Fashion Theory

The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture

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Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the

Feminine?: Revisiting J.C. Flügel’s Psychology of
Clothes

Chloe Chapin

To cite this article: Chloe Chapin (2021): Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of

the Feminine?: Revisiting J.C. Flügel’s Psychology�of�Clothes, Fashion Theory, DOI:
10.1080/1362704X.2021.1952919

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Fashion Theory
DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2021.1952919
# 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Chloe Chapin
Chloe Chapin is a PhD candidate in
American Studies at Harvard
University, and currently the Joe and
Wanda Corn Fellow at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum
and Smithsonian National Museum of
American History.
chapinc@g.harvard.edu
Masculine
Renunciation or
Rejection of the
Feminine?:
Revisiting J.C.
€gel’s
Flu
Psychology
of Clothes
Abstract
ugel’s conception of the “Great Masculine
In this article, I revisit J.C. Fl€
Renunciation” and its lasting effect on fashion scholarship. Coined in
ugel’s 1930 book The Psychology of Clothes, the term was quickly
Fl€
adopted by early dress historians, though it has often been used in
extraction from its original context. Fl€ ugel’s framework of psychology
both illuminated and limited his analysis of men’s clothing: I compare
his early 20th-century psychological analysis to the real historical style
changes between the 18th and 19th centuries, and the profound, lasting
impact they had not just on men, but on broader understandings of gen-
der, class, and nationality. I challenge Fl€ ugel’s definition of the changes
2 Chloe Chapin

in fashions that did occur at the end of the 18th century as essentially
about masculinity—by far the more profound impact has been the asso-
ciated assigning of women’s dress to the character of “fashion,” a role
which had previously been held by both genders of the upper class.
While it is not invalid to consider this esthetic shift in terms of a loss
for men, it also allowed for women’s fashion to be marked as fashion,
and for women and nonwhite, non-western, or non-heteronormative
men to be marked as “other.”

KEYWORDS: J.C. Fl€ ugel, Great Masculine Renunciation, gender,

masculinity, French Revolution

Introduction

Comparing the portraits of well-to-do Western European men—one

painted in the mid-18th century and one painted in the mid-19th cen-
tury, as seen in Figure 1 a modern viewer would likely notice both how
much their style of dress had changed, and, entangled within this style,
how drastically their ideas of manliness had transformed along with
their wardrobes (Figure 1). Even though the later portrait was painted
nearly two hundred years ago (twice the time as that elapsed between
the two paintings), the short hair and plain dark suit of Alexander von
Humboldt project more or less a recognizable picture of masculine style
to a modern viewer. What then explains the dramatic shift that occurred
between the two portraits—or the lack of change since? In 1930, British
psychologist J.C. Fl€ugel described the profound stylistic change in men’s
clothing that occurred between the 18th and 19th centuries as a shift
from “brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of
ornamentation” to “a plain and uniform costume” (Fl€ ugel 1930a,
110–119). Fl€ ugel called this the “Great Masculine Renunciation,” and
this idea has remained a central (and mostly uncontested) tenet of men’s
fashion history since Fl€ ugel first coined the phrase nearly a hundred
years ago.
Fl€ugel, like many scholars of menswear since, read this shift primarily
in the form of loss for men, lamenting that “man abandoned his claim
to be considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at being only useful. So
far as clothes remained of importance to him, his utmost endeavors
could lie only in the direction of being ‘correctly’ attired, not of being
elegantly or elaborately attired” (110–111). This description of the fun-
damental, seemingly irreversible shift in masculine style has had a lasting
impact on the field of fashion—perhaps the most profound analysis
about men’s fashion in the field.
In this paper, I examine Fl€ ugel’s professional career as a psychologist,
seeking to address how his field both illuminated and limited his analysis
of men’s clothing. I revisit his book Psychology of Clothes and compare
his psychological analysis to the real historical style changes for men
 Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 3

Figure 1
€gel’s idea of the “Great Masculine Renunciation” referred to fundamentally different conceptions in men’s dress (and masculinity) before
Flu
 Van Loo, Unknown Artist Carrying the Order of Saint-Michel. c.1730–1740,
and after the late eighteenth century. Left: Charles-Andre
Cha^teau de Versailles. # Art Resource NY / Christophe Fouin. Right: Joseph Karl Stieler, Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, 1843,
Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin. # Foundation Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, Berlin-Brandenburg / Gerhard Murza.

between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In doing so, I weigh inter-
dependent explanations for changes in style alongside the profound, last-
ing impact this style change had not just on men, but on intersectional
understandings of gender, class, and nationality. In doing so, I challenge
Fl€
ugel’s definition of this shift as essentially about masculinity, in a consid-
eration of what has been overlooked in the powerful—if simplistic and
one-sided—nature of his far-reaching analysis. I argue that, while the clear
style shift identified by Fl€ugel has certainly had a lasting negative impact
on men and their wardrobes, by far the more profound impact has been
the associated assigning of women’s dress to the character of “fashion,” a
role which had previously been held by both genders of the upper class.
The fashioning of femininity and the corelated feminizing of fashion are, I
argue, ramifications of this Great Renunciation that ought to be consid-
ered alongside any changes to the masculine wardrobe.

€ gel’s Psychology of Clothes

Part 1: Flu

John Carl (J.C.) “Jack” Fl€

ugel (1884–1955) was a British experimental
psychologist who worked throughout the war years as a teacher at
4 Chloe Chapin

