit as it's played out on white men's bodies. But how did the suit in the 19th century, how is it perceived as being an outfit for white men versus black men? And then also the suit as. As a outfit just for men versus a suit being something that women can wear? Because, you know, as many of us know today, there are Women wear suits all the time. It's. It's, you know, a common. Especially, you know, in a business and work context, which says something as well, you know, is a common. Common outfit. So could you talk a little bit about these. These other elements of the suit?
- [45:58]
B
Yeah. So I think that talking about suits or modern suits as a costume of white masculinity was a question that I really wanted to address in this book. And it was really hard. Talking about clothing and race is really hard because, as you know, race is a construct. And it's really easy to talk about fashion and culture or fashion and class. And race is overlapping with both of those things. So it was. I tried to address race and gender, at least in some way, throughout each chapter, to varying degrees of success, I think, because, in part, in this period, whiteness is really not yet defined. That really starts happening, I would say, more towards the end of the 19th century with more conversations about racial hierarchy and the idea of scientific racism. But these ideas are also starting in the end of the 18th century, around this period, but they are not calling it whiteness, even though it is part of the history of whiteness. This comes up tangentially, I would say, in the material culture chapter where I talk about the demand for whiteness and textiles and in other articles that are coming from ideas that I just had to cut from this book for length and clarity of topic. I talk a little bit more about the relationship between whiteness and textiles to ideas of civility, two ideas of race which are also tied into ideas of cotton on Southern plantations with black enslaved workers. And so these ideas of blackness and whiteness are both tangible in material colors, both in black dyes and bleached white textiles, but also in black bodies and white bodies, and then abstract ideas of, like, dirtiness and goodness and moral purity. So that's sort of like the material part of the story. In other chapters, I talk a little bit more about how dress is perceived differently on different types of bodies, including enslaved bodies and black dandies who are, you know, coming from free black populations more, you know, into the 19th century and 1830s, and how satirical prints at the times were really different in terms of how they looked at white dandies versus black dandies. That dandyism was seen as more a kind of, like, silliness and critique of aristocracy on white bodies, where on black bodies, it was seen more as a moral failure, that there's no possibility that this body can ever be civilized, no matter how fashionable they are or how carefully they follow the etiquette that White culture has. And that comes up in chapter four, which is, I think about it as more the performance studies chapter. It's where it's. It's interpersonal. So I've looked at the visual aspect, the material aspect, the embodied aspect, and now it's the interpersonal aspect. Suits out on the street. What happens when you're a body around other bodies. And so this is the chapter I talk the most about people who are not just white men, including Native American men, and how they are policed in their dress in a different way than how black men are policed in their dress. But it also incorporates stories of women and people who today we would probably call transgender. One of my favorite characters in the book is Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, who was a surgeon during the Civil War, and she is still the only woman to have ever won the Medal of Honor from the United States army for her work during the Civil War. And she wore that medal for the rest of her life. And she wore trousers for most of her life. First as part of the. It was called the Bloomer costume, where it looked sort of like conventional women's dress, but the skirts were shorter, they were like knee to shin length. And then they were wearing matching trousers underneath. And then later in life, she just wore suits that looked like conventional men's suits. And she was totally unapologetic about it and also very involved in women's suffrage and equal rights and voting rights for women. So she's a real character.
- [50:49]
A
Yeah. The notion of the, like, you know, women wearing suits is very interesting and part of what it suggests and oftentimes like the expectations around what women are supposed to wear if they are in positions of authority. And you look at this idea of this kind of this long lasting legacy, this almost political legacy of the suit, that the suit is something where politicians are expected to be displayed wearing it.
- [51:25]
B
I used to, for a while, the conclusion expanded to like a chapter length thing, and I talked a lot more about women in politics and the sort of history of women wearing pants on the floor and how Kyrsten Sinema was attacked for not dressing appropriately. And then fashion commentators were attacked for daring to say anything about what a woman politician wore. And it just got like, too off topic and too contemporary. And I ended up having to cut all of that. But it's such a critical part of the story.
