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TROUSERS AS AN INDUS TRIAL PRODUCT: THE CASE OF ERIC GILL

DENNIS DOORDAN UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME [email protected]

ABSTRACT together . Focusing on the political The English artist, typographer and social dimension of his choice is not to deny the critic Eric Gill did not wear trousers. This subjective and psychological dimensions of paper explores the political dimension of Gill’s life. I ndeed one goal of this Gill’s choice of dress in terms that link it to presentation is to consider how design his response to industrialization and historians confront the issue of the alienation, conditions he perceived as integration of political ideologies and constituent features of modernity. Systems personal histories when the subject of of production and distribution rather than historical inquiry is a single artist or questions of gender identity occupied a designer. central position in Gill’s discussion of clothes. In his choice of homespun tunics in place of trousers Gill sought to actively MAIN TEXT de monstrate his resistance to the industrial In late June 19 30 the English artist, type system of manufacturing clothing. Gill’s designer and social critic Eric Gill visited position was clearly articulated by him in his Germany at the invitation of his patron writings. In his 1937 pamphlet Trousers he Count Harry Kessler . The purpose of the trip wrote: This essay is neither a plea for sexual was to enable the two men to confer on exhibitionism nor sexual absolutism . It is not Gill’s illustrations for the proposed Cranach a plea for anything except a frank Press edition of Song of Songs. Kessler me t recognition that … our clothes & our Gill at the railroad station and later commercial-industrialism exactly go recorded the arrival scene in his diary. 2

Gill was immediately visible in the station in his odd garb: knee Another Gill biographer, Fiona MacCarthy, stockings, a short black cassock and noted Gill’s choice of dress and observed: brightly colored scarf. He said that Gill always insisted it was a rational all of Cologne was looking at his dress, the clothing of his trade, and legs- was this perhaps because his indeed it had a precedent within the stockings were so thin? (Kessler, Arts and Crafts tradition in the blue 1930) craftsman’s smock as worn by William Morris and Cobden Gill’s customary costume was indeed Sanderson … But somehow Eric Gill unusual for men of his time and is managed to wear it differently consistently remarked upon in the (MacCarthy, 1989: p. 110). descriptions of him penned by his contemporaries. Beginning in the 1910’s it This afternoon I want to explore the appears that Eric Gill gave up wearing political dimension of Gill’s choice of dress trousers in favor of tunics or smocks. in terms that link it to his response to Donald Attwater, one of Gill’s biographers, industrialization and alienation, conditions described Gill’s way of dressing as follows: that he perceived as constituent features of [H] e was always dressed in a modernity. I also want to attempt to link my collarless tunic or smock which discussion of Gill’s decision to dress in a reached to his shins, confined by a distinctive way to the theme of this leather belt, woolen stockings and conference: Design Activism and Social shoes. … the material was always a Change. Gill’s decision to forego trousers homespun varying in weight and and most other features of tailored men’s texture according to the time of clothing brings into sharp relief the year, brown or dark grey in colour, connection – central to design and and no difference was made in therefore important to design history – material and colour whether the between thought and action. And I would particular tunic was to be worn on like to explore the possibility that this formal occasions or when at work historical episode can be employed to with hammer and chisel.(Attwater, interrogate contemporary calls for design 1965: p.151) 3 and social activism such as Tony Fry’s Clothes were a recurrent theme in Gill’s Design as Politics (Fry, 2011). writing beginning with his 1921 pamphlet Dress (Gill, 1921) (subsequently republished I need to begin by acknowledging some of in his important collection Art- the complexities one encounters in any Nonsense(Gill, 1929) ). In 1931 he published discussion of Gill. Eric Gill was an important a book-length treatment of the subject, English artist of the early twentieth century. entitled Clothes (Gill, 1931) and returned to He was also a vocal social critic and during the theme in 1937 when he published a his lifetime he was a controversial figure for small pamphlet Trousers (Gill, 1937). the positions he took on a variety of artistic, Clothes was widely reviewed, Evan Gill cites social and economic topics. Since the more than fifty reviews in his bibliography publication in 1989 of Fiona MacCarthy’s of his brother Eric’s work. And while it is biography of Gill with its revelations about impossible to prove either way, Donald his sexual conduct he has become a Attwater’s observation that “ on the notorious character. (Everybody wants to strength of its title, it has doubtless come talk about his sex life.) Today, he remains a into the hands of more general readers than challenging figure for historians: the divide any other of Gill’s books except the between Gill the artist and public Autobiography” (Attwater, 1965: p.151) intellectual and Gill the private man can be suggests something of the book’s difficult to negotiate. So I need to say that importance and place in Gill’s career as a while I am focused here on the political writer and social critic. The core of Gill’s dimension of Gill’s choice of dress and his argument about clothes and modern arguments about clothes, I do not deny the society focuses on clothes as manifestations existence of the subjective and of systems of production and distribution psychological dimensions of Gill’s personal rather than emblems of gender. In Trousers , life when it comes to his preference for for example, he pleads with his readers to tunics rather than trousers. How historians recognize that: integrate political ideologies with personal This essay is neither a plea for histories is always an issue when the sexual exhibitionism nor sexual subject of historical inquiry is a single absolutism. It is not a plea for designer. anything except a frank recognition of the relation between clothes and 4

