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flocked to Paris from all over Europe to meet the ever-growing demands of its wealthy merchant classes.’ Flash, it seems, will out.
As Paula Baxter explains, menswear has also been closely linked to the military. ‘The earliest ideals of manhood were based on the warrior, who chose adornment that manifested his overt masculinity and bravery… Garments for combat were generally intended to be colourful, decorative, and functional.’ (‘A Rakish History of Men’s Wear’, exhibition guide, September 2006.) The emergence of tailoring is directly linked to the evolution of the uniform, with its notions of disciplined cut and proportion, while early examples of ‘fashionable’ menswear take their cue from horsemanship and other martial skills. But if male dress has from the very beginning been codified and regulated, it has also been consistently subverted by rakish outsiders. ‘A universal truth emerged early on,’ Baxter writes. ‘Young men are quick to adopt flashy, often sexually provocative garments as a means of advertising their virility.’ Outré stylishness, she adds, acts as ‘a goad to dress norms’.
A shadowy reflection of this sensibility can be seen among British football fans. As the style writer Robert Elms underlines in his sartorial memoir The Way We Wore (2005), British male fashion has for the last 50 years been built from the bottom up, by working class lads on the streets. Tracing the history of his own fashion enthusiasms, Elms takes us from mod to skinhead, from disco to punk and on to the experiments of the New Romantics in the eighties – and beyond. But he never neglects the influence of the terraces. ‘There’s always been a close relationship between football and fashion. The terraces, when there were terraces, were the perfect theatre of display, and the most immediate means of communicating new trends. The skinhead look, for example, emerged from mod via the West Ham mob, and in the one season, 1968–9, spread around the country. I can still vividly recall being taken to Chelsea as a ten- or eleven-year-old and seeing a guy
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standing at their end in a canary yellow Harrington [jacket], and being told he was the leader of the Shed.’
He returns to the theme in the 1980s, when the ‘Casuals’ emerged, rigged out in their bizarre melange of European sportswear and British golfing attire: Fiorrucci jeans meet a Lacoste shirt under a Pringle sweater, or thereabouts. Accessories included a Stanley knife in the back pocket. More recently, the emerging British menswear designer Aitor Throup showed, in September 2006, a collection that combined military influences with ‘hooligan wear’.
Born in Argentina but raised in the northern town of Burnley, Throup was inspired by a stint working as a sales assistant for casual clothing brand CP Company. He told i-D magazine: ‘It was during the time when labels like CP and Stone Island were key labels for football hooligans. I was never one of them but I wore their gear.’ (‘Aitor Throup – Football gets fashionable’, September 2006.)
But while Mintel’s ‘peacock generation’ ruffle their plumage in tribal display on the terraces, the older man remains buttoned up in his sober charcoal suit. What horrible upheaval convinced the mature Western male that he should subdue, truss and pluck his inner peacock? According to the exhibition L’Homme Paré, the French Revolution is to blame.
The birth of men’s fashion in France took place under the reign of Louis XIV, who established the royal court at Versailles in 1682. Marked by an attempted uprising during his youth, he was determined to keep his closest advisors – and his potential enemies – close to him. So both king and courtier lived in the countryside at Versailles, away from dangerous external influences and assassination plots. The king dressed extravagantly and his courtiers, who were forever at close quarters, had no choice but to do the same. In fact, they competed with one another to see who could wear the most audacious costumes: richly decorated capes, sleeves garnished with ribbon or lace and clothes of satin or velvet, depending on the season.
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By the early 18th century, complex garments such as haut-de- chausses (breeches) and the pourpoint (doublet), and the capes that covered them, had evolved into a simpler three-piece outfit – an early version of the contemporary suit. But although lines had been pared down, men lost none of their peacock tendencies:
coats featured complex embroidery and highly decorative buttons in silver, copper, pearl or gold. Buttons were also painted with coloured varnishes or ornamented with complex filigree patterns.
The 18th century male was even more of a bird of paradise in private. Casual silk robes with voluminous sleeves, worn while relaxing at home (the distant cousin of the smoking jacket), were inspired by the Orient, particularly Persia, and featured glorious symmetrical floral patterns. These baroque designs found their way into daytime wear in the form of extravagant waistcoats.
New weaving methods made such garments easier to produce and thus more affordable. Today, while waistcoats come and go, the tie remains the only constant outlet for men’s baroque fantasies.
