“Shannon’s book is like one of those nifty wardrobes advertised for sale by the new department stores of the era, a polished piece of furniture with carefully labeled chapters and neatly hanging concepts that help us organize all that information and tuck it away without getting it wrinkled.”—Ellis Hanson, author of Decadence and Catholicism

The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behavior underwent a radical change.

In The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914, Brent Shannon examines familiar novels by authors such as George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hughes, and H. G. Wells, as well as previously unexamined etiquette manuals, period advertisements, and fashion monthlies, to trace how new ideologies emerged as mass-produced clothes, sartorial markers, and consumer culture began to change.

While Victorian literature traditionally portrayed women as having sole control of class representations through dress and manners, Shannon argues that middle-class men participated vigorously in fashion. Public displays of their newly acquired mannerisms, hairstyles, clothing, and consumer goods redefined masculinity and class status for the Victorian era and beyond.

The Cut of His Coat probes the Victorian disavowal of men's interest in fashion and shopping to recover men's significant role in the representation of class through self-presentation and consumer practices.

Download The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914

PDF format, 5.3MB, 265Pages.

Paperback: 288 pages
Author: Brent Shannon
Publisher: Ohio University Press (October 2, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0821417037
ISBN-13: 978-0821417034

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 “It cannot be supposed that men make no study of dress”
The “Disappearance” of Men’s Fashion and Consumption in Victorian Britain 21
2 Outfitting the Gent
The Emergence of the Male Consumer and the Commodification of the Male Body 52
3 “Really there is much more to be said about men’s fashions
than I had imagined”
Fashion and the Birth of the Men’s Lifestyle Periodical 91
4 From Dandy to Masher to Consumer
Competing Masculinities and Class Aspirations 128
5 Ready to Wear
Class Performance and the Triumph of Middle-Class Sartorial Taste 161

INTRODUCTION
In May 1904, the London men’s monthly Fashion reprinted in full a letter written to the Irish Independent by a frustrated tailor and closet reader of popular fiction.

“I wonder what it is that the writers of fiction pay so little attention to the costuming of their male characters,” the letter began; “Of course, nobody expects a man’s clothes to be as interesting as a woman’s, but they certainly deserve more space than they get in novels, particularly the novels of women.”

The tailor cautiously admitted that he had lately begun to read a great deal of fiction, “not because I like it, but because I was anxious to find out how real heroes dressed. I didn’t learn much. Judging by the scant courtesy accorded the apparel of mankind in literature, they don’t do much dressing.”

The tailor noted that Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dinah Mulock Craik, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Edith Wharton, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Lucas Malet “seldom, except in cases of character study, . . . go into details of dress” regarding their male protagonists and villains and most often “discreetly leave their tailoring to our imagination.” “It isn’t fair to us tailors,” he concluded; “Dressmakers get a good write-up on almost every page of the popular novels, but the tailor is cut down to about six lines in the whole book” ...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brent Shannon is a visiting professor of English at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. He has published articles on nineteenth-century literature and culture in Victorian Studies and Studies in Browning and His Circle.

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