Responding to "the suit died for good reasons"

[dieworkwear]

If and when I do wear a suit now, am I then complicit in anti-liberal, possibly even white-supremacist tendencies?

Casualwear, welcome .... .. to the resistance.

 

[FlyingHorker]

Hopefully this means a trend towards a diversity of cool shirt jackets

 

[eaeden]

The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

This isn’t about liberalism - it’s about the fact that the world spins.

Id love to break out my way-too-extensive and way-too-useless classical western education here, but this discussion has jumped the shark imo.

 

[comrade]

"to bring it back to fashion, Orientalism was in vogue in France in the 19th century, or how silk from the Far East was revered due to grandiosity of the Orient imperial courts. I don't see how you can escape the undertone of power in dress. While it would be nice to attribute the death of the suit."

The Orientalism that was in vogue mainly referred to North Africa
and the Middle East, which at this stage of their decay hardly hosted
grandiose imperial courts, the Ottomans included. This is not to
be confused with the rage for Japanese Art and artifacts which swept
Europe in the second half of the 19th century, which I do not consider
an example of "orientalism", but rather the admiration of an aesthetic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism

 

[WhyUEarly]

"to bring it back to fashion, Orientalism was in vogue in France in the 19th century, or how silk from the Far East was revered due to grandiosity of the Orient imperial courts. I don't see how you can escape the undertone of power in dress. While it would be nice to attribute the death of the suit."

The Orientalism that was in vogue mainly referred to North Africa
and the Middle East, which at this stage of their decay hardly hosted
grandiose imperial courts, the Ottomans included. This is not to
be confused with the rage for Japanese Art and artifacts which swept
Europe in the second half of the 19th century, which I do not consider
an example of "orientalism", but rather the admiration of an aesthetic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism

The Orientalism I was thinking of was the Ottoman Empire, but you're right about the decay. I was under the impression that in the mid 19th century, the Ottomans were still considered to be a world power, and thus influentially culturally, especially considering their conflicts with the Russian and the Hapsburg Empires. But I am not familiar enough to know whether the rage over Japanese aesthetic was considered to be distinct from the interest in Ottomans meant by Orientalism. I did not mean to conflate the modern usage of Oriental (Far East) with the traditional British reference of the Near East. I think we can all agree that there was a very long history of admiration for Far East goods (embroidery, porcelain, silk, tea) in Europe. I was going more for the juxtaposition of the absolute power that sultans or Chinese emperors hold and the corresponding aesthetic of those imperial courts.

 

[erictheobscure]

coming late to this thread and have only had a chance to skim the original article as well as the discussion, but my initial impressions would be:

- I do think @dieworkwear's original article is (as someone has accused him of being) surprisingly Whiggish--or, actually, some sort of proto-Whiggishh--in that it ignoresthe Restoration completely as it skips from the revolutionary upheaval of mid-seventeenth-century England straight to America and/or to Victorian England. This shuffle is important since it conveniently ignores the era of libertinism and courtly display ushered in after 1660.

- There's an odd back-and-forth between a broad-scale historical explanation and a narrow focus on the suit. @dieworkwear makes rhetorical use of this slippage when he points out that the suit was casual workwear (or whatever) from a certain historical/class vantage point. But there's a flip-side to this rhetorical position: if the suit is just one transitional point between, say, aristocratic clothing (policed by sumptuary laws!) and everyday workwear, then it's kind of sloppy (not wrong, just sloppy) to say that the decline of this particular form of clothing--which occupied different social roles in different periods--is simply explainable by a large scale historical trajectory.

- My hunch (and it's only a hunch because this is way outside my realm of expertise) is that one thing that needs to be considered is the history of textiles. Cotton is probably the most important one--and, namely, the transition from (English) wool + exotic silk to the New World production of cotton. It's not that cotton suits don't exist, obviously. But maybe cotton is located right at that meeting point of taste, utility, geography/climate, and economic realities and helps to explain the decline of the (mostly woolen) suit as regular menswear, signifying instead a working-but-not-laboring bourgeois masculinity. If my hunch about cotton is right, then it would help to show how the evolving status of the suit and its supposed decline isn't just due to the rise of liberalism but also due to the very illiberal economic realities behind that historical trajectory.

 

[dieworkwear]

coming late to this thread and have only had a chance to skim the original article as well as the discussion, but my initial impressions would be:

- I do think @dieworkwear's original article is (as someone has accused him of being) surprisingly Whiggish--or, actually, some sort of proto-Whiggish that ignores the Restoration completely as it skips from the revolutionary upheaval of mid-seventeenth-century England straight to America and/or to Victorian England. This shuffle is important since it conveniently ignores the era of libertinism and courtly display ushered in after 1660.