- [51:59]
A
Sure. Yeah. Obviously, Hillary Clinton's, you know, suit is kind of, you know, it was very infamous in part for, you know, what, what color she was going to wear. I think some, some, you know, the Women in suits, there's maybe more flexibility allowed in terms of the color that they're allowed to display on the suit, where the, you know, men's suits tend to be. The expectation is that they wear either a navy suit or they wear a black suit.
- [52:23]
B
You're so right. I mean, you know, I get pushback from people that are like, I have a suit and it's not black. And then I ask, is it navy or charcoal? Like, yeah, outside of those three, it's not just that it's about a black suit, it's about how constrained the options are. And that's really the key. And that's a hard thing to maintain over the course of the book. But really the book is not about black suits, but it's about sartorial conformity and the fact that there's such a limited range of options for menswear. And as you were saying earlier, I think also that has such a huge effect on masculinity. That was one of the real goals in telling this story, especially in translating it from the dissertation to the book, is really in the book to help show how this uniformity, this symbol of patriarchy, almost has such different effects on different people in the world that it's clear how it has been sort of perceived as a kind of exclusive club that, you know, traps out people that aren't seen to be natural inheritors of the suit, which would include women, non white men, non European men, non heteronormative men, people of gendered, non conforming identity. But it also affects white, straight, rich men too. It just does it in a completely different way. But I don't think we should overlook that that is part of the story. So that was something that I really tried to address here too, is that this uniformity of suits has really trapped white men in this cage of conformity that they're told is normal and natural. And it really isn't. It's totally invented. I mean, the more I worked on this, the more I started to see. And my next book project has a much more expansive approach to thinking about fashion over a much longer time period. And the more I think about it, the more I find that adornment is really such a human instinct and plainness is not. It's a ramification of a number of different things. But in the modern world, it was really because of a particular political moment and it's not the norm and it shouldn't have to be. And the fact that masculinity is policed so heavily around it, and not only like ideal masculinity. But the fact that different expressions of masculinity are so linked to accusations of homosexuality or anything that's about deviance is I think something we should pay a lot of attention to.
- [55:16]
A
Yeah, certainly. I mean, I think the, you know, I think about how one of the. It feels maybe like it actually was just a sort of a passing moment. But you know, right after the pandemic there was this kind of whole storyline about whether or not the tie is dead. Men stopped wearing ties. Now men seem to be wearing ties again. So maybe that was just a brief, a brief moment in time. But it is interesting how like the slightest change in a men's suit, in a man's suit seems to elicit a big reaction, much bigger reaction than you know, than other, other fashion changes. Like, you know, like the Obama tan suit, which you know, was such a, a moment, kind of a, almost a funny but ridiculous moment where you know, a tan suit was seen as like, you know, it was critiqued as being like non presidential. Like why would, how could a president wear a tan suit? I, I wonder if, you know, obviously we've, you know, we've been sort of living in the, the American century now and now, you know, we're entering this sort of more multipolar world. And part of that means that there are, there are other cultures that are, you know, have a lot more visibility on the global stage, like Indian culture or Middle Eastern culture where the men do wear suits sometimes, but oftentimes they wear, you know, other, other outfits too, like you know, like Nehru jackets in the case of Modi. And I, you know, do, do you. It seems, it seems like you think on some level, like if we look forward in a hundred years, maybe it wouldn't be surprising if men are still wearing suits, but it seems very possible that the suit might be, you know, we look back on the suit maybe like we do other, other sort of outfits of the past. Do you have any thoughts like about the like long range history of men's fashion? Obviously you can't predict the future, but I don't know how do you think about the future for that?