The revolution of 1789 and its aftermath put an end to the French male’s strutting. Dressing ostentatiously had been, after all, the habit of the aristocracy. Once heads had rolled, clothing became democratized: plain and streamlined, with only vertical stripes to provide visual interest. French men adopted English dress habits, which had always been more practical because English aristocrats were traditionally landowners, rather than courtiers, and prized simple, resilient, practical clothes for riding.
In the Napoleonic era, only the military were allowed overtly colourful costumes, and both soldiers and emperors wore their dashing uniforms for social occasions. After the restoration and into the Second Empire, the black frock coat or redingote (a corruption of the English ‘riding coat’), worn with a plain black waistcoat and trousers, became the uniform of the elegant man about town. Many fashionable males approved of this sharp black look. The poet Baudelaire considered that, ‘the greatest colourists know how to make colour with a black suit, a white tie, and a grey
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waistcoat’. He also felt that black had ‘not only a political beauty, as the expression of universal elegance, but also a poetic beauty.
We are all celebrating the death of something’.
Similar views had been expounded several decades earlier, on the other side of the Channel, by a man whose influence lingers over British male dress to this day: George ‘Beau’ Brummell, the first of the dandies.
Born on 7 June 1778 into a rather arriviste upper-middle-class family with political connections, Brummell became a friend of the Prince Regent and the ultimate male icon of his day. He was what all men seem eternally to require when it comes to matters of style: a role model. A pupil at Eton and then a soldier with the
‘Prince’s Own’ regiment – the 10th Regiment of Light Dragoons – Brummell synthesized schoolboy and military influences, together with the pared-down English equestrian style favoured by French revolutionaries, into an outfit of brutal simplicity. If your clothing provoked raised eyebrows – or even a sideways glance – you were overdressed, in Brummell’s opinion. What he sought was not ostentation, but perfection.
The basic Brummell look can be summarized as follows: a snowy white shirt and cravat (or ‘neckcloth’) under a pale or white waistcoat; form-fitting white or buff breeches or pantaloons, either in a woven stocking material or in soft leather, secured by braces; a dark blue jacket with tails, adorned with brass buttons and sculpted by the tailor to suggest an athletic physique; black Hessian riding boots.
After the lacy and embroidered fopperies that had preceded it, this ruthlessly streamlined look was a fashion electroshock. As Ian Kelly puts it in his (2005) biography Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Dandy, ‘it was the ideal visual corollary of Empire: noble, muscular, self-evidently aspirational, utterly uneffeminate’. And although it might seem severe today, at the time the ensemble spoke of liberty and physicality. The clothes were ‘the casual
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sportswear of their day – Hessian riding boots, riding breeches and cutaway riding jackets – so that even West End “loungers”, who had no intention of riding anywhere, could give the appearance of readiness to mount a horse and gallop towards revolution’.
Suitably enough, much of Brummell’s socializing was done at the theatre, whose stalls played the role that the football terraces would a couple of centuries later.
As one might expect given his high public profile, Brummell was sought out for early forms of celebrity endorsement. The (1999) book The Hidden Consumer, by Christopher Breward, offers an interesting insight into Brummell’s relationship with the tailor Stultz, via a clipping from an 1872 edition of the magazine The Tailor and Cutter. ‘Stultz… conceived the idea of making a coat for Brummell… The coat was sent with a £100 note in the pocket.
Brummell acknowledged the receipt of the coat, adding that the lining was very acceptable. An arrangement was made whereby Stultz sent Brummell a new coat in a new style at the beginning of each month, each having a £100 note in the pocket… ’
Such was Brummell’s influence that a coterie of admiring men – which included the Prince Regent – would call by his rooms in the morning to watch him dress. Nobody had such skill with a necktie, it seems. He also introduced elements of male grooming that are familiar to us today, but were unusual for the era. For instance, Kelly tells us that he ‘exfoliated his body all over with a coarse horse-hair brush’. He also bathed and changed his clothes several times a day. Of course, the immaculately white shirtfronts and cravats sported by Brummell and his followers also signified status – only wealthy young men could afford such a quantity of freshly laundered material. Those dashing jackets, too, demanded a high level of craftsmanship if they were to transform a well- fed London dandy into a broad-shouldered yet sleek Adonis. ‘The real art of bespoke tailoring,’ Kelly writes, ‘was born from this need to define each body according to a perceived ideal, rather than swathe a body generically in fabric suited to his class.’
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An armature of tailoring over a smart shirt and necktie: Brummell’s legacy, then, was the ubiquitous suit.