civilization and, above all, a employs the metaphor of clothes as houses recognition that our clothes & our and explains that while houses provide commercial-industrialism exactly go shelter from the elements, utilitarian together. (Gill, 1937:p. 22) concerns alone cannot explain the evident diversity we observe in the environment. Gill develops his argument most fully in his Cultural systems and philosophical beliefs 1931 book Clothes . Modern clothes he enrich and differentiate houses and maintained were a direct manifestation of manners of dressing as well. the de-humanizing and de-individualizing effect of modern industrial civilization. Gill admired the beauty and the gravitas of Industrialism means servile labour; ecclesiastical dress and the robes worn by it means standardized labour and it jurists and civic officials on state occasions. means the standardized product. It He spoke highly of dress military uniforms means that the thing which and was particularly fond of sporting gear everybody needs or thinks necessary such as the racing silks worn by jockeys. He will be made to standard patterns. counted all of these as residual elements – (Gill, 1931: p. 73) holdovers from premodern times – and lamented the fact that regardless of their Mankind was, according to Gill, a special profession or station in life men increasingly kind of clothed animal. The naked form is tended to dress the same. “ The counting beautiful and a source of pleasure; but a house (one of Gill’s euphemisms for naked human being remains incomplete. contemporary culture infected with the Clothes are essential to completing a man values of Puritanism and industrialism) sets or a woman because in putting on clothes the fashion; the counting house has they come to recognize their full dignity as swallowed everything. All men wear the human beings. Give a naked man a coat, Gill clothes of clerks.”(Gill, 1931: 63) declared, and he will be more a man than before. “It is not the coat that makes him How something is made – how it is what it gentle but in the coat he recognizes what is is – is a central theme in Gill’s work and his becoming to his natural gentility and writings. In Clothes he distinguishes without which he cannot live up to his between garments that are draped over the nature.” (Gill, 1931; p. 3) Gill goes on to body and those that are pre-cut according 5 to a standardized pattern to which the body image he wished to project of an is forced to conform. Creases and folds are independent spirit committed to living and good and compliment the human form; cuts making art in certain ways. In this reading and seams are wicked and confine the Gill’s preference for tunics rather than body. trousers serves more as an unmistakable sign of his declaration of independence This next sentence concludes with a from social conventions and is emblematic multiple-choice. The tragedy of Eric Gill’s of his provocative lifestyle. (And I will return career as a social activist is that he was: to this point below). A) An irascible contrarian B) A savvy manipulator of his public As for Gill’s Catholicism: it was central to his image thinking about both art and social issues. C) A Catholic weirdo The Thomistic philosophy of Thomas D) An eccentric Englishman. Aquinas, which Gill absorbed through the scholarly writing of Jacque Maritain, was Now let’s review this list. absolutely fundamental to Gill’s intellectual development. But the Catholic intellectual The contrarian is always with us. We is almost by definition out-of-step with the recognize the type; he or she possesses an mainstream secular worldview of modern acerbic voice and the utter conviction that times. I am not saying that Catholic views whichever way the wind is blowing is the were absent from the great debates of the wrong way. The contrarian serves as a period, but I do suggest they remained convenient foil for argument’s sake but peripheral rather than central to the after awhile you begin every conversation discussions. Witness, for example, the place with a contrarian aware of how it will of Distributism – the political movement unfold and you become more inclined to inspired by Catholic social teaching which indulge rather than engage critically. Gill supported –in the political landscape of the early twentieth century. I included the term savvy manipulator on my list because we know that Gill The eccentric Englishman is a charming commissioned publicity photos that cultural type, a character we enjoy but do portrayed him in ways that reinforced the not necessarily take seriously. 6