- [57:10]
B
So one thing I think is interesting is if you look at masculinity studies, like the academic field of masculinity studies, one of the things they always talk about is that masculinity is always seen as being in crisis, that there's always this imagined past where men were men, but men are soft and it's a big tragedy. And it's all because it's always women's fault. But what's interesting, I think, is that that's very parallel to the question of men's suits always being in crisis. That the men's suit are always about to die. And the tie, I would say, is just sort of a subcategory of the suit. And it keeps coming back. You know, there's a lot of staying power in suits. And that was another part of this project that was something that I thought a lot about is, you know, or that people ask me a lot about is like, should we kill suits? Are suits dead? Is this the end of suits? And that's definitely not what I'm trying to argue in this book, that suits should go away. I think there's real power in them. And it's a really interesting, you know, part of this story of American selfhood and equality, or different definitions of equality, is more about bringing it to light. Because it just seems to have been this weird, invisible form of power for so long. And I don't know what the future of fashion is, but one of the things I hope is that whether or not it has anything to do with this project in particular, but that fashion itself, the idea of fashion, is allowed to have more prominence as a respectable form of inquiry. You know, one of the things I always talk about as evidence is you look at how many art history departments are there around the world or even in this country, and how many fashion history departments are there? Almost none. And almost all of them are in programs that are specifically geared toward people going into the industry, either as fashion designers or working in sustainability or something like that. But it's seen as somehow being inappropriate for serious historical cultural critique. And that's really a problem because it's such an important part of everyone's life and has been since humans began. And I think the reasons for it are very much a part of this story that I'm telling here in the suit. The more I thought about it, the more I. And I was really thinking a lot about academic disciplines in writing this because I'm so multidisciplinary and was not ever really raised in a discipline because I came from an art background. So I was always meeting new disciplines because I needed new strategies for telling the story. I just was asking the suit, you know, that's all I was doing, was following what the suit was telling me because I am fluent in that language of fashion. And. And so I would be like, you know, there's something psychological going on here. So I would go into psychology and get a little Bit of that or I go into the history of science or performance studies or material culture, economics or wherever it was that the suit was leading me. And in a way, I think that might be one of the challenges to defend the academic position is that it might be hard to contain fashion studies in a particular field. You know, I don't think that fashion studies is a discipline. I think it's inherently multidisciplinary. But it's a, it's a problem that it has been under researched. And I think it's very much related to the fact that academic disciplines are not, they're not natural things that appear in the world like history, philosophy, art. Those are not real things. Those are categories of thought that were invented by humans in the Western world and not just any kind of humans, but men in the 19th century while they were wearing plain uniform suits and were therefore, I argue in this book, predisposed to overlook the value of clothing as a language. It's like a whole language that a lot of men don't even understand exists, but that other people, not only women and black men and men from other cultures and queer people and trans people, but they are, you know, it's almost, it almost seems like a form of gaslighting to be told that fashion isn't important or is silly or frivolous and not worthy of critique. Which is definitely the case in a lot of, I would say, academic discourse. And that was one of the things that I was trying to address in this book, that it's serious and it deserves attention.
- [61:56]
A
Yeah, I mean, one of, to get, I think to that point, like, you know, you point out that Ralph Waldor Emerson, who is, you know, a bit of a radical in his day and preached nonconformity, of course wore suit. So you know, for, for, for him, he, he didn't see the difference in that. And I think if we actually, I think actually a contemporary example of how fashion is a huge signal and actually like maybe sometimes more important than what someone actually says is, is in the current state of politics where there seems to, to be a style of politician where they will deliberately dress down to signal that they are of the people. And it doesn't matter what they say, what their values are, if their views are different that to the left of or to the right of their opponent, if they look like, you know, if they don't look like just another man in a suit, then somehow they have a bit of cachet with, with, with voters. So it's interesting to see how like how the suit in pol you know, in, in politics is becoming almost like an anti signal for a certain type of voter that they want, they want politics, people want politicians who don't wear suits because the suit is the symbol of power of the establishment. So yeah, it's interesting and I would
