Weaving history of gents, tailors

By Silas Polkinghorne

History professor Chris Kent. Photo by Silas Polkinghorne

The clothes make the man – and they have for more than 150 years.

That’s according to Chris Kent, a History professor who is researching gentlemen’s dress in Victorian England, a period stretching from 1837 until the early 1900s.

“Dress is important – at least I think it is – but a lot of men don’t really like to admit it,” said Kent. “All dress is a statement.”

The 19th century, the period that marks the beginning of modern men’s dress, was the height of economic and imperial power for the British Empire. Men in others countries who wanted to be seen as powerful dressed like Englishmen, Kent explained.

“The British male was the global model for masculinity … London was really the style centre for men’s dress, as Paris was for women,” he said. “Go to Washington, go to Ottawa, go to Melbourne, go to India in the late 19th century, see what men were wearing – gentlemen, men of authority and influence, politicians, successful businessmen. They were following London.”

Males in the middle-class aspired to achieve the status of gentleman, which held a much deeper significance than it does today. “One of the most important ways of projecting that identity was through the way you dressed. So dress was a really important social passport.”

Kent is looking at gentlemen’s dress through the relationship between men and tailors, who worked to ensure that men viewed fashion not as a frivolous “women’s thing”, but as masculine – a sign of money, taste, and independence.

“Oh yes, you can get an off-the-rack suit,” said Kent, mimicking a custom tailor of the day. “Yeah, it’ll be fairly well-made. It’s okay. But if you really want to project the identity that I think you want to project, sir … I think you’ll realize that a custom-tailored suit will mark you off and announce to the world: this man is a gentleman.”

With a “combination of luck and feel” Kent is searching through microfilm archives of periodicals of the era, including the leading weekly trade journal, Trailor and Cutter, to gain insight into the world of gentlemen and tailors.

Tailors had an interesting place in the social hierarchy, and have rarely been studied by social historians, in part because of a bias toward “honest, working class trades like bricklaying and cabinet-making.” Tailors never got their hands dirty – a mark of status – and while they usually came from the working class, it was possible for them to climb the social hierarchy and become business owners.

In addition, their relationships were mainly with the well-to-do. “They were often accused or suspected of being snobbish,” said Kent, adding tailors were the brunt of jokes since their work was seen as unmasculine.

Thirty years ago it would have been much too “quirky” for a social historian to research men’s dress, Kent said, and although women’s fashion and women’s bodies have been the focus of much study, men’s dress has been largely ignored by academia.

Kent, whose father worked in a London men’s clothing shop as a young man, says clothing has always been important to him but admits there is something to the stereotype of the “absent-minded and slovenly-dressed academic.”

“This is in fact the academic style, and what it says is, ‘My mind is on higher things. I don’t think about dress’,” he said. “So I like to go a little bit against that. I probably care a little bit more than the average academic.”