Victorian Studies

In November 1893 the Cutter's Gazette of Fashion, a prominent trade periodical for tailors, published the comments of a T. Patterson delivered before the Sheffield Society. In his address, Patterson celebrated the robust state of London's men's tailoring and extolled the modern advances that had allowed its proliferation throughout the provinces and the Continent:

Fashions for gentlemen do not now originate across the channel, but in London, the great centre of the world's life in so many things, she also becomes mistress in what relates to style and fashion in gentlemen's dress. Nor are the provinces lagging behind so much as they used to. It is no unusual occurrence for a customer to ask for a certain garment or a special shade of color, that has just become the "go" in London....Cheap travelling, and the display of the newest and latest fashions by the purveyors of dress, soon educates the public taste and informs the individual as to what is being worn.

Patterson's comments suggest tremendous changes both in the popularity of fashionable dress and in English masculinity wrought by nineteenth-century developments of modern consumer culture.¹ Indeed, the transformations in retailing and consumer practices during the half-century between 1860 and 1914 were nothing less than a revolution. The emergence of the large-scale department store, the massive expansion of the popular press in the form of inexpensive books and periodicals, and the rapid development of increasingly sophisticated advertising techniques brought about an awareness, availability, and affordability of clothing and an ever-growing variety of other goods. No longer regarded by the middle classes as the domain solely of women, the elite, and the inhabitants of sophisticated capital cities, fashion had become available to and desired by all male Britons. More significantly, Patterson's speech also suggests the eagerness with which commercial industries pursued and createdthese growing markets. The clothing [End Page 597] trade was more than happy to expand its customer base by "educating" middle-class men about the consumable tools of the fashionable life.

The enormous changes rendered by nineteenth-century commercial culture on the economic, social, and psychological lives of Britain's consumers cannot be underestimated, yet their effects on male consumption and the social construction of masculinity have yet to be examined thoroughly, and men's gender and class performance via fashion, grooming, and consumer habits has been largely overlooked or ignored by cultural historians. Recent scholarship has dismantled "separate spheres" ideology that imagines men as producers and women as consumers and has challenged the notion of a "Great Masculine Renunciation,"² in which nineteenth-century middle-class Englishmen adopted sober, unadorned business-oriented dress in an attempt to gain sociopolitical legitimacy. While the Renunciation's ideal of male sartorial reserve is no longer regarded as a historical truth, its seemingly monolithic presence in popular Victorian literature has proven problematic for contemporary historians attempting to recover the social and consumer habits of the era and has hindered a more nuanced, rigorous examination of nineteenth- century middle-class male engagement with clothing and shopping. Fashion and consumption are still largely gendered as the exclusive domains of women. The iconography of shopping—its spaces, its goods, as well as the very act of shopping itself—are consistently encoded as feminine. Consumption is readily linked to adornment and beautification of the body and therefore has historically been associated with the feminine and female vanity (Nixon, "Have You Got" 151). Men are believed to exhibit little interest in ornamentation or style, dressing instead for comfort and utility. Victorian and turn-of-the- century fashion and shopping have conventionally been read only in terms of their effects on female consumers—as evidenced by the recent historical and critical studies of Lori Anne Loeb, Elizabeth Langland, and Erika Diane Rappaport, which have explored the influence of consumer culture on femininity and...