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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.
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If and when I do wear a suit now, am I then complicit in anti-liberal, possibly even white-supremacist tendencies?
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."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
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?
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].
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.
Until Donald Trump, conservatives in the US would still be considered liberals.
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).