Clothing

Fashion is the primary framework through which human beings read and understand the concept of gender. Whereas the term fashion can be understood to mean clothing styles that change in swift succession (Johnson 2003), it is often used synonymously with the word dress to refer to an assemblage of modifications and supplements to the body, including such things as coiffed hair, painted skin, tattoos, garments, jewelry, and accessories (Roach-Higgins 1992) arrayed in a formal arrangement that "expresses the aesthetics and customs of a cultural period" (Schreier 1989, p. 2). According to Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943) quoted in Christopher Breward's The Culture of Fashion, ties between the ideas of fashion and identity parallel "etymological changes in the word fashion itself: 'As a term for the action or process of making, for particular features or appearance, for a distinct style or pattern, the word had long been in use, but it is in the sixteenth century that the word fashion seems to come into wide currency as a way of redesigning the forming of a self'" (Breward 1995, p. 69).

SEX AND GENDER

The primary genders framed in fashionable dress in most of European and North American culture are masculine (heterosexual implied) and feminine (heterosexual implied). Scholars such as Marit K. Munson define other sexual identities, such as homosexual-male (gay), homosexual-female (lesbian), transsexual (either male to female or female to male), transvestites, drag queens, cross-dressers, and ceremonial assumption by men or women of symbols of the other as alternative genders (e.g., Munson 2000). Several of these categories are defined by their use of fashion as an expression of gender choice, as discussed by Cressida Heyes, who includes as transgender "gays, lesbians and straights who exhibit any kind of dress and/or behavior interpreted as 'transgressing' gender roles" (Heyes 2003, p. 1107). This article addresses mainly European and North American society and primarily with masculine and feminine differentiation.

GENDER AND FASHION STUDIES

The study of gender through dress has been concentrated within the historical and art-historical approaches, where it is often associated with developing feminist analysis of historical materials (Jones 2004, Grossinger 1997). Within the anthropological and sociological disciplines, the study of gender and dress often refers to traditional or indigenous and ceremonial wear and its meanings within that culture (Taylor 2002, Eicher 2001), but it also encompasses approaches combining the elements of multiple discourses, contradictions, and active production of meaning. Literary criticism also addresses issues of gender identification, as does women's studies. Finally, within the burgeoning field of fashion studies, the study of gender is often associated with how humans define themselves as masculine or feminine through the medium of clothing (Holliday 2001).

GENDER AS CHANGING SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION

Throughout known human history men and women have distinguished themselves from one another using clothing and related forms of adornment. In each time and place and social structure, the complete appearance that constitutes masculine or feminine has been different—a social construct in its own right. These nuances of appearance are not always apparent to subsequent observers of these trends. For example, a twenty-first-century viewer might interpret the pink silk suit worn by a perfumed and made-up French courtier (male) of 1760 as effeminate or very feminine. Within the context of the eighteenth-century French court, however, such an outfit was an expression of masculinity, skillful understanding of court negotiation, and power. Whereas the color pink became associated with femininity sometime in the nineteenth century, a few vestiges of the earlier masculine association remain. One example is the pink polo shirt still commonly sold by men's clothiers such as LaCoste and Polo.

GENDER, DRESS, AND OCCASION

In her essay "Appearance and Identity," Valerie Steele points out that women tend to wear more clothing than men do on an everyday basis, expressing cultural ideals of modesty, but this paradigm shifts for ceremonial occasions, such as rites of passage, religious ceremonies, and warfare (Steele 1989a). In her work with the Kalabiri tribe of Nigeria, Joanne B. Eicher studies this idea in greater depth, comparing tribal practice for both daily and ceremonial wear with European and North American bridal practice (as expressed in Brides magazine). Her findings seem to support a general idea that ceremonial dress for women tends to focus on their sexual attributes (waist, breasts, back, and arms) whereas masculine ceremonial dress tends to emphasize power and wealth (employing more clothing and jewelry, not less) on such occasions (Eicher 2001).

THE PROGRESSION OF FASHION

Fashion as people think of it, with varied options, styles, and cyclical changes of features worn by members of the upper classes (with less expensive versions that trickle down to lower classes) began somewhere between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries in Europe. During the twelfth century both men and women wore floor-length robes with very similar cut and decoration. Noblemen could be distinguished by their long hair and beards. The contemporary ecclesiastical chronicler Vitalis described this style: "They parted their hair from the crown of the head to the forehead, grew long and luxurious locks like women, and loved to deck themselves in long, over-tight shirts and tunics … scarcely any knight appears in public with his head uncovered and decently shorn …" (Tortora 1994, p. 93). Skirts might be slit front and back for riding horseback, and they often carried swords.