University College London and as a practicing psychoanalyst. An early

adopter of Freud’s ideas of the unconscious, Fl€ ugel was one of the first
people in Britain to straddle academic psychology and the relatively new
area of psychoanalysis, and his first book, The Psychoanalytic Study of
the Family (1921), helped introduce the highly influential Oedipus con-
cept to a wider audience.1 To assert that he was a key figure in the rise
of both psychology and psychoanalysis seems to be a bit of an under-
statement, despite the fact that he appears not to have had nearly the
same lasting impact within his own field of psychology as he has in
fashion studies.2 Fl€ugel was a prolific writer, with over eighty publica-
tions. Fluent in five languages, he frequently cited works in French and
German, particularly in his writing about clothing. He was noted for
having an “easy and graceful literary style,” and was deeply interested
in morality and social ethics, concerned as much about international
cooperation as inner peace. He was well-remembered for his experimen-
tal work and was, for a psychologist, unusually committed to laboratory
experiments: this attention to applied research may have influenced his
later interest in what we might see today as the embodied (or “applied”)
relationship between people and their dress habits.3 He published a
number of articles about the psychological aspects of clothing in medical
journals and presented his early ideas on dress publicly through a BBC
radio program on “The Psychology of Food and Dress” (Fl€ ugel 1929a,
1929b)4 He clearly advocated for the value of studying clothing within
his own professional sphere, presenting dress-themed papers at conferen-
ces and contributing articles on clothing to a large encyclopedic collec-
tion on psychology (Fl€ ugel, 1930b, 1936). Psychology of Clothes was
nevertheless seen as a bit of an anomaly to the psychology world, men-
tioned prominently in his obituaries alongside his reputation for
unorthodox thinking and challenging of taboos.
Psychology of Clothes is a surprisingly wide-ranging overview of the
history and function of clothing and fashion; it strikes the reader rather
like later writers Anne Hollander, Alison Lurie, or Fred Davis in scope.
There are fifteen chapters, each with a different idea for thinking
through the meaning of clothing. Fl€ ugel draws on what he described as
the “general agreement among practically all who have written on the
subject” that clothing serves three primary purposes: decoration, mod-
esty, and protection, though he downplays the last to focus on decor-
ation and modesty, drawing on a broad range of scholarship in dress,
psychology, and anthropology (Fl€ ugel 1930a, 16). The section on the
“Great Masculine Renunciation” appears in Chapter Seven (“Sex
Differences”), and is quite short (only eight of 223 pages in the 1969
ugel begins the chapter laying out what he calls “primitive”
edition). Fl€
sex differences in a bit of a muddled argument about which sex is the
more decorative among what he saw as “savage” versus “civilized” peo-
ples. He makes some interesting observations about gendered social con-
ventions, such as the practice of covering or uncovering one’s head in
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 5

church.5 He focuses on the dress of women in the next two sections of

this chapter, “Women’s Sartorial Emancipation” and “Female Exposure
and the Charge of Immodesty:” here Fl€ ugel wrestles with the reasons
behind sex differences in dress and adornment: while the racial premises
of his analysis may be problematic to a modern reader, his ultimate
question reveals where his true concerns lie: “[why is] women’s dress so
much more ornamental than that of men?” (105). His psychological
concerns with modesty, exhibitionism, and the eroticized body are
prevalent in these sections, though he also makes some interesting his-
torical observations that build toward his argument about men’s fash-
ion, noting that “from the fall of the Roman Empire to the end of the
18th century, there was little to choose between the decorativeness of
the two sexes,” except that women wore skirts and men wore bifurcated
garments (106).6
Fl€
ugel’s assessment of women’s dress lead him straight into his ana-
lysis of menswear, suggesting that if women gained a “great victory” in
their use of dress for erotic appeal, men “may be said to have suffered a
great defeat in the sudden reduction of male sartorial decorativeness.”
He calls this “one of the most remarkable events in the whole history of
dress,” and observes that (as many would agree) we are still living under
the influence of this event (110–111). Here Fl€ ugel hints at his particular
interest in this phenomenon, suggesting that “sartorially, this event
surely has the right to be considered” what he called “The Great
Masculine Renunciation.” Fl€ ugel describes this phenomenon as a process
of loss, under which “men gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer,
more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these
entirely to the use of women, and thereby making their own tailoring
the most austere and ascetic of the arts” (111).7 He sees the cause of
this great change to be of both political and social nature associated
with the French Revolution. Drawing on his previous claim that a pri-
mary purpose of decorative dress is the ability to emphasize distinctions
in rank and wealth, he understands how “the magnificence and elabor-
ation of costume” should have been “distasteful” to expressions of
Revolution. He agrees that a “brotherhood of man” would only be pos-
sible through greater uniformity and greater simplicity in dress, linking
a “relatively simple costume” with a newly respectable ideal of work.
In the next two sections, however, Fl€ ugel worries about these
changes, describing men’s dress as “dull uniformity,” asking “how have
men been able to bear the sacrifice that the new order has imposed on
them?” (114–115). He claims that many men are “profoundly dissat-
isfied” with their dress, and suggests that the result of this lack of
romance would reveal “deep-lying psychological difficulties and
inefficiencies” as a direct result of their sartorial loss (117). Another
profound observation that is often overlooked by fashion scholars is
what Fl€ ugel called “scoptophilia,” or the erotic pleasure in the use of
vision. He suggests that the shift of decoration led to a declining interest
6 Chloe Chapin

for men in “showing off” which had profound psychological ramifica-

tions, leading men from passive exhibitionism to active scoptophilia,
what he describes as “the desire to be seen transformed into the desire
to see” (118). While not the first psychologist to consider this concept,
his application of it to gender and fashion seems to foreshadow future
theories of the “male gaze,” (an idea later theorized by the art critic
John Berger) and is a critical aspect to the overall shift that Fl€ ugel is
pointing to in his idea of renunciation; one that reaches far beyond
men’s wardrobes.8
Delving deeply into Fl€ ugel’s writing it becomes quite clear that it
wasn’t really clothing that Fl€ugel was interested in, even in a book pre-
sumably about clothes: his attention was always on the human psyche
and individual ego within the world at large (what one reviewer called a
“sociopolitical interpretation of Freud.”)9 As a psychologist, he was
committed to the study of the mind and behavior, seeking to understand
both conscious and unconscious motivations of individuals within intim-
ate interpersonal relationships and in society as a whole. Like other psy-
chologists writing on dress, he was primarily interested in fundamental
human motivations for which he needed to both address and flatten cen-
turies of human history and decor. In his focus on modesty and decor-
ation, Fl€
ugel was particularly interested in anything he saw as related to
sex, including differences between the sexes, sexual competition and
attraction, shame, fear, taboos, or anything understood as “deviant”
behavior. In this obsession, Fl€ugel was obviously heavily influenced both
by Freud and the field of anthropology, a fact that was not lost on
Fl€
ugel’s female contemporaries. Doris Langley Moore, in her 1949 book
The Woman in Fashion, took a skeptical attitude toward Fl€ ugel’s focus
on sex, which she ascribed to psychoanalysts more broadly, claiming
“the psycho-analytical interpreters, in general, seem to me the last per-
sons to read the signs aright. The compulsion, almost religious in char-
acter, which constrains them to search incessantly for sexual
implications has made them as narrow minded as the theologians of the
sixteenth or seventeenth century” (Langley Moore 1949, 2).
Preoccupied as Fl€ ugel was with sex, he clearly believed that clothing
was the key to understanding what he saw as a delicate balance between
conflicting internal forces (what Freud described as the id, ego, and
super ego), and the various demands they placed on the body and the
psyche. In other words, Fl€ ugel was seeking to understand the psycho-
logical burdens of his patients in the early part of the 20th century: he
just happened to find answers to some of his questions in the intricate
material significance of dress.
Critical to this article and my own interests in the idea of sartorial
renunciation, Fl€ugel was deeply concerned with the lives of men as men,
particularly in his later books Men and their Motives (1934) and Man,
Morals, and Society (1945). In Men and their Motives, Fl€ ugel worked
through what he saw as critical differences between “sexual” and
 Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 7

