Suits You, Sir?

What lay behind the apparently radical shift in men’s fashions during the late 18^th century? And what can the invention of a ‘masculine’ style that still dominates menswear tell us about the roles played by men, and by women, in a rapidly changing Britain?

The clothes we wear are more than fashion choices. They tell other people how we want them to think about us and, whether we like it or not, they signify our place in society. Our clothes reflect social status as well as gender, job and even politics. And if this is statement is valid today, it was massively more so in the past. The cultural code of costume was so integral to Georgian life that in the late18^th century, a sudden move in menswear from fancy styles to plain seemed to reflect a transformation in what it meant to be a man.

My latest novel Ravenglass opens with the screams of a small boy being stripped out of his petticoats. This is not a scene of child abuse but of ‘breeching,’ a universal rite of passage for boys in Georgian Britain which marked an end to wearing the ‘baby-skirts’ that made potty-training more practical. To our eyes, it’s strange to see ‘great men’ of history like Charles II or Louis XV dressed in their early years like girls. Yet contemporaries were alert to the subtle differences in boys’ and girls’ appearance.  Boys’ dresses often displayed tropes from military uniforms and their portraits feature boyish toys like drums, or boisterous animals.

Louis XV as a child by Pierre Gobert

From a 21^st century perspective, all Baroque male fashions can look feminised. Late 17^th century high-status outfits for men were characterised by lavish decoration, gaudy colours and big, let’s make that massive, hair. This male high-fashion extravagance continued through the main part of the 18^th century. Embroidery became ever more colourful and technically ornate. In my novel, Kit Ravenglass learns the specialised art of passementerie, using braid and precious metal threads for tassels and trimmings. This craze for flashy embellishment reached its zenith with the ‘Macaroni’ fashionistas of the 1760s and 1770s. ‘Macaroni’ was a disparaging term for men who took current fashions to camp extremities with towering wigs, feathery hats, stripey stockings and frothy lace cravats.

James II by Ann Killigrew (1685)

 But although we may think of frilly flamboyance as feminised, contemporaries regarded lavish garments as symbols of wealth and power. In their eyes, it was the petticoat that divided men and women, and after breeching day, the wearing of petticoats by a man was taboo. For boys in well-to-do homes like the Ravenglass household, breeching would take place between the ages of four and seven when boys would also begin a more rigorous education than their sisters in preparation for a completely different path in life. Yet Kit Ravenglass, although fictional, was surely not alone in missing the comfort and feminine elegance of his ‘baby-skirts’. Later in life, a series of dramas and tragedies lead to Kit live as ‘Stella’ and wear only female clothing. A few real Georgians also crossed this great petticoat divide. The engraving of Charles Edward Stuart (aka Bonnie Prince Charlie) disguised as Flora MacDonald’s maid ‘Betty Burke’ provided my original inspiration for Ravenglass. More relevant to Kit’s experience is the remarkable Chevalier (or Chavelière) D’Éon a diplomat, celebrated fencing champion and spy who spent many years living as a woman though the reasons for doing so were complex and nuanced as explained in an excellent new book, Queer Georgians by Anthony Delaney.

Charles Coote, 1st Earl of Bellamont by Joshua Reynolds (1774)

With hindsight, Macaroni flamboyance looks like a last decadent gasp of the ancien regime, and the radical change in men’s clothing seems to arrive suddenly with the pitchforks and pantaloons of the sans-culottes. After 1789 few people even outside France wished to be too closely associated with aristocratic excess that had characterised court fashions at Versailles. In the last decade of the 18^th century, the marker of social status in menswear switched from ornate display to expert tailoring. Plainness and sobriety in male fashion seemed to reflect a new cultural importance of masculine restraint and responsibility amongst a hard-working citizenry. Wigs and feathers were exchanged for short hair and dark hats. Floral-embroidered silks gave way to plain suits. Within a couple of decades, breeches (culottes) and stockings would be in the dustbin of history as the trousers of the sans-culottes made their way towards world domination.

Simon Chenard as a Sans-culotte by Louis-Leopold Boilly (1792)

This sudden and profound shift in the style of men’s clothes was coined ‘The Great Male Renunciation’ by psychologist John Flugel in 1930. He argued that at the end of the 18^th century, men gave up any claim to be considered beautiful and became instead “only useful.”  In Britain, George ‘Beau’ Brummel helped shift the definition of ‘taste’ and status from expensive ornament to stylish cut. Machine-made superfine woollen cloths allowed highly skilled tailors to create fitted silhouettes that could be scandalously body-hugging. In western Europe the fashion for plain dark suits coincided with the rise of the affluent middle-classes in a world where the pace of industrialisation and the globalisation of trade was accelerating as never before. The sharp, dark business suit became the last word in male power-dressing. And so it remains to this day.

But as dark suits were becoming universal for go-getting European men, women’s fashion in the 19^th century became ever more elaborate and burdensome. While the male form was being revealed by Savile Row tailoring, well-to-do women’s bodies became encased in outlandish crinolines and corsets. Men, agile and active in their lightweight suits, were out in the world forging technological and political progress whilst women, wearing skirts as big as sofas, retreated into domesticity. The idea that 19^th century women and men lived in separately gendered spheres, as glorified in the popular 1854 poem The Angel in the House, seemed reflected by the gaping gulf between the sexes in Victorian fashions.

Male and female fashions 1832

Yet historian, Amanda Vickery argues the opposite. She concludes her brilliant debut The Gentleman’s Daughter, by saying, “the well-documented struggles of privileged Victorian women to participate in institutional life represented less a reaction against irksome restrictions, recently imposed, than a drive to extend yet further the gains made by their Georgian predecessors.”  In fact, the 19^th century witnessed a growing involvement of British women in public life. Despite the encumbrance of bustles and bonnets, Victorian women became increasingly involved in higher education, local government and philanthropy as the century progressed.

Uniform of the 7th Queen's Own Hussars 1842

And in costume history, appearances can be especially deceptive. Yes, men’s suits were predominantly dark but other clothing for men was not. Victorian military uniforms became as ostentatious as any late Stuart court dress ensemble. James II would surely would have approved of the 1840s uniform of the Queen’s Own Hussars. And as with so much in history, the big glaring picture can obscure the nuance of reality. The artefacts that remain from 300 years ago are generally those of highest status. Waistcoats of gorgeously embroidered silk are more likely to be preserved than those of well-worn worsted. And despite the eye-catching bling of high fashion, there are many portraits of Georgians in plain dark suits. Charles II is credited with the invention of the three-piece suit and the one he wears in the painting that proves it is uniformly brown. And what of those little boys in dresses like Kit Ravenglass? Curiously, despite the stark divide between 19^thcentury male and female fashions, small boys (including Franklin D Roosevelt , yes that really is him) continued to be dressed like girls.

Franklin D Roosevelt (1884)

So, while it’s true that the late 18^th century witnessed a major shift in in the way western men dressed, this change may not have seemed as radical to contemporaries as it does to us. What is clear is that the rapid dominance of the plain dark suit laid the rules for how a man should look until our present century. Only in the current decade has the suit’s stranglehold on the workplace begun to slacken. Who knows whether, in a radically changing world, we might be on the brink of a new fashion revolution.

This article first appeared in Historia Magazine