The Rise of Fashion: A Reader

by Daniel Leonhard Purdy (Ed.)
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2004
356 pp. Trade, $74.95; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4392-X; ISBN: 0-8166-4393-8.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.

mosher@svsu.edu

A recent item from Reuters news service noted that investigators seized the warehoused wardrobe of the former President of Zambia Frederick Chiluba. When they publicized his 100 pairs of shoes, 300 shirts and 150 suits as evidence of his corruption, Chiluba replied "Zambians know me and know that I have always dressed very well from the 1960s." One recalls similar political symbolism of shoes belonging to former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos. George Simmel commented in 1901 on how nineteenth-century clothes often signified whether the wearer supported the right or left wing politics of the day; a commentator in today's United States might lament that Democrats sport the same suits as Republicans, though the latter prefer red-state neckties.

Fashion has always been about more than merely people in pretty clothes. This collection shows us several eighteenth century writers concerned with issues of dress and social roles, social functioning, social morality and mobility. In the nineteenth century, Adolph Loos——remembered for undecorated architecture and his fulmination that every tattooed man a potential criminal——lamented the declining influence of Austrian hatmakers, proper German pantlegs and good tailors in Vienna. To read Thorsten Veblen on how impractible clothes are conspicuous consumption, one recalls the John Berger essay on August Sander's photo of three peasant men in off-the-rack suits that contrast with the billowy, functional shirts they wore when working in the fields. The American reformer Amelia Bloomer advocated women adopt a sensible coatlike frock worn over comfy pants and boots appropriate to New England weather, a position extremely controversial to her fellow suffragettes. Simone DeBeauvoir wrote on the idealized wasp-waisted ingénues in Charles Dana Gibson's cartoons. Yet on the damaging effects of the whalebone corsets of the day, a contemporary anatomy professor said that "if you want to find all the internal organs in their normal position, procure a male subject."

Fashion is also an aesthetic experience, and it was celebrated as such in the nineteenth century. Poet Stéphane Mallarmé even wrote for fashion magazines. While Charles Baudelaire praised the dandy's restraint as he interrogated urban beauty in Constantin Guys' paintings and Parisian users of cosmetics, Thomas Carlyle wrote a somewhat goofy essay on dandyism, and Barbey D'Aurevilley praised top English dandy Beau Brummell. As the century neared its end, Oscar Wilde praised the literary utility of authors George Sand for her simple black dress and Diderot for his favorite old bathrobe.

Fashion has long been a part of the visual symbology of the transgressive, as Karl Kraus noted the eroticism of clothing in what it reveals or veils. Weimar-era sexologist Magnus Hirschfield's 1910 essay on transvestitism is characteristically sympathetic to sexual variety. Hirschfield writes of a young married man who dressed as a woman to join a woman's band (Inspiration for the 1950s movie comedy "Some Like It Hot"?) for many years undetected. After leaving the band but not drag, the subject "hired himself out successively as a barmaid, soda-water saleswoman, waitress, buffet hostess, [and, in a circus] tightrope walker to skilled rider". He left the circus to appear onstage as a female music-clown, a member of a female vocal trio and then——why didn't this idea strike him earlier?——a female impersonator. Similarly, a hard-working "female case . . . who, in spite of the fact that she had hardly turned 30, had already put on men's clothing and had become a miner, locksmith, butler, barber, whaler, steward, housepainter, and factory worker", worked other jobs when dressed in female clothes, and remained "an active married woman." My undergraduate college library had a copy of Hirschfield's book Sex in the Great War, where he wrote of soldiers reduced to masturbating in the trenches who sported tattoos "My wife used to be my right hand, now my right hand is my wife."

It is the success of Purdy's anthology that one now wishes for a companion volume on the non-European, nonwhite world. It might include items 1930s Osamu Dazai on men's kimonos, Robert F. Thompson on West African aesthetics of cool, discussion of Mahatma Gandhi's loincloth and other explorations of the garb of the people of the planet. One might even assemble an anthology on fashion among diverse cultures in the United States, including contributions on 1940s Zoot suits among Los Angeles Mexican-Americans, and Henry Louis Gates, Malcolm X and others on black hair preparation. This reviewer recalls an enlightening essay circa 1980 on the meanings of workout clothes in the urban ghetto, how pricey Adidas tracksuits and warmup gear were appreciated both for their high tech synthetics and as symbolic of the enforced leisure of unemployment. Today, much of the designer sportware advertised in VIBE magazine seems derived from the baggy denims issued to men in prison.

Purdy analyzes the fashions that appear in several paintings and popular prints, and readers would enjoy a full book of such imagery with similar informative captions. It is the mark of an enjoyable and successful volume that readers begin to imagine other books they wish this author would produce. Purdy has contributed a serious and well-cut collection to the historical study of fashion. Now excuse me while I change out of my writing cravat, and into my dinner jacket.