The
Rise of Fashion: A Reader
by Daniel Leonhard Purdy (Ed.)
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis,
MN, 2004
356 pp. Trade, $74.95; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 0-8166-4392-X; ISBN: 0-8166-4393-8.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University
Center MI 48710 USA.
mosher@svsu.edu
A recent item from Reuters news service
noted that investigators seized the warehoused
wardrobe of the former President of Zambia
Frederick Chiluba. When they publicized
his 100 pairs of shoes, 300 shirts and
150 suits as evidence of his corruption,
Chiluba replied "Zambians know me and
know that I have always dressed very well
from the 1960s." One recalls similar political
symbolism of shoes belonging to former
Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos. George
Simmel commented in 1901 on how nineteenth-century
clothes often signified whether the wearer
supported the right or left wing politics
of the day; a commentator in today's United
States might lament that Democrats sport
the same suits as Republicans, though
the latter prefer red-state neckties.
Fashion has always been about more than
merely people in pretty clothes. This
collection shows us several eighteenth
century writers concerned with issues
of dress and social roles, social functioning,
social morality and mobility. In the nineteenth
century, Adolph Loosremembered
for undecorated architecture and his fulmination
that every tattooed man a potential criminallamented
the declining influence of Austrian hatmakers,
proper German pantlegs and good tailors
in Vienna. To read Thorsten Veblen on
how impractible clothes are conspicuous
consumption, one recalls the John Berger
essay on August Sander's photo of three
peasant men in off-the-rack suits that
contrast with the billowy, functional
shirts they wore when working in the fields.
The American reformer Amelia Bloomer advocated
women adopt a sensible coatlike frock
worn over comfy pants and boots appropriate
to New England weather, a position extremely
controversial to her fellow suffragettes.
Simone DeBeauvoir wrote on the idealized
wasp-waisted ingénues in Charles
Dana Gibson's cartoons. Yet on the damaging
effects of the whalebone corsets of the
day, a contemporary anatomy professor
said that "if you want to find all the
internal organs in their normal position,
procure a male subject."
Fashion is also an aesthetic experience,
and it was celebrated as such in the nineteenth
century. Poet Stéphane Mallarmé
even wrote for fashion magazines. While
Charles Baudelaire praised the dandy's
restraint as he interrogated urban beauty
in Constantin Guys' paintings and Parisian
users of cosmetics, Thomas Carlyle wrote
a somewhat goofy essay on dandyism, and
Barbey D'Aurevilley praised top English
dandy Beau Brummell. As the century neared
its end, Oscar Wilde praised the literary
utility of authors George Sand for her
simple black dress and Diderot for his
favorite old bathrobe.
Fashion has long been a part of the visual
symbology of the transgressive, as Karl
Kraus noted the eroticism of clothing
in what it reveals or veils. Weimar-era
sexologist Magnus Hirschfield's 1910 essay
on transvestitism is characteristically
sympathetic to sexual variety. Hirschfield
writes of a young married man who dressed
as a woman to join a woman's band (Inspiration
for the 1950s movie comedy "Some Like
It Hot"?) for many years undetected. After
leaving the band but not drag, the subject
"hired himself out successively as a barmaid,
soda-water saleswoman, waitress, buffet
hostess, [and, in a circus] tightrope
walker to skilled rider". He left the
circus to appear onstage as a female music-clown,
a member of a female vocal trio and thenwhy
didn't this idea strike him earlier?a
female impersonator. Similarly, a hard-working
"female case . . . who, in spite of the
fact that she had hardly turned 30, had
already put on men's clothing and had
become a miner, locksmith, butler, barber,
whaler, steward, housepainter, and factory
worker", worked other jobs when dressed
in female clothes, and remained "an active
married woman." My undergraduate college
library had a copy of Hirschfield's book
Sex in the Great War, where he
wrote of soldiers reduced to masturbating
in the trenches who sported tattoos "My
wife used to be my right hand, now my
right hand is my wife."
It is the success of Purdy's anthology
that one now wishes for a companion volume
on the non-European, nonwhite world. It
might include items 1930s Osamu Dazai
on men's kimonos, Robert F. Thompson on
West African aesthetics of cool, discussion
of Mahatma Gandhi's loincloth and other
explorations of the garb of the people
of the planet. One might even assemble
an anthology on fashion among diverse
cultures in the United States, including
contributions on 1940s Zoot suits among
Los Angeles Mexican-Americans, and Henry
Louis Gates, Malcolm X and others on black
hair preparation. This reviewer recalls
an enlightening essay circa 1980 on the
meanings of workout clothes in the urban
ghetto, how pricey Adidas tracksuits and
warmup gear were appreciated both for
their high tech synthetics and as symbolic
of the enforced leisure of unemployment.
Today, much of the designer sportware
advertised in VIBE magazine seems
derived from the baggy denims issued to
men in prison.
Purdy analyzes the fashions that appear
in several paintings and popular prints,
and readers would enjoy a full book of
such imagery with similar informative
captions. It is the mark of an enjoyable
and successful volume that readers begin
to imagine other books they wish this
author would produce. Purdy has contributed
a serious and well-cut collection to the
historical study of fashion. Now excuse
me while I change out of my writing cravat,
and into my dinner jacket.