- [63:16]
B
say this isn't new at all. Right. Like I remember this, you know, you might be too young for this, but I remember this with George W. Bush appealing to Joe the plumber. Do you remember Joe the plumber? And that's something you see in contemporary politicians, I think, maybe with the exception of Trump, is that they tend to have a different kind of sartorial codes depending on who the audience is. They're more likely to wear power suits, which I would say is the definition of Trump's style, which is black suit, white shirt, red tie. They're much more likely to wear that when they're representing the United States abroad. So any kind of international address, like the bigger the stage, the closer to that look. But the more likely they're trying to appeal to voters, the more likely they are to wear a blue suit, a blue shirt and a blue tie or no tie. I mean, that's sort of like the opposite. Like that's about as extreme as you can get with the exception of maybe wearing a double breasted suit. You know, Colin Powell was famous for wearing his double breasted suits. A green shirt, a pink shirt, like that's very rare in politics, but it does happen. But that's all about, right, the appeal to the common man, and we see it today in contemporary politics. John Fetterman is a perfect example of this. You know, even in his website today, it says, john doesn't dress like a politician. He doesn't act like one either. Like his, you know, propensity for Carhartts and hoodies is such a key part of his look. I think also probably that's partially because he's 6 5. He's like the tallest serving senator I think right now. And it's much harder to buy an off the rack suit if you're 6 5. But I saw it showing up in the 19th century too. There's this amazing quote, unquote biography of Martin Van Buren, who was at the time he was vice president, written by, of all people, Davy Crockett, the king of the wild frontier. When he was, I had no idea the story. He was a representative from Tennessee and he wrote this story where he accuses Van Buren of being an aristocrat, wearing corsets and having fancy carriages and things like that, saying that like if it weren't for his whiskers, you think he was a woman. And that story in particular is so interesting because Van Buren is still the only president to have learned English as a second language. He grew up speaking Dutch in upstate New York and he was raised in like very impoverished circumstances. Went to school in a one room schoolhouse. The presidential campaign of 1840 between Van Buren and William Henry Harrison is just, I mean, it's so important in the history of politics, especially around like political campaigns. But the clothing is such an important part of that story because William Henry Harrison is pitched as being the man of the people. And all the propaganda has him in front of a log cabin with like cider and you know, real down home stuff. And no one was more of an aristocrat than William Henry Harrison. He'd grown up on one of the biggest plantations in Virginia. His dad signed the Declaration of Independence. Like there was no one that was more of a kind of American golden boy. But he was marketed as being of the people, which meant a particular thing. But they also wrote it into being a particular thing by doing that, by saying that, by them connecting the sort of like rustic plainness with Americanness. Even though who is more of an American success story than Martin Van Buren?
- [67:06]
A
I mean, I think that is, it's, it's so interesting to think about the met, you know, men's dress. I mean, I think, you know, when I think of America, you know, I think of, you know, blue jean billionaires. You know, the billionaires want to, they want to look like middle class, working class people because part of America, part of the dress and I think part of the history of, of the suit too that you show is that, you know, there was a time where it was seen as the democratic, egalitarian, almost wear. It was not the fancy. Now we think about it as, you know, the fancy dress. So is slowly. But I don't know, who knows, maybe at some point, you know, it's like almost moving to, towards informality bit by bit. But you know, maybe there'll be a, you know, we'll see another, another dandy age or something like that. Though that dandy age dandies always seem to be in reaction in some level.
- [68:02]
B
One thing I think is so interesting in terms of this story of plainness is we like to associate plainness with the people, lower class, affordability, equality. But visual plainness doesn't necessarily mean it's cheap. Right? And I think that I read an article the other day where Mark Zuckerberg wears like $800T shirts or something like that. Right. You can be casual and plain, visually, visibly, and yet it can still be so expensive and so materially ostentatious. And that is, I think, is again, another.
- [68:46]
A
The quiet luxury.
- [68:47]
B
Exactly, exactly. Quiet luxury. And that is so related, I think, to this story of suits and even to the story of the Founding Fathers.