In contrast, women frequently would wear veils or caps. This theme of feminine head coverings continues through many eras. A further division in female status was often made between married and unmarried women. Generally, an unmarried woman might show some of her hair, whereas a married woman wore veils or caps. Untidiness or inappropriately loose hair on a married woman might be associated with immodest behavior, as demonstrated in this instruction by Menagier de Paris, an older man writing to his young wife in the late fourteenth century: "Take care first that the collar of your shift [underdress], and of your … cotte [dress], and surcoat, do not hang out one over the other as happens with certain drunken, foolish or witless women, who have no care for their honor, nor for the honesty of their estate or of their husbands, and who walk with roving eyes and heads horribly reared up like a lion, their hair straggling out of their wimples [pieces of veil worn under the chin] …" (Tortora 1994, p. 110).

A major shift in fashion silhouette and construction took place beginning in France and spread to the rest of Europe and England after 1340. Men and women left the long, loose garments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries behind and began to wear more tightly fit and carefully shaped clothing. For younger men this included garments in new, shorter popular lengths ranging from the knee to just below the crotch. Literature of the time marked the shape of a man's leg as a style point. For women concurrent styles remained long, but suddenly exposed neck, shoulders, and bosom. This trend for fitted garments may have developed from men's quilted armor padding, and required padding and elaborate fitting to produce the desirable barrel-chested shape of the era. Women's garments likewise were worn tight, and emphasized the waist and an expanded chest area. Garments for both men and women were fitted and shaped in ways that affected and created a new posture.

In the fifteenth century both men and women added voluminous robes over the fitted garments or cotes. Here again, women's clothes continued to be long, but shorter garments remained an option for men. Women's headdresses took a leap toward the fantastical; they are depicted as quite tall, often bifurcated, and frequently elaborately decorated, whereas men's remained somewhat simpler. Advice offered to the Lover in the contemporary Roman de la Rose (a popular poem of the time quoted in Breward's The Culture of Fashion) instructs a man to "dress well and wear good footwear, as your pocketbook permits. You should have a good tailor who knows how to sew fine stitches and make your sleeves well fitting. Wear fresh, new shoes quite frequently, so closely fitting that lower-class people will wonder how you got into them and how you will take them off. When you go out, carry gloves, a silk purse, and wear an attractive belt … Wash your hands, polish your teeth, and have no sign of dirt on your fingernails. Sew on your sleeves, comb your hair, but do not make use of any face makeup, which is for women only, or for sodomites" (Breward 1995, p. 23).

Note that these descriptions emphasizes appropriate attire for the station of both male and female, but with different traits celebrated in masculine (have a good tailor) and feminine (honesty of estate or of their husbands.) The same type of chivalric romance describing dress for the lover above is quoted describing the object of his passion thus: "She had blond hair finely curled. The eyes were gay and laughing, the face shapely, the nose high and well-placed. The lips were more red than a cherry or a rose [perhaps the impetus for the cosmetic enhancement eschewed for the Lover] … and her teeth were white and fine. She had breasts, hard, which lifted up her gown just as if they were nuts, she was slender about the waist so that one could enclose it in two hands. The daisies lying under the instep of her feet … were outright black compared to her feet and legs, so very white was the little girl" (Breward 1995, p. 32).

The middle of the fifteenth century saw the introduction of one of the most notoriously anatomical fashion accessories in the history of European and North American fashion. The codpiece began as a triangular piece of cloth fastened over the opening at the top of men's hose. It continued to develop, however. By the first decade of the sixteenth century, it had expanded into an oval or tubular protrusion over the wearer's crotch, often standing out from underneath men's short doublet skirts. As the sixteenth century progressed, it developed in size and prominence. It was usually decorated to coordinate with men's elaborate trunkhose, or the top part of men's leg coverings that were frequently paned, embroidered, and stuffed. Codpieces made of rich fabrics pulled though slashes in the base fabric for a multitextured effect are depicted frequently in portraiture in the second half of the sixteenth century. To put the codpiece in context with the rest of fashion, this era saw unprecedented artifice and shaping in clothing for both sexes. Men's clothes early in the century included tightly fitted lower hose, a skirted doublet fit tightly over the chest, and a gown with exaggerated broad sleeves, and evolved into a series of attenuated and artificially produced cone shapes by the century's end.