“social” relationships. As a part of his analysis, I was fascinated to find

that it was Fl€ ugel who coined the term “homosocial,” which has
become such a critical concept for the study of both menswear and mas-
culinity.10 Dress is not analyzed itself in Men, Morals, and Society,
though he often utilizes clothing as ways to reinforce psychological phe-
nomena: for instance, in an analysis on the varying limits of social stric-
tures, Fl€
ugel used men’s clothing as an example of especially narrowly
determined conventions, what he saw as almost ritual behavior, as in
the case of “the more or less uniform apparel that constitutes male civil-
ian dress for formal occasions.” (137).
Fl€
ugel clearly had personal stakes in the politicization of fashion: an
early member of the Men’s Dress Reform Party, he argued, “Our motto
should be ‘Better and Brighter Clothes’,” although a photograph of
Fl€
ugel with fellow members shoes how limited even their transgressive
ideas of men’s dress were (Figure 2, Burman 1995, 279). His contempo-
raries viewed his dislike of conventional clothing as a “personal foible,”
and his embrace of dress reform may be the cause of one writer to say

Figure 2
Members of the Men's Dress Reform Party at a London rally in the summer of 1929. Flu€gel, in a flannel pinstripe suit with shorts, is third
from the right. Members of the Men’s Dress Reform Party, London; July 4, 1929. Hulton Archive. # Imagno / Getty Images.
8 Chloe Chapin

of him that “Flugel was apt to break, or cheerfully ignore, taboos,” fur-
ther suggesting that Psychology of Clothes “strides cheerfully over sev-
eral Verboten signs.” (Pear 1956, 2).11 Key to Fl€ ugel’s ideas about
gendered dressing were the recent changes he observed in women’s dress
(which makes considerable sense given he was writing at the end of the
1920s, an arguably critical decade in both fashion and the rise of wom-
en’s emancipation). He argued that women’s fashion had become more
“rational,” which had led to observable mental benefits. Fl€ ugel’s reflec-
tions on the impact that changes in women’s dress had on their psyche
was part of what drove him to advocate for men’s dress reform.
Fl€
ugel was certainly not the only person writing about dress in the
first decades of the 20th century—he wasn’t even the only psycholo-
gist writing about it.12 Major themes that Fl€ ugel explores, such as
sex appeal, morality, and fear of ostracization, are common to see in
other works on dress, particularly the work of trained psychologists.
In a chapter on “The Role of Sex in Fashion” in the similarly-named
Psychology of Dress by Elizabeth Bergner Hurlock, the writer also
points to the French Revolution as a moment of important change:
“For several centuries, men and women gave almost equal attention
to dress and after the French Revolution, women took over the lead
in all matters of clothing and personal adornment” (Hurlock, 1929,
147, 154, 156). Hurlock presciently compares that time period to her
own; noting the influence of the first world war on women’s fashion:
“This emancipation of women has affected feminine fashions in much
the same way as the French Revolution affected masculine fashions”
(160). None of them, however, spend as much space as Fl€ ugel does
considering the impact that it had on men or ideas of masculinity,
and it is in the depth of this analysis that Fl€ ugel’s ideas have had
such a lasting impact.
Many of Fl€ ugel’s ideas in Psychology of Clothes now seem quite
dated and read today as at bordering on (if not blatantly) racist, sexist,
homophobic, and transphobic, which can make it a difficult text to
teach. He does, however, devote considerable interest into what was
characterized at the time as “deviant” behaviors, and some people might
find his exploration of marginalized sexuality and gender identity to be
more open-minded than might be expected for his time period. One
aspect of the book that has not aged well are his explanations of
“primitive” cultures (and their dress), which are categorized with a com-
bination of morbid fascination and racial dismissal that will strike mod-
ern readers as deeply problematic, though these views are quite common
to find in both dress history and anthropology throughout the 20th cen-
tury.13 If anything it is striking in comparison that his explanations of
masculine dress have been so lasting while other perspectives have not
stood the test of time.14
Psychology of Clothes seems to have been well-received by Fl€ ugel’s
contemporaries, who referred to his “high standard of scientific
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 9

competence,” with two separate reviewers observing positively that “it

only could have been written by a psycho-analyst.”15 Their observation
that “clothes play a very important part in human life and it is odd that
there should be so few books dealing with them” speak to Fl€ ugel’s deft
handling of the subject, with one reviewer suggesting that the book
“might legitimately claim to have opened a new department of this sci-
ence.” Fl€ugel’s focus on exhibitionism elicited much interest, though not
everyone was convinced by the importance he placed on modesty, or on
his predictions on the future of nudism. On the other hand, Fl€ ugel’s
ideas about renunciation appear to have been embraced by dress histori-
ans quite early, including by the pioneer fashion historian James Laver.
While Laver doesn’t mention renunciation specifically, a review of his
book did, suggesting that Fl€ ugel’s ideas were by then common know-
ledge among dress historians (Nevinson 1943, 44).
Another early adopter of Fl€ ugel’s was Doris Langley Moore (who
later founded the Fashion Museum at Bath with her personal dress col-
lection). In The Woman in Fashion, Moore was frequently in conversa-
tion with a wide range of Fl€ ugel’s ideas on dress. She somewhat
reluctantly agreed with Fl€ugel’s thoughts on men’s dress, saying:

I would not be understood as implying that European and

American men have absolutely given up fashion, but when one
compares the immense variety of shapes and trimmings shown by
women’s clothes in the past hundred years with the comparative
uniformity of men’s, one must agree to some extent with
Professor Flugel that what he calls The Great Masculine
Renunciation has taken place. (Langley Moore 1949, 3)