- There's an odd back-and-forth between a broad-scale historical explanation and a narrow focus on the suit. @dieworkwear makes rhetorical use of this slippage when he points out that the suit was casual workwear (or whatever) from a certain historical/class vantage point. But there's a flip-side to this rhetorical position: if the suit is just one transitional point between, say, aristocratic clothing (policed by sumptuary laws!) and everyday workwear, then it's kind of sloppy (not wrong, just sloppy) to say that the decline of this particular form of clothing--which occupied different social roles in different periods--is simply explainable by a large scale historical trajectory.

- My hunch (and it's only a hunch because this is way outside my realm of expertise) is that one thing that needs to be considered is the history of textiles. Cotton is probably the most important one--and, namely, the transition from (English) wool + exotic silk to the New World production of cotton. It's not that cotton suits don't exist, obviously. But maybe cotton is located right at that meeting point of taste, utility, geography/climate, and economic realities and helps to explain the decline of the (mostly woolen) suit as regular menswear, signifying instead a working-but-not-laboring bourgeois masculinity. If my hunch about cotton is right, then it would help to show how the evolving status of the suit and its supposed decline isn't just due to the rise of liberalism but also due to the very illiberal economic realities behind that historical trajectory.

Hm, not sure I understand your first two points. I don't think I skipped over the inter-periods, but I had to skim them for brevity. But either way, how do those periods change my point?

I agree the suit has meant different things at different times, but the forces that threw out the frock coat were also the same one that threw out the suit. And my point is that those forces are rooted in our general celebration of the common man.

Agree global markets play a big role in this story, but I would again just chalk that up to a result of liberal economics.

Maybe that's unfair since liberalism basically shaped almost everything in the world for the last four hundred years, especially in the West. It's not like we have an identical world where liberalism didn't happen, and we can compare how dress norms turned out in that world against this one.

But I think one reasonable test is to see how dress norms differ in liberal vs. illiberal states. The more illiberal places tend to be stricter and more traditional about dress norms. The more liberal places tend to be accepting, cosmopolitan, and even more casual. When the Iranian Revolution happened, one of the first things they did was institute stricter, more traditional dress norms. And in places such as Saudia Arabia, they still have their version of a suit. Liberal states let people dress however they want, for the most part, and buy things from around the world.

The celebration of the common man, along with liberal norms and institutions (including markets), drives things towards the more casual end of the spectrum. That's my view, anyway.

 

[erictheobscure]

Hm, not sure I understand your first two points. I don't think I skipped over the inter-periods, but I had to skim them for brevity. But either way, how do those periods change my point?

The weaker version of the upshot would be: the narrative of liberalism as the rise of the everyman (or, at least, the proto-bourgeois everyman) specifically as it relates to fashion is not at all a straight line. It contains swings back and a forth. The Restoration is a swing back to a celebration of hierarchy, of aristocracy, of excess & splendor. I'm guessing the fate of the suit exists within those swings rather than in a straight line.

The more polemical (but less fashion-related) version of the upshot would be: if the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was an important moment in the advent of bourgeois culture (and it was!), it also happened unleashed an illiberal theocracy. And although the Restoration was a swing back to an aristocratic myth, then the Whiggish narrative of liberal progress arose in the aftermath of the Restoration, as a narrative about blocking a Catholic king from the occupying the throne (is that liberal? illiberal?). The point being that the rise of liberalism is intertwined with explicitly illiberal tendencies [insert Benjamin quotation about barbarism here]. I suppose if you wanted to dig far enough, you could find this combination of liberal and illiberal tendencies beneath the contradictory banalities about suits (how they're not inaccessible to the everyman! how much we've declined when men don't wear suits! etc.).

 

[dieworkwear]

The weaker version of the upshot would be: the narrative of liberalism as the rise of the everyman (or, at least, the proto-bourgeois everyman) specifically as it relates to fashion is not at all a straight line. It contains swings back and a forth. The Restoration is a swing back to a celebration of hierarchy, of aristocracy, of excess & splendor. I'm guessing the fate of the suit exists within those swings rather than in a straight line.

The more polemical (but less fashion-related) version of the upshot would be: if the Puritan revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was an important moment in the advent of bourgeois culture (and it was!), it also happened unleashed an illiberal theocracy. And although the Restoration was a swing back to an aristocratic myth, then the Whiggish narrative of liberal progress arose in the aftermath of the Restoration, as a narrative about blocking a Catholic king from the occupying the throne (is that liberal? illiberal?). The point being that the rise of liberalism is intertwined with explicitly illiberal tendencies [insert Benjamin quotation about barbarism here].

Oh right, I agree with that. I mean, after the French Revolution was Napoleon.

I would just say that, while there are swings, there's been a general arc towards one direction. It's not a random back and forth. @eaeden mentioned above about how this is just "the world turning," but that seems to only focus on change and not what's been an incredibly consistent one-sided direction of the change, even if there are occasional swings towards illiberalism.

The current wave of illiberalism is a result of liberalism's success. But the world has consistently gotten more and more liberal over time, for the most part.

 

[suitedcboy]

It seems odd to me to put liberalism down as cause. In the US conservatism is all about no rules and no government. It seems that pokes at any norms where a person is forced/required to dress and even at in a prescribed way.