Women's clothes demonstrated similar artifice. Sometime in the early sixteenth century the corset, perhaps the most conspicuously fetishized female garment in European and North American fashion, developed from earlier fitted and shaped bodice styles. By the end of the sixteenth century women's clothes were even more extremely shaped than men's, with long rigid bodice fronts enforced by corsetry, low décolletage and long skirts padded to an extreme drumlike width at the hip.

Certain common characteristics between men and women's clothes, such as elongated bodice/doublet points, wide neck ruffs, and the wearing of tall, masculine-styled hats created a cultural anxiety about appropriate gender display. This was expressed by Puritan pamphleteer and poet Phillip Stubbes (1550?–1593?), writing in England in the mid-1580s: "Our apparell was given us as a signe distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex, & therfore one to weare the Aparel of another sex, is to participate with the same, and to adulturate the veritie of his own kinde" (Breward 1995, p. 93).

In the seventeenth century both men's and women's clothes had simplified, in both silhouette and embellishment. But the luxurious court of French king Louis XIV (1638–1715) at Versailles brought the return of rigidly shaped, elaborate styles for women and heavily embellished clothes for men. It also introduced more modern men's clothing in the form of jacket, vest, and loose short pants. It is from these pieces that men's iconic power garment, the three-piece suit, developed into a recognizable outfit. English King Charles II (1630–1685) brought this combination of vest and long coat with him when he returned to take the throne in England in 1666. The diarist Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) observed this change in fashion: "This day 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 [cut] with white silk under it, and a coat over it, and the legs ruffled with a black riband like a pigeon's leg' and upon the whole I wish the King may keep it, for it is a very find and handsome garment" (Tortora 1994, p. 185).

As the seventeenth century progressed, greater association between women and fashion and frivolity developed. This trend began with further differentiation between the lives of men and women concurrent with the rise of urban environments (Breward 1995). Extending into the eighteenth century this trend fueled changes both for the workers in fashion industries, as well as the ideals of what men and women should wear. Breward discusses the sexual connotations of urban female fashion "ritualized and bound up in the follies of fashion, gratuitous consumption and entertainment" (Breward 1995, p. 102). By the eighteenth century the urban fashion business had evolved partly based on the evolving assumptions that women were essentially more interested than men in fashion and that fashion itself was inherently frivolous (Jones 2004). Fashion's very production began to bifurcate along gender lines, "shaped by rivalries between seamstresses, linen drapers, ladies' hairdressers and fashion merchants" (Jones 2004, p. 5). This shift represented a battle on the part of female seamstresses in Paris to make a livelihood independent from the male-run tailor's guild. The seamstresses used as a principle argument that "female seamstresses should make clothing for women and children because … it was consonant with female modesty to be dressed … by a woman" (Jones 2004, p. 82).

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, both men's and women's clothing was elaborate, colorful, and multilayered. In the middle of the century, at its most extreme, well-to-do women wore corsets with elaborate hoops that extended their skirts many feet to the sides. Men's clothing retained the form of breeches, fitted vest, and long coat, while the breeches and vest moved from loose to formfitting. Both men and women of the upper classes wore pale colors, dramatic woven silks, and elaborate trimmings, as illustrated by an observer named Mary Granville in 1739: "The Duchess of Bedford's petticoat was green padusoy [sic], embroidered very richly with gold and silver and a few colours; … there was an abundance of embroidery, and many people in gowns and petticoats of different colours. The men were as fine as the ladies … My Lord Baltimore was in light brown and silver, his coat lined quite throughout with ermine" (Tortora 1994, p. 243).

"THE GREAT MASCULINE RENUNCIATION"