Though she later refers to “his excellent analysis of men’s

renunciation,” echoes of Moore’s initial skepticism can be found by
later fashion historians who have since taken issue with Fl€ ugel’s broad
dismissal of variety in menswear (13).
Christopher Breward, particularly in his book The Hidden
Consumer, has been among the most vocal critics who have challenged
any assessment that men truly banished all color and decoration from
their wardrobes after the French Revolution. His research on 19th-
century men as shoppers highlights the ways in which the idea of a total
renunciation negates the allowance for the agency of men as consumers
or the variety of their self-expression, which Breward argues demon-
strates the “survival of ‘elaboration’ and ‘elegance’ in masculine models
of physical beauty” (Breward 1999, 25). In his later book The Suit,
Breward extends his reluctant approval of the concept, noting pointedly
“the concept of ‘renunciation’ is in many ways an attractive and com-
pelling idea, essentially binding sartorial developments to the emerging
political values of modern democracies” (Breward, 2016, 17). He cau-
tions, however, that the argument is too Anglocentric, noting (in a
10 Chloe Chapin

slightly more global, if not quite decolonial version of his previous argu-
ment) that sober uniformity arose across Western Europe at differ-
ent times.
David Kuchta has also noted the mutual influence of political and
economic customs: “changing habits and ideals of consumption spurred
a transformation in political and economic relations, while [these] ideals
influenced a reform in men’s consumer behavior” (162–172). Kuchta
elaborated on Fl€ugel’s theories more than most, suggesting that he saw
the great masculine renunciation as “a result of a middle-class-adoption
of ready-to-wear aristocratic notions of masculinity,” though he saw the
origins of these ideas as coming from much older political and social
processes going back to the Glorious Revolution in the late 17th century
(along with the rise of the original three-piece suit which is the focus of
his book). Kuchta noted that the ramifications of this shift affected the
ideas of both class and gender; middle-class gentility replacing aristo-
cratic breeding:

The great masculine renunciation of the late eighteenth and early

nineteenth centuries was thus less the triumph of middle-class
culture; rather, it was the result of middle-class men’s
appropriation of an earlier aristocratic culture, of aristocratic
men’s appropriation of radical critiques of aristocracy, and of a
combined attempt by aristocratic and middle-class men to exclude
working-class men and all women from the increasingly shared
institutions of power.16

Overall, dress historians tend to side with Fl€ ugel’s analysis; even if
they don’t agree with him outright, the words they use to describe
men’s fashion clearly fall into two distinct ways of thinking about men’s
clothing: before the French Revolution, Western men’s dress is described
as elaborate, excessive, decorative, flamboyant, and ostentatious; after-
wards, men’s dress is described as uniform, democratic, simple, sober,
constrained, restrained, and respectable.17 If dress historians have
pushed back against Fl€ ugel’s interpretation of a renunciation, they have
mostly done so by arguing that men didn’t entirely abandon bright col-
ors or flamboyant self-display.18
The problem with arguing over whether or not men’s dress funda-
mentally changed is to miss out on the bigger picture; one that has been
significantly overlooked by both dress and cultural historians.19 Instead
of quibbling about whether or not all men actually abandoned all decor-
ation, I argue that we ought instead to return to Fl€ugel’s concern for the
psychological impacts of the shift that did occur. Instead of focusing
solely on the loss experienced by men who have been unable to express
themselves with greater sartorial abandon, we must look past the effect
this shift had on their wardrobes to the larger global landscape of dem-
ocracy and modernity. Brent Shannon, in his 2006 book The Cut of His
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 11

Coat, comes the closest to articulating the ways this style shift had on
larger cultural issues, in his observation that “significantly, the Great
Masculine Renunciation also purportedly marks a major shift from a
sartorial system based on distinctions of class to one based primarily on
distinctions of gender” (23–26). While Shannon didn’t elaborate on
what he meant by this major shift of a sartorial system, in the second
part of this article I build on the idea of a shift as not simply an occur-
rence within the fashions of men, but a much more wide-scale rejection
of what later became understood as “feminine,” with a clear impact not
just on men’s clothing, but more broadly on lasting gendered ideas of
class and civic authority.

Part 2: fashion after revolution

The historical moment that Fl€ ugel sees as the “sudden reduction of
men’s sartorial decorativeness” is vaguely referred to as “the end of the
18th century,” and while he assumes this must have something to do
with the French Revolution, he makes no mention of either the
American or the Industrial Revolutions, and does not make any
attempts to differentiate between national styles or interests (Fl€ ugel
1930a, 110–111). A new analysis of Fl€ ugel’s ideas of renunciation
requires an overview of what it was that changed during the period of
transition that he was so interested in. Based on the evidence in portraits
and fashion plates, styles in dress for both men and women across
Europe did change rather dramatically between 1775 and 1800, as one
might expect for a period dominated with war, famine, and revolution-
ary fervor. Aristocratic men and women rejected the bright colors, elab-
orately embroidered silk fabrics, and lace trimmings that had been
fashionable for the last century in favor of unadorned, un-patterned,
dark wool and light cotton (Figure 3). Along with this major shift in
esthetics for textiles, silhouettes changed more dramatically for both
men and women than they had in a similar time frame at any point in
the past century: women discarded structured gowns with stomachers in
favor of high-waisted gowns that showed off the drapey qualities of fine
muslin. Men’s silhouettes didn’t change quite as dramatically as that of
women, but change they did—particularly noticeable was the rejection
of powdered wigs in favor of short natural hair for the first time since
the mid-17th century. As in women’s dress, the shift in textiles allowed
for (if not demanded) a shift in silhouette that would take better advan-
tage of the new fibers: for example, men’s coats grew wide lapels and
high collars that had previously only been seen in (woolen) military uni-
forms. While other key developments in men’s dress were still to come,
in many ways this initial period could be interpreted as that of the most
impactful change. What many historians overlook is that the change
that mattered first was in the change of textiles; the major changes in
clothing styles were still to follow.
12 Chloe Chapin

Figure 3
Changes in dress and textiles between 1775 and 1800. Left: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Henry Loftus, 1st Earl of Ely and his wife Frances
Monroe, Countess of Ely. Upton House, Warwickshire. # National Trust Images / Angelo Hornak. Right: Jacques-Henri Sablet, Portrait of
the Count and Countess de la Roche-Saint Andre (detail). 1799. Louvre Museum. # RMN-Grand Palais (muse e du Louvre) / Jean-
Gilles Berizzi.