Entrepreneurialism and work from home have killed a lot of suit wardrobes and I don't know where that falls in the liberal-conservative scale.

 

[dieworkwear]

It seems odd to me to put liberalism down as cause. In the US conservatism is all about no rules and no government. It seems that pokes at any norms where a person is forced/required to dress and even at in a prescribed way.

I'm using liberalism in the old philosophical sense, not the left/ right or liberal/ conservative sense.

Until Donald Trump, conservatives in the US would still be considered liberals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism

 

[Patrick R]

Until Donald Trump, conservatives in the US would still be considered liberals.

Mostly.

 

[maxalex]

Most men are lazy dressers and always have been, which is why the suit was invented. It allowed men in the rising mercantile class of the 19th century to easily dress for work without worrying if things matched, since they weren’t Beau Brummell and didn’t have the time or skill to be “sartorial.” Off-the-rack sack suits were pajamas for daytime.

Today’s man is no more lazy or indifferent about dress than his ancestors; all that’s changed is the acceptable range of indifferent clothing. Hence cargo shorts and flip flops in nice city restaurants.

Today’s equivalent to fine bespoke suiting is artisanal workwear: $600 Japanese indigo pullovers, hand-knitted Irish sweaters, etc. But just as few men wanted (or could afford) Savile Row suits in the 60s, most men today are not buying hipster Japanese casual wear; I would venture few American and European men are even aware of those brands.

In that sense cargo shorts, far from being the antithesis of the suit, are its direct descendant. Grandpa grabbed whatever JC Penney three-piece was back from the cleaners; Grandson grabs the cargo shorts out of the dryer.

 

[Mr Knightley]

Excellent discussion, thank you to @JJ Katz and @dieworkwear

My two penn’orth – first the suit did not die, of course. Just a couple of random examples:

Even the head of Facebook abandoned his no doubt carefully-crafted look of grey t-shirt and jeans in favour of a suit when he appeared recently before a British Government Committee to answer for some of his business practices. And didn't he look uncomfortable? Was that the grilling or the fact he is so unused to suit-wearing, I wonder.

The massive growth in interest in this particular forum and many others like it confirms that there is still much interest in correct dress.

Second, if the suit, notwithstanding my comments above, is at least an endangered species then has that come about ‘for good reasons’?

No one today in the western world would fail to recognise the benefits of liberalism as an idea, at least. But, along with many other very sound political ideals it will eventually be judged by the way in which we implement and sustain it.

Thinking of the Socialist / Communist experiment of the 20thC, I was recently in Russia and it was explained to me that, shortly after the Revolution and amidst all the euphoria of the time, the new regime set about building the most palatial apartments in St Petersburg for the ‘common man’ to show that now we can all live in a palace. The existing palaces (over 1,000) of the displaced Royals and their cronies were taken into use for the common good. Fantastic! By the late 1980s, it was also pointed out, they could barely afford to build at all and some of the examples of late-Soviet apartment blocks were dire indeed.

This is a menswear forum, so back to the subject. Like others, while accepting that dress has to be seen against the political / social background of the day, I am unconvinced that the relative decline in more formal dressing is entirely attributable to more liberal times.

I also believe that things are far more cyclical than the original article allows and here I am much closer to the views of the OP. Let’s look at this intriguing piece on that other menswear Forum Ask Andy: https://www.askandyaboutclothes.com/forum/threads/dressing-in-the-age-of-nudity.79035/. Here we see an argument that we are in the second Age of Nudity. We have been here before the piece (again a somewhat selective one) proposes.

Looking at English football ‘fans’ celebrating in front of the big screens on Saturday, I was left thinking that we cannot go much further down the nudity path before we get back to fig leaves – or before (more likely in my view) we reverse the current trend. So, perhaps things will come full circle and the Second Age of Nudity will be supplanted by a new age of conservative reactionary dressiness akin to the Victorian era replacing the late-Georgian?

 

[StockwellDay]

One other thing: My cousin designs kids clothes in Italy for Italian kids. When I visited her last year in a suburb of Milan, I told her that when walking around Milan the day before, I was struck by the ubiquity of t-shirts with English words and that I had counted at least ten times as many t-shirts with English words as non-English. She said that when she's designing kids' clothes, if a product will have words on it (graphic tees, etc.) the words have to be in English. That's the only thing that sells.

This year, I went shopping in Rome for kids clothes with a friend. We both looked for clothes with Italian words or phrases on them but couldn't find any. Everything was in English. And almost everything looked like stuff you could get in the US. Because of that I didn't buy a single clothing item for my kids. My friend only bought a pair of imitation Crocks for a girl and a set of boy's socks. They were part of the house brand a local department store (OVS, I think). But they looked just like they were from the US, complete with pictures of footballs on the socks (American footballs).

Funny enough, same experience shopping for my son in Cannes earlier this year... save for the Galeries Lafayette house brand.