This Lecture Is About Clothing As an Idea and an Object, It Aims to Trace
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This lecture is about clothing as an idea and an object, it aims to trace the suit’s all-pervasive iconography in modern and contemporary cultures, to show how the suit’s simple forms have emerged and how its original meanings have adapted and persisted to denote truths that are greater than the basic meeting of cloth, scissors and thread. In order to do so it will be necessary to start with the fundamentals, with the structures of the suit itself. In made-up form, the suit is usually characterized by: a long-sleeved, buttoned jacket with lapels and pockets, a sleeveless waistcoat or vest worn underneath the jacket (if three piece), and long trousers. The simplicity of its appearance is belied by the complexity of its construction. As a comparative study of ready- made suit manufacture commissioned by the British Government Department of Trade and Industry in 2003 demonstrated: A tailored jacket has an intricate structure, composed of as many as 40-50 components… Its manufacture may involve up to 75 separate operations. The first step in the production process is the “marker” – a pattern according to which the many components… are cut from the material. The experienced marker maker tries to configure these so as to waste as little of the cloth as possible… The material is then layered, perhaps with as many as 40 plies at a time, and then cut… The production sequence is, in principle, similar to making cars. The various parts are made first, they are then assembled into sub-assemblies, which are progressively brought together for final assembly. Smaller items are made first or in parallel with the body fronts – interlinings, back sections, pockets, collars, sleeves, and sleeve linings. Pockets and interlinings are attached to the body front. Back sections are joined to the fronts, then collars. Sleeves are lined and then joined to the body. Buttonholes and buttons are added. Sewing operations involve a range… of stitches (chain, lock, overedge, blind, buttonhole…)… Under pressing is carried out at various stages of the assembly, by ironing (as in the domestic sense), to make sewing easier or more accurate… A range of mechanical presses, each with a moulded shape, are used for top pressing the completed garment.i The modern ready-made suit then, is the product of a widely-recognized and well-ordered system of manufacture, refined and democratized through the twentieth-century by high-street pioneers and international brands, and present in the wardrobes of many. Its bespoke variation continues to be manufactured on traditional lines, for an elite minority in the west and a wider audience in Asia and the developing world. Both options conform to an accepted set of parameters that produce a fairly standardized notion of what a suit should be – how it should look and feel. It was not always thus. When the proposition of a ‘suit’ of clothing (a well-fitted set of garments to be worn at the same time, though not necessarily of matching cloth) emerged in Europe’s cities and royal courts during the fourteenth century, its construction was more likely to constitute a complex negotiation between the skills of the tailor and other craftsmen and women, and the tastes and desires of the client. The possibilities for variation were endless. Intriguingly, while the skill of the tailor and the pressures of commodity culture have produced a material and stylistic history of the modern suit marked by subtle variation and an obsession with the details, many observers and critics have instead chosen to damn it for its association with a stifling conformity. The suit has most often been dismissed as a mere uniform, regulating difference through disciplining appearances, keeping men in their place. The progressive late nineteenth-century writer on social struggle, Edward Carpenter railed against the prison of its heavy seams: The truth is that one might almost as well be in one’s coffin as in the stiff layers of buckram-like clothing commonly worn nowadays. No genial influence from air or sky can pierce this dead hide. Eleven layers between him and God! No wonder the Arabian has the advantage over us. Who could be inspired under all this weight of tailordom.ii Carpenter’s lament is an interesting one, not least in its evocation of the freedoms of Arabian dress. For if we take Charles II’s introduction of the Ottoman inspired vest into English Court dress in the Autumn of 1666 as the pivotal moment in the birth of the modern three-piece English suit, then we can see that Orientalism was, in fact, amongst several influences that actually inspired the look of the suit’s original genesis (hardly the marker of a stifling conformity).iii Stylistic genealogies aside, it is also clear that the new costume adopted by Charles’s courtiers achieved an unprecedented and welcomed uniformity amongst elite and middling civilian ranks, that in its earliest iterations was revolutionary and invigorating rather than constraining. Samuel Pepys recorded the effects with typical acuity: This day [October 15, 1666] the King begins to put on his vest, and I did see several persons of the House of Lords, and Commons too, great courtiers, who are in it – being a long cassock close to the body, of black cloth and pinked with white silk under it, and a coat over it, and the legs ruffled with black ribbon like a pigeon’s leg – and upon the whole, I wish the King may keep it, for it is a very fine and handsome garment.iv Fine and handsome it may have been, but the new suit also owed a debt to the military uniforms that had preceded it, and were being reformed at the same time. In response to the increasing introduction of firearms on the battlefields of Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries military theorists and commanders had come to the conclusion that greater co-ordination and co- operation of troops was necessary in order to gain martial advantage. A shift from the use of private feudal armies towards the establishment of permanent salaried regiments of volunteers were also pre-conditions for the manufacture, provisioning and development of uniform military dress across all ranks. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, in what has become known as the ‘patrimonial era’, a striking and polychromatic uniformity of battle-zone and ceremonial dress, often informed and embellished by aspects of local costume (from plumes to leopard skins) had become the norm.v In mid eighteenth-century France and Prussia, with their spectacular fetishism for bureaucratic order, the military uniform was also a potent agent of court and state control – and thus a source of much debate. The material and economic costs and rewards that the uniform business generated were huge. As historian of clothing and appearances Daniel Roche estimates, between c.1726-60, in order to clothe the necessary number of recruits to keep regiments fully- manned, the French Army’s suppliers had to provide 20,000 outfits a year. For foot soldiers alone this would have accounted for a theoretical 30,000 meters of broadcloth for coats; 3,000 meters of coloured cloth for facings, 100,000 meters of serge for linings, and further thousands of meters of various textiles for breeches, waistcoats, shirts, underwear, stockings and neck stocks.vi But what was more important than the scale of the project, in France and elsewhere, was the disciplinary challenge that the idea of uniform set down, both for civil society in general and for concepts of respectable, fashionable and modern masculinity in particular. As Roche proclaims, drawing on the philosophy of the time: The need to shape minds and bodies finds in uniform a valuable aid: it is a training, an element in the education of controlled individual power… It is an instrument in a process designed to shape the physique and the bearing of a combative individual, whose autonomy conditions his docility and whose obedience transforms individual strength into collective power. Uniform is at the heart of the military logic… when war is a necessary continuation of politics. Uniform constructs the fighting man for mortal combat. It imposes control, a source of efficiency in battle and means to social power… It creates through education, realizes a personage and affirms a political project by demonstrating omnipotence… Uniform is central to a utopian and voluntarist vision of the social which reconciles the conflict between automatic docility ‘and the concrete economy of the individual liberty in which the autonomy of each constitutes the measure of his obedience’. It impregnates the whole of society.vii Roche’s oblique reference to the central tenets of Rousseau’s ‘Social Contract’ reminds us that a relegation of the suit to the status of ‘mere uniform’ provides an insufficient and un-nuanced account of the suit’s central importance in the story of European modernization. Like military uniform itself, with which it shares a common history, ‘it was part of a new delineation of public space, it established distances, a code of human and social relations, and was all the more persuasive in that it developed an aesthetic.’viii But perhaps the smart flashiness of the soldier’s get-up takes us only so far in understanding the evolution of the modern suit. Whilst there is certainly a degree of equivalence and a tangible synergy between the military impulse to discipline, the practical affordances of uniformity and the development of a costume best suited to the new social and political contract, the showy ceremonial qualities of battlefield dress really represent a genre of clothing whose meanings were essentially martial in focus.