Styles for men and women experienced further transformation

between 1800 and 1825, but what has been under-analyzed is that the
manner in which they changed differed significantly by gender.
Women’s dresses shifted from the light-weight, high-waisted, columnar
neoclassical style to bell-shaped skirts and structured bodices made of
increasingly colorful silks—an esthetic that would be repeated, with
some variety, through the rest of the century (Figures 3 and 4). While
the evolving silhouette of women’s 19th-century fashion after this revo-
lutionary, “neoclassical” period was distinctly different from that of the
time before it, in many ways the esthetic priorities of the two before-
and-after periods had much in common: both relied on corsets and skirt
understructures for shaping the silhouette and showcased luxury silk
fabrics that emphasized the architectural rather than the natural body.
Men’s styles during this period changed in quite subtle ways, but they
had a lasting impact. The most obvious modifications were the introduc-
tion of woolen trousers and full-skirted frock coats, which both grad-
ually replaced knee-breeches and tailcoats. The importance of these new
garments can be easy to overlook, because in many ways the overall
esthetics of menswear were still the same through the enduring similar-
ities in textiles; however, this period might be seen as just as influential
as the previous quarter-century for these critical markers of sartorial
modernity. Just as important to this period was the lack of any change
in esthetics for fabrics in the masculine wardrobe. Unlike in women’s
dress, men clung to the new styles in textiles, retaining plain woolens
 Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 13

Figure 4
Changes in dress between 1825 and 1850. Left: Ferdinand Georg Waldmu €ller, Theodor Joseph Ritter, His Wife and Their Children, 1827.
€
Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna. # Art Resource NY / Erich Lessing. Right: Johan Heinrich Newman, Portrait of the Metelerkamp Family,
1851–1852. Centraal Museum, Utrecht. # Centraal Museum Utrecht / Ernst Moritz.

and further purging the silk fabrics still seen in waistcoats. Similarly,
men continued to prioritize dark colors, slowly leeching jewel tones out
of the daytime and evening wardrobes and exiling them to the dress of
leisure activities, such as hunting gear and dressing gowns. Thus, in this
critical period, both men’s and women’s dress changed—but they
changed in fundamentally different ways, and it is this difference in
divergence which is so critical to future conceptions of both dress
and gender.
The shift that occurred (or didn’t) between 1825 and 1850 is perhaps
even more profound in terms of the establishment of a newly gendered
system of dress: not because it looked so different, but because it contin-
ued to set into place a whole new idea of dressing that shifted primary
differences in dress from class to gender. While women’s dresses grew
more colorful and elaborate through the introduction of hoop skirts,
men’s clothing lost even more color and flamboyance. Trousers lost
exaggerated fullness at the waist and eventually were cut in the same
dark woolen cloth as frock coats. High collars, puffed sleeve caps, and
exaggerated hourglass forms flattened into broad lapels and boxy sil-
houettes, and the once-common tailcoat was consigned to formal even-
ing dress. Through the rest of the century, women’s fashions kept
evolving with ever-changing silhouettes and styles, but menswear
became—for the first time—stagnant in all but the most nuanced ways.
14 Chloe Chapin

Far more complex than a simple rejection, an analysis of the period in

question shows that the critical changes in men’s dress happened over a
75 year period: first a revolution in textiles, then the introduction of
trousers and frock coats, and then finally, the critical period dominated
by a lack of change.
The word “renunciation” comes from the Latin renuntiare, or “protest
against,” and is defined as “the formal rejection of something.” What was
it that men were purportedly rejecting in their adoption of both new
clothes and a new sense of self? The beginnings of the Great Masculine
Renunciation occur amid the American, French and Industrial
Revolutions. All of these various “revolutionary” influences proved to be
mutually constitutive and interdependent, mixing fashion esthetics with
political ideals, material goods, and advances in manufacturing.
One issue with the framework of a grand decisive change has—like
much of fashion history—a relentlessly French focus, overlooking both
the boundaries and permeability of national dress. As Kuchta, Harvey,
and Valerie Steele have all pointed out, this seismic shift in men’s esthet-
ics was as much a shift from French to English styles as any sort of sin-
gular linear evolution toward a vision of masculine modernity. Often
overlooked by dominant stories of fashion history is how these same
shifts were occurring in the new United States: while perhaps not con-
sidered the center of fashion influence before the 20th century, ideas of
America and its revolutionary, frontier spirit were nevertheless critical
for international ideas throughout the 19th century of both colonial
expansion and a capitalist, “democratic” masculinity.
As Aileen Ribeiro has thoroughly explored, French fashions through-
out the 18th century emphasized luxurious fabrics in a wide range of
colors and patterns.20 The popularity of silk textiles highlighted that
fiber’s natural luster, producing a fabric with a high shine that show-
cased garments that relied on excessive fabric draped and patterned to
fall over architectural understructures. Silk was also one of France’s pri-
mary exports, and the French city of Lyon had been the center of
European silk production since the Renaissance. Other fashionable ele-
ments of the period, such as decorative silk embroideries and lace cuffs
and cravats also showcased French-manufactured goods: to dress fash-
ionably was to dress in the French style—even in America.21 Post-
French Revolutionary fashions for dark woolen coats and riding boots,
which replaced brightly-colored silk coats and stockings was known as
“Anglomania,” the term itself pointing to the reality that this esthetic-
ally plainer fashion had already been popular in Britain (Bolton & Koda
2007). National distinctions were seen in particular garments as well:
the women’s ensemble known as the “robe a la Française” (or “dress in
the French style”) featured side hoops called paniers and a sacque back,
while the style known as the “robe a l’anglaise” (“dress in the English
style”), with a fitted back and round skirts, was considered distinctly
less formal than its French counterpart.
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 15