- [68:55]
A
Yeah, And I think that's why the chapter on materials is important, because, you know, that tells a story as well,
- [69:03]
B
and it's not even a contemporary problem. Like, you look at the idea of homespun in the 19th century, and even then that story was being spun as being about a sort of like intentional rusticness. But it absolutely wasn't like when George Washington wore a plain brown suit for his inauguration. That's how historians love to say it. Plain, plain, brown suit. He was not choosing brown to be plain. He didn't care about the color. He wanted the best quality woolens that America could produce. He wanted to be competitive with England, not to look different than England. It's just that the industries were still beginning at the time. And so I think that is a real underground, undertold part of the story of plainness, too, is that it was a political choice, but it was also a fashionable choice.
- [70:00]
A
Could you talk a little bit about the political nature of the suit?
- [70:04]
B
Yes, absolutely. So this is the topic of chapter five. The previous chapters, as we talked about it, was looking at the visual aspect, the material aspect, the embodied component, that performative, interpersonal nature. So chapter five really gets to the suit and the state. And that was a really interesting investigation. I think, because of the long term ramifications of the suit as a symbol of the patriarchy, is thinking about that. How does the state even think about clothing? We think about politics and fashion as being two totally different realms, but it's amazing how similar they are, how much they connect to each other. But they do that in ways that are different than how we typically think of fashion. So in that chapter, I look at military uniforms, which are probably the most specific relationship that dress has to the state. And diplomatic dress uniforms, which is a totally fascinating history. But the other part of it that I was thinking about is really just like, how does fashion become institutionalized? That's what a uniform is, a type of fashion that becomes codified and that rules are given to it and that then there's certain sort of prescription to it and they're all written down and you have to abide by them or you're breaking the social conventions. And so that chapter sets up that relationship between the suit and the state through these specifically prescribed uniforms, like military uniforms and diplomatic dress uniforms, before then looking at this plain black suit and how it became institutionalized. But the thing that's really interesting about the suit, as we're saying it, is that it is so uniform. It's more uniform than any other kind of civilian dress. In fact, it is more uniform than military uniforms. But it doesn't think of itself as a uniform. And that's really weird.
- [72:01]
A
It's a really fascinating history. And I think what shines through it is also. It's the interdisciplinarity of it. And I really do think that. I think that these sorts of histories are really important to write that take all sorts of different perspectives and all sorts of different fields into consideration. I think that this is fantastic and very much in the spirit of New Books Network, where we like to cross post episodes onto all different channels to give academics exposure to different topics. For you now, I mean, you said that you had to cut a bunch of stuff from this book. What are you working on now? What's your next project?
- [72:42]
B
So I was just talking about how I think it's strange that fashion has been kind of under explored at the academic level and thinking about the reasons why and the kind of ramifications of the suit. And I've always had an interest in archaeology and the sort of deep history of the suit, if you will, or the deep history of clothing. And so I'm taking more of an archaeological lens to this research and going back in time to the early Paleolithic and looking at the earliest evidence of human adornment and thinking about it in terms of this long deray history of clothing and adorning the body. And it's complicated because of the words that we have in contemporary English to describe what this phenomenon is. It's not just clothing because it also includes things like hairstyles. It's not just fashion because it's also about practicality, like keeping warm. It's not just about adornment because it's also about dress. It's not just about, you know, so it's so it's all of these things together. And I think including the history of textile engineering, which is another key part of the story, especially because it was so associated with the labor of women, which is another part of the story that we didn't really talk about much, is the sort of feminization of the labor of textiles, which is another one of the reasons why I think it became so undervalued in this period right after the industrial revolution where suddenly clothing and textiles was like 600% less valuable than it had been a century earlier. So anyways I'm looking at this sort of long deray of adorning the body and how the invention of different academic disciplines means that we haven't been able to see the importance of clothing as a part of being human.
- [74:46]
A
Yeah, I mean it's obviously you know, since the stories of, of Adam and Eve clothing has been an essential part of how we think about what it means to be human and in many ways clothing is an integral story in our self consciousness of our species. So I think that's a really fascinating project and yeah would love to have you on when you write that book. Yeah, awesome. Well Chloe, thank you so much for being a guest on New Books Network. It was really so fantastic to speak with you about your book.
- [75:18]
B
Thanks so much for having me. You asked such great questions.