By the end of the eighteenth century this similarity in color and embellishment between the dress of men and women had largely evaporated. Whereas men's dress of the early nineteenth century still appears quite colorful by late twentieth-century standards, it had simplified dramatically from the apparel worn by Lord Baltimore as described above. Speculation about causes for this shift has occupied many fashion theorists, most famously the psychologist J. C. Flugel (1884–1955). In his 1930 work The Psychology of Clothes, Flugel referred to the transformation of men's clothing between 1760 and 1795 from the colorful silks of the French Ancien régime(the social and political systems in place before the Revolution of 1789) to the soberer attire worn by men since the French Revolution as "The Great Masculine Renunciation." He described this event thus: "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." He goes on to explain several reasons for this change in fashion, including, "[Men] 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" (Purdy 2004, p. 103). He ascribes the background of this change to the new social order dictated by the French Revolution, which demanded "a greater uniformity of dress, a uniformity achieved particularly by the abolition of those distinctions which had formerly divided the wealthy from the poor…. [The] change in question implied at the same time a greater simplification of dress, by a general approximation to more plebeian standards that were possible to all. This tendency to greater simplification was powerfully reinforced by a second aspect of the general change of ideals which the Revolution implied by the fact that the ideal of work had now become respectable…. [With the Revolutionary ideals] a man's most important activities were passed, not in the drawing-room, but in the workshop, the counting-house, the office-places which had, by long tradition, been associated with relatively simple costume" (Purdy 2004, p. 104).

Flugel's primary argument, that men no longer cared about being fashionably dressed, has been attacked in recent work by Breward, who uses examples from nineteenth-century trade publications to describe modish clothing for gentlemen at the turn of the twentieth century: "Far from conforming to the constraining dictates of renunciation, [fashionable dress] traced the demands of the social calendar as closely as the female wardrobe" (Breward 2001, p. 165). Both Steele and Breward explain this shift in fashion as a shift in fashionable definitions of masculinity: setting aside the ideal of an aristocratic courtier, not to a bank clerk, but to the ideal of an English country gentleman (Steele 1989b, p. 16). This shift away from French formality reflects English pastoral ideals and the development of North American culture, with its underlying antielitist themes. Within this evolving context masculine ideals shift focus to physical vigor enforced by the emerging technology of tailoring. Breward illustrates this new ideal by describing how the tape measure, a new garment construction tool, allowed tailors to "construct a unique cloth carapace … [using] published rules which presented systems of proportion as universal law [and] lent tailors the ability to fit a generalized pattern to anyone who desired it" (Breward 2001, p. 166).

Tailors themselves identified this new mechanical ability with humanistic ideals of art and philosophy. Dr. Henry Wampen, a German mathematician whose books on tailoring made a large impact on nineteenth-century tailoring methods, expressed it thus: "I took a great interest in art and philosophy, and a question was then much discussed whether the Grecian ideal of beauty was simply ideal or founded on a scientific basis…. I was induced to measure certain statues, and I came to the conclusion that the Grecian sculptors worked on a scientific basis …" (Breward 2001). Lest this seem far from the discourse of fashion, consider the text of a series of Punch cartoons of 1882, titled "Lost Illusions." These showed a male subject wearing sporting and formal wear commented on by an audience of potential female suitors. In the plate showing athletic wear, the gentleman "looked like a young Greek god, fresh from Olympus." In the formal wear plate, the same man dressed in a morning suit "looked for all the world like a commonplace young clerk." Later, the same subject models for an intellectual, who perceives that he looks "like a Greek god even in his every-day clothes!" (Breward 2001, pp. 173-174).

In fact, despite an increasing availability of goods and services, the rise of the department store (a public space designed particularly as a place for women to purchase clothing and accessories) and increasing differentiation between social roles for men and women, silhouettes worn by men and women in the 1840s and 1850s had some similarities. "Health and beauty in both sexes require that the chest should be thrown well forward, the shoulders carried back, the carriage erect, free and unconstrained," admonished a self-improvement book of 1845 (Kidwell 1989a, p. 127). The method by which men's and women's clothing achieved this silhouette was different, however. Women's sloping shoulders and narrow waists were achieved by corsets, petticoats, and strategically placed linens. Gentlemen's shapes were more often built in by tailors using careful cut and padding (Kidwell 1989a.) Whereas both men and women might wear fashionably narrow waistlines, descriptions of their bodies in contemporary literature focused on different aspects. The lacing in a man's trousers, which created that narrow waist, might instead be described as enhancing his breadth of shoulder, whereas any description of the fullness of a woman's skirts, in contrast to her corseted waistline, might be seen as showing off her small waist (Kidwell 1989a).

THE FRAGMENTATION OF FASHION

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, media culture has decentralized fashion categories, providing many more ways for individuals to express identity. The introduction of movies and then television have brought images of cultural icons to every small town that could put up a screen or receive a television signal. As the twentieth century progressed, these media came into use by more and more specific interest groups as marketers identified more differentiated target markets. Popular cable television shows, such as Queer as Folks, would have been unthinkable in the 1950s when media outlets tended to emphasize white heterosexual and family-oriented norms. This show maintained a healthy, if specific