While the British certainly both manufactured and wore silk fabrics,
particularly for formal court functions, their association with woolen
fabrics was historically rooted in the land and their own domestic pro-
duction. While London and Paris may not seem that far away from
each other geographically, the system of the English landed gentry sat
British lords on their own country estates well up into Scotland, and the
climate of Yorkshire is decidedly both cooler and damper than that of
Versailles. Wool had been a primary export of Britain since the Middle
Ages, and its qualities of warmth and resistance to dampness suited the
climate of the countryside far better than embroidered silks, which were
much better suited to indoor palace life south of Paris. As Kuchta has
argued, the English aristocracy viewed the wearing of domestic woolen
products as particularly symbolic of national pride and a matter of
patronage since at least the Restoration, and understood silk (at least to
some degree) as a foreign (and often feminized) import from the French,
whom they had been on decidedly poor terms with for centuries
(Kuchta 2002).
The War of American Independence and the French Revolution both
contributed to what was later thought of as a “neoclassical” movement,
a transnational reaction against regimes of monarchy and inherited aris-
tocracies, with ideals reaching back to the classical world and an interest
in republican political movements and self-governance. The growing
merchant class increasingly looked for opportunities to achieve a higher
social and economic status based on their character and hard work
rather than the family that they were born into. All of these ideals were
reflected in their choice of dress. As a former British colony, the young
United States had adopted many of Britain’s sartorial preferences, des-
pite an aggravation with early laws restricting manufacturing that left
the American colonies reliant on English imports. The founding fathers
chose American-manufactured, “homespun” materials for their inaug-
ural suits, focusing on “plain cloth”—even though, initially, all of these
men were from a land-owning class that was in many ways considered
an American aristocracy (Brekke 2006). Their sartorial ideas were about
ideals, not economic necessities, full of claims to patriotic simplicity and
prioritization of self-reliance over foreign luxuries (Zakim 2001). There
is evidence that men in early America saw and understood recognizable
national difference in dress and made distinct choices in consideration
of it: Thomas Jefferson, while serving as the third president of the
United States between 1801 and 1809, adopted a simple and sober
wardrobe in a conscious, “republican” self-fashioning. He implemented
this “plain and honest” dress despite the fact that he was known to be a
bit of a clothes-horse; and had spent five years in Paris as the successor
to Benjamin Franklin as the United States Minister to France from 1784
to 1789. Despite his own European sartorial inclinations, he considered
an informal appearance so essential to the nature of the American presi-
dency that he deeply offended the first British Ambassador to the United
16 Chloe Chapin

States, Anthony Merry, for greeting him in casual clothing and bedroom
slippers (Allgor 2000, 36–39). While the White House and the Capitol
were still rough, nascent ideas in early stages of both design and imple-
mentation, Jefferson intentionally chose to dress in this manner: it was a
deliberate dressing-down, hardly born of necessity, as Jefferson was one
of the richest men in America at the time.
The twenty years following Jefferson’s death in 1826 occupy an
often-overlooked, liminal space between “old” and “new” expressions
of masculinity, further suggesting that a “renunciation” is perhaps a
simplification of a longer evolution. In many ways, the most visible
element of the “great” change had been made: dark woolens had
replaced colorful silks, trousers were just being adopted in favor of
breeches and stockings, frock-coats were replacing tailcoats for daytime
dress, hair was natural and unpowdered, and plain cravats had replaced
ruffled jabots. In reality, however, much of the masculine self-fashioning
still clung to a great deal of “pre-masculine-renunciation” sensibilities of
male self-image: woolen coats were cut in a shapely, hour-glass style
with nipped-in waists, puffed sleeves, and skirts falling to the knees,
often with dramatically high collars and decorative stitching, and shorter
sack coats (the ancestor of the modern suit coat) were yet to enter the
masculine wardrobe.
Thus, the true ramifications of this great change weren’t apparent
until the mid-19th century, when masculine clothing could be seen in
hindsight as such a contrast with that of a hundred, fifty, or even thirty
years before. The term “renunciation” seems exaggerated if considered
from the perspective of any individual man—the “shift” in reality would
have taken generations to fully evolve and would have depended greatly
on where he lived. The broader (and arguably more critical) idea of
Fl€ugel’s at stake is a sort of supra-national, western conception of man-
hood—one that was civilized (and therefore likely European and white)
and increasingly urban, and who championed republicanism over aris-
tocracy (even from within a monarchal state): a “gentleman” that was
increasingly defined in terms of gender, rather than in terms of class.

Part 3: masculine renunciation or feminine rejection?

By naming this moment of evolution in masculine style a

“renunciation,” Fl€ ugel—however unwittingly—set up a century of over-
simplified explanations of both masculine style and masculinity. As Gail
Bederman has clarified, the term “masculine” wasn’t used to refer to the
esthetics or qualities associated with men until closer to the end of the
19th century; instead, “manhood” and “manliness” were more common
parlance to describe a collective self-description of men (Bederman
2000, 7). But to call this shift a “Renunciation of Manliness” seems to
get it backwards, and the same is true for a “Great Manly
Renunciation,” though this variation highlights that it wasn’t that
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 17

manliness was being rejected, it was that men were the ones doing the
rejecting. In fact, the very act of renouncing is what Fl€ ugel is calling
masculine: in rejecting styles seen later as feminine, men marked them-
selves as masculine. The modern understanding or material expression
of masculinity is thus both based on and articulated through the post-
Great Masculine Renunciation esthetic of men’s clothing. It is therefore
both limited and problematic to define this shift as a masculine renunci-
ation when modern expressions of masculinity happened as a result
of it.
Men certainly suffered a loss when a wide range of esthetic charac-
teristics was coded feminine, as Fl€ ugel noted (and both Breward and
Anne Hollander have agreed). Men lost the option to embrace their
own delicacy and softness, and to express themselves colorfully and
with ostentatiousness. They lost a certain tactility in their sartorial
selves, a creativity, the ability to show off and stand out, though these
are elements of masculinity clearly visible in 18th-century portraiture.
Through the adoption of monochromatic, dark-colored, tailored woolen
suits, men learned through their options in clothing to perform a par-
ticularly narrow expression of masculinity.
Understanding this shift around a sense of loss for men’s identities is
not invalid (particularly for a psychoanalyst, as Fl€ ugel was), but it is
critical that we not overlook the larger impact that it had on the cre-
ation of the “feminine,” which marked both women and nonwhite,
non-western, and non-heteronormative men as “other.” A more gender-
inclusive framework would be to see this shift as a renunciation or rejec-
tion of a new sense of the feminine from the male wardrobe. Many of
the newly-rejected fashions (such as ruffled jabots or floral silks) were
initially seen as quite masculine or were not associated with a gender
until later; with this schism they were collectively marked as feminine in
ways that are more or less still held as true. Re-centering the shift away
from masculine loss and more appropriately on a rejection or re-situ-
ation of styles now considered feminine more accurately focuses the con-
versation around gendered power dynamics.
As Jo B. Paoletti (2012) has explored in her work on children’s cloth-
ing, there is no biologically imperative association between gender and
color, pattern, or fabric, though many people have historically context-
ual and culturally specific associations between men and women (or
boys and girls) and aspects of material culture including but not limited
to dress and adornment (such as pink vs. blue or skirts vs. pants).22
Scholars of both dress and material culture more broadly are aware of
these gender assignments to objects or material characteristics, which
not only mark tangible things as associated with a gender (or sexuality),
but also work to produce or perpetuate lasting associations between
gender and specific material traits.23 Pat Kirkham has observed that
many material characteristics have been organized into a male/female
binary: dark/light, blue/pink, large/small, geometric/organic, rough/
18 Chloe Chapin

