Becoming a Man in the Age of Fashion: Gender and Menswear in Nineteenth-Century France, 1830-1870

Abstract

“Becoming a Man in the Age of Fashion: Gender and Menswear in Nineteenth-Century France,” investigates the evolution of the menswear industry in France from the July Revolution of 1830 to the collapse of the Second Empire in 1870. Drawing on a wide range of archival materials – including newspapers, fashion plates, posters, advertisements, state records, patent records, bankruptcy records, probate records, family papers, portraits, and visual ephemera – this project first argues that in order to drive profits and support France’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse, the fashion industry mobilized gendered and classed discourses to encourage particular forms of sartorial consumption while also delineating the limits of appropriate behaviors for elite, middle-class, and eventually working-class men. Second, this work argues that elite and middle-class men participated actively in the design, procurement, and maintenance of their wardrobes throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Although there is no question that women played the most important and often overlooked roles when it came to dressing themselves and their families, the history of menswear between 1830 and 1870 reveals how dress and fashion were essential to how elite and middle-class men navigated the social and political dimensions of the world in which they lived. Before 1850, the fashion industry focused most of its attentions on encouraging consumption amongst elite men. In the 1830s and 1840s, tailors and shirt makers advertised themselves as the only artisans capable of understanding what it took to properly dress elite male bodies. In the 1850s, however, new businesses that specialized in cheap ready-to-wear menswear began using both new and retooled advertising strategies to encourage lower middle-class men and working-class men to also think of clothing as an essential part of how they performed their gender and class identities. Finally, using the men’s ready-to-wear industry as a point of entry, this work argues that the menswear industry in France is an example of how entrepreneurs and businesspeople contributed to the articulation of modern legal practices as well as production techniques that have come to define industrial capitalism, including the supremacy of advertising, modern intellectual property rights, mass-production, and a devaluation of “feminine” forms of labor.