otherness - that Fry calls for in Design as The world of the eccentric is too small and Politics . Gills’ tunics and smocks were personal for most of us. The world of the indeed homespun. His daughter Petra had Catholic is perceived as too confining and studied weaving with Ethel Mairet in the world of the contrarian is - well – too Ditchling. While Gill certainly worked in the contrary. modern world, he consistently refused to be identified as a part of the modern world But is there another lens we could use to – at least as it was shaped by the values of examine Gill’s case? Is there another way to industrialism. His choice of living see Gill that might shed some insight on arrangements is noteworthy in this regard. something besides or beyond Eric Gill? Is He preferred communal living, first as a Gill and the household he created perhaps a member of the Guild of Saint Joseph and model of what Tony Fry describes as a Saint Dominic in the village of Ditchling and community of estrangement that creates a later, after he left Ditchling, in communal “place apart” - a place or pattern of action settings that included his extended family that materializes - in Fry’s words – Future and apprentices. He endeavored to Thought? integrate his living and working conditions in a way that would serve as model, in his Whatever else he was, I am prepared to words: to make a cell of good living in the argue that Gill was not a Romantic chaos of tour world . Medievalist yearning to return to the Middle Ages. Gill rejected what he called In terms of Design Activism and Social the tyranny of tailors but not the twentieth Change, confrontational is the word that century. Nor was he a Utopian Modernist best describes Gill’s strategy of social “dreaming out loud” about a more perfect activism at least as it relates to clothes. In future. He was an artist trying to live terms of his own conduct, any time you according to a set of precepts that valued came into his presence you were individuality, appropriateness and the confronted by his emphatic choice to dress integrity of the well-made thing. differently than all the other men present. No words needed to be said or action In some ways Gills would appear to be a required by others present; but no one model of the kind of critical alterity – could ignore the obvious. In his writing 7 about clothes Gill forced his readers to change society). Instead Gill argued : “A confront a central fact about the modern change of mind is not caused by a change of experience: the sheer pervasiveness - the clothes; on the contrary a change of clothes intrusiveness - of modern economic is caused by a change of mind. (Gill, 193: systems. Modern clothes are an intimate, p.70)” immediate, unavoidable point of contact with industrialism and “the counting house” If I am reading Tony Fry correctly, this is culture Gill abhorred. Certainly, other exactly what he is arguing: a change of mind design thinkers and social critics shared - a recognition of the true nature of what is Gill’s reservations about modern - must precede the fundamental industrialism. They suggested that the reconfiguration of how we live that is corrupting influence of modern society required by the crisis of unsustainability or could be resisted or blunted by attention to Defuturing to use Fry’s name for the it. We the design of the domestic realm and the must change the way we think and see and promotion of the cult of domesticity or feel the world before we can design the through the cultivation of the Fine Arts or tools, the systems, and the lifestyles of through the restorative effects of exposure what Fry calls Sustainment. to Nature, that is: the home, the museum and concert hall or the rural landscape all What then can we learn - or at least provide nurturing retreats for modern man. observe intelligently – from the case of Eric But Gill argues that without first reclaiming Gill? What, for example, undermined Gill’s our full human dignity, without casting off effort to persuade people through his own the very trappings of industrialism and the example? The link between thought and counting house, resistance was futile. If you action needs to be framed in ways that wear the clothes of a counting house clerk people can understand in order to process when you are at home then that is what and eventually identify with. For Gill writing you are regardless of your surroundings. In was his way of framing his acts and linking what I consider a significant move, Gill his personal actions with a political stance. rejects the concept of design determinism ( But his book Clothes can be a frustrating i.e. the belief that we are shaped by the read. Earlier I quoted Donald Attwater’s buildings that surround us and that if we remark that Gill’s book Clothes probably reconfigure the built environment we will reached more readers than almost anything 8 else he wrote but Attwater goes on to trousers; all Kessler saw was the arrival of conclude: “it has been productive of more his friend the eccentric English artist. disappointment than any of Successfully framing the link between them.”(Attwater, 1965: p. 151) Clothes is thought and action is critical and, in the about a lot more than tunics and trousers. end, Gill’s efforts to frame his actions were In addition to describing the evils of critically flawed. industrialism and the modern tyranny of tailors Gill spells out his position on gender REFERENCES identities, sexual mores, birth control, Attwater, Donald (1965) A Cell of Good homosexuality, the nature of work and art, Living. The Life, Works, and Opinions of Eric the origin of human dignity along with Gill. London: Geoffrey Chapman. observations about the soullessness of Fry, Tony (2011) Design as Politics . Oxford: modern science and the Thomistic Berg. distinctions between making and doing. In Gill, Eric (1921) Dress. Being an Essay in the context of this conference, Gills’ writing Masculine Vanity and an Exposure of the is a fatal weak link between his thinking and UnChristian Apparel Favoured by Females. his actions. Ditchling: St. Dominic’s Press. Gill, Eric (1929) Art-Nonsense and Other Despite the very public nature of his choice Essays. London: Cassell & Co. to dress a certain way Gill’s activism Gill, Eric (1931) Clothes. An Essay Upon the remained solitary and misunderstood. Nature and Significance of the Natural and However astute Gill was at self-promotion it Artificial Integuments Worn by Men and is exactly the fierce independence of the Women. London: Jonathan Cape. image he created that, I suggest, Gill, Eric (1937) Trousers & that Most undermined the power of that image to Precious Ornament. London: Faber & Faber. promote social activism and to incite others Kessler, Harry (1930) Tagebuch, Monday, to reject the tyranny of tailors and thus June 30, 1930 , Deutsches Literaturarchiv, resist the hegemony of modern Schiller-Nationalmuseum. industrialism. Standing in a German railroad MacCarthy, Fiona (1989) Eric Gill. London: station in 1930, Count Harry Kessler could Faber and Faber. not see the political act of separation and resistance signaled by Gill’s refusal to wear 9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Tracy Bergstrom and John Sherman, colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, and Ruth Cribb, Victoria & Albert Museum, for their advice and assistance. The work on this paper began during my residency as the Mellon Fellow at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University. I wish to thank Jon Mogul, Frank Luca and the staff of the Wolfsonian-Florida International University for their assistance and support.