smooth, and hard/soft (Kirkham 1996). While this binary system of

opposites is frequently invoked by fashion scholars as common know-
ledge, it has been surprisingly under-theorized. More specific to dress
and textiles, this binary system could also include wool/silk, durable/
flimsy, plain/embellished, comfortable/constricted, or covered/exposed.
The rubric that I wish to use to explore this gender-based rather than
class-based categorization of dress is that of practical/impractical.24
Under today’s classification of esthetic qualities that are conventionally
read as feminine, most of the same characteristics could also be read as
materially impractical: delicate fabrics in light colors tend to be more
expensive, easier to wrinkle, stain or snag, and are harder to launder,
iron, and mend. Garments that read as “feminine” tend toward the
restrictive, cumbersome or inadequate: corsets, excessively long or exces-
sively short skirts, high heels, styles that are cropped, embellished, or
have unnecessary cutouts. While “durability” is easily accepted as being a
“masculine” (or at least “unisex”) trait in contemporary fashion, before
the end of the 18th century, practicality would have rendered the wearer
working-class rather than masculine.25 Historically, if your clothing (or
body modification) created a physical burden on your body, it was a clear
sign that you didn’t need your own physical labor to take care of yourself
or your sovereign. When the visible impracticality of dress that once signi-
fied the aristocratic class shifted from signaling status to marking feminin-
ity, women’s clothing (and, by extension, the women inhabiting them)
was increasingly seen as suspicious artifice, rather than important patron-
age. The connection between fashion and excessive consumption, once
seen as a critical part of aristocratic privilege and national investment,
was marked as gender rather than class. At the same time, mirroring the
rise of the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic patronage that was once
critical to local economies was redefined as a consumption—based less on
local economies that supported national goods and local workers, and
more on expanding (and rapidly industrializing) markets. The entire fash-
ion system which men and women had participated in equally for millen-
nia was suddenly seen as a primary purview of women, and historical
criticisms about luxury, frivolity, and excess that were once directed
toward the aristocracy were directed at women.26
These concurrent shifts recognized both fashion and women as friv-
olous. The double-marking of frivolousness had profound, lasting rami-
fications as it visually defined women (or non-masculine men) as
domestic consumers. Furthermore, by marking fashion as merely friv-
olous decoration, it trapped its own subjects as incapable of arguing in
their own defense: if women are marked by their clothing as silly
domestic subjects, they’re simply not capable of higher orders of intel-
lect. The perceived lack of import of fashion as actually meaningful is a
burden that the field of fashion studies has been wrestling with since its
inception (Taylor 2002, 1–3). As any fashion scholar knows—but the
rest of the academic world has been incredibly slow to accept—changes
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 19

in clothing are not mere whims of a mindless, trend-hungry populace.

As Anne Hollander famously claimed, “changes in dress are social
changes” (Hollander 1995, 4). Clothing does not simply illustrate, it
makes manifest in ways that are both personal and political.

Conclusion

The very understanding of mens fashion, according to Tim Edwards, is

“haunted by the ghost of Fl€ ugel” (Edwards 2011, 41). But to see the
esthetic shift of the “Great Masculine Renunciation” primarily through
the lens of masculine loss is to center the shift entirely around men,
rather than how both genders were re-assigned specific material qual-
ities. In fact, what was renunciated, or rejected, were elements of style
that would increasingly be associated with women’s dress, and under-
stood, by the middle of the 19th century, as “feminine.”
In this paper, I have examined the context in which John Carl Fl€ ugel
wrote his book The Psychology of Dress and considered the impact that
his idea of a “Great Masculine Renunciation” has had on fashion schol-
ars for the last century. As Christopher Breward noted, “‘The Great
Masculine Renunciation’ has provided … a convenient shorthand for a
stylistic progression and color … and a starting point for further philo-
sophical explorations of the meanings surrounding an assumed resist-
ance to brightness and differentiation by male consumers” (1991, 25).
As a starting point, I have reexamined the period of fashion that Fl€ ugel
referred to in order to map the changes that occurred in men’s fashion
between the last quarter of the 18th century and the first half of the
19th century, through the lens of both gender and national products. I
have argued that, while it is not invalid to consider this esthetic shift in
terms of a loss for men, we ought also to see the impact that this change
had on women’s dress: in particular, the way that this shift allowed for
women’s fashion to be marked as fashion, and for women and non-
white, non-western, or non-heteronormative men to be marked as
“other.” By more clearly noting the ways that this shift in esthetics has
contributed greatly to the marking of white western men as an
unmarked universal, fashion historians can rectify some of the harm we
have done by allowing men to operate outside of systems of fashion.
This framework is critically significant to scholars outside of fashion
studies as well: recontextualizing ideas of equality and democracy in the
early 19th century as exclusive gendered and racialized concepts that
exist outside of the material world is long overdue.

Acknowledgments

For their comments on early drafts, many thanks to Sydney Maresca,

Jennifer Roberts, Philip Deloria, and Alex Mann.
20 Chloe Chapin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The first classes in England on psychoanalysis were taught by

Fl€ugel at University College London, and he was an early member
of the British Psychoanalysis Association. Involved in many
professional organizations throughout his life, while as President
of the British Psychological Society Fl€
ugel helped to grow it from a
small group of professionals to a large association. He later wrote
a comprehensive history of the field (1933), which was used as a
standard textbook for many years (Jones 1956, Pear 1956).
2. Fl€ugel’s name does not appear in the American Psychological
Associations list of the Top 100 Eminent Psychologists of the
20th century, and none of his publications are listed in
Wikipedia’s “Timeline of Psychology.” Monitor on Psychology
33, no. 7 (July/August 2002), 29; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Timeline_of_psychology.
3. Fl€ugel also suffered from birth with a medical condition of the feet
(ichthyosis hystrix with hyperkeratosis) which made it painful to
walk and was likely unpleasant to look at, which possibly
contributed to his personal interest in both clothing and nudity.
4. In his Preface to Psychology of Clothes, Fl€ ugel mentions that the
BBC talk was the incentive for his further writing about fashion.
For an excellent analysis on Fl€ ugel’s ideas of dress and the body
(as well as some excerpts from his BBC series), see Carter (2003).
5. “The assumption is that clothes are a sign of disrespect in man,
but nakedness a sign of disrespect in woman” (Flugel 1930a, 104).
6. Some of his observations here also seem strikingly modern, even
proto-feminist, in his suggestions that, for instance: the Church
institutionalized the tendency of men to project their sexual guilt
onto women; that conventions for covering breasts might be a
future area of women’s emancipation; he questions the cultural
sublimation of female desire; and he suggests that when men
accuse women of being immodest, women may rightly reply that
“sexuality was seen when none was present,” refuse to “accept the
part of the guilty temptress,” and rightly claim that if women are
immodest, it is only that men have made them so (Flugel,
1930a, 107–110).
7. Fl€ugel himself capitalized the term: “Sartorially, this event has
surely the right to be considered as ‘The Great Masculine
Renunciation’.” (Flugel 1930a, 111).
8. Berger’s idea of the male gaze was developed (like Fl€ ugel’s ideas
on dress) in a BBC series in 1972, and later published as a book
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 21

(Berger 1972). Feminist film critic Laura Mulvey is known for

extending this idea into common parlance through her seminal
essay (1975). The idea is often associated in dress studies with
Anne Hollander’s book Seeing Through Clothes (1993), though
she doesn’t actually use the term herself, as her focus is primarily
on the gazed upon, rather than who is doing the gazing.
9. Fl€
ugel’s later interests grew even farther away from fashion and
focused more on the effects that clothing had on the inner psyche
and the unclothed body (1930c, 1950).
10. ugel introduces the term thus: “we may perhaps be allowed to
Fl€
coin the word ‘homosocial’ to designate ‘social’ relationships
between members of the same sex and the word ‘heterosocial’ to
designate ‘social’ relationships between members of the opposite
sex, the pair of terms being used in an analogous sense to the well-
known existing pair of ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’.” While
credit for this term is often given to queer theorist Eve Kosofsky-
Sedgwick, the Oxford English Dictionary confirms Fl€ ugel as the
originator: the book chapter was initially published in article form
(1927, 147).
11. Given the fairly generous reception of Psychology of Clothes after
publication by Fl€ ugel’s contemporaries, Pear’s claim that “the
subject is hardly mentioned to-day by social psychologists, its
discussion being discreetly left to the anthropologists” either
suggests his own personal discomfort with the topic, or that there
was a significant decline in interest in dress between the initial
publication in 1930 and Fl€ ugel’s death in 1955.
12. Contemporary publications include the work of sociologist
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (2002 [originally published in her
monthly journal The Forerunner, 1915]), Dearborn (of the
American Army Corps) (1918), Parsons (instructor and then
president of the New School of Art, which was later named after
him) (1920); and perhaps most closely in concert with Fl€ ugel,
Hurlock (Instructor in Psychology at Columbia University) (1929).
In addition to books written by trained or even amateur
psychologists, journalists also explored burgeoning ideas between
clothing and psychology or sociology in journals such as Women’s
Wear Daily.
13. Out of 26 images used to illustrate Fl€ ugel’s ideas on dress, five are
of people native to tropical climates: Northern Thailand
(“Padaung”), Java, Papua New Guinea (“New Pomerania”),
Samoa, and Hawaii; two from Africa: Tunis and one unspecified
region; and one from Siberia.
14. Some of Fl€ ugel’s ideas read today as rather bizarre: his obsession
with phallic signs borders on obsession, finding symbolism in all
sorts of dress objects (including shoes, hats, trousers, and buttons).
ugel also approved of proposals for having a British “Ministry of
Fl€
22 Chloe Chapin

Fashions” that would decide upon on dress styles, and any

designer proposing a new fashion would need to get it approved
by an elected board (1930a, 219).
15. Reviews surveyed: Heathcote (1931), Money-Kyrle (1931), Fagg
(1933), and Allport (1932).
16. For other historians who have argued that it was less a
renunciation than an embrace of aristocratic English fashion, see
Harvey (1995, 27) and Steele (1985, 52–53). Kuchta’s focus on
national difference and the politics that connected domestic
patronage and fashion was a welcome addition to menswear
scholarship, which makes it all the more disappointing that he
appears to have moved on to other areas of writing.
17. See, for instance: Miller (2016, 49–51) and Entwistle (2015,
153–154, 172).
18. For arguments against a renunciation, see especially: Breward
(1999) and Matthews David (2003).
19. Breward observed, “it is surprising … that his interpretations have
been taken at face value by succeeding historians” (1999, 25).
20. Ribeiro (2002, 1995, 1988).
21. For transatlantic connections between French, British, and
Colonial American fashion, see Haulman (2014) and
Anishanslin (2017).
22. One place this is evidenced is in the experiences of transgender
children, who often adopt clothing as an experience of their
transition—even at a young age, children are aware that, in their
western culture, “girls” wear skirts and pink and have long hair,
while “boys” have short hair and don’t wear dresses.
23. Butler’s book Gender Trouble (1990) is seen as the instigator for
understanding how gender (and therefore, many fashion historians
since have observed, dress) is not just part of a performance of
gender, but works performatively; that is, it produces a series of
effects beyond just a display or costume which is part of a fleeting
performance. In other words, wearing a dress may be performing
woman-ness, but it also reinscribes the conditions of woman-ness
as being connected to dresses.
24. This is related to but somewhat different than Veblen’s theory of
conspicuous consumption so often associated with fashion and
class; in his theory on what he calls “conspicuous leisure,” Veblen
notes that “conspicuous abstention from labor therefore becomes
the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the
conventional index of reputability” Veblen (2007, 30).
25. Even military uniforms—at least those of the officer class—leaned
toward the fanciful and extravagant. For an excellent analysis of
officer uniforms, see: Matthews David (2003).
26. Joan W. Scott, in her now-infamous article (1986) pointed out
that examining gender in history was not just a way to address
Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine? 23

silences in the historical record about the lives of women in the

past, but also that the examination of gender is always an
examination of constructs of power. For a field that is so
fundamentally defined by gender, fashion studies has often
overlooked structures of power that have been reflected in and
reified by dress. Fashion journalism in particular is not just
complacent in this, but actively contributes to the problem: by
continuing to mark certain styles as “masculine,” such as the
“Boyfriend Blazer” or the “Power Suit,” women are constantly
positioned as “borrowing” power from men and masculinity.

ORCID

Chloe Chapin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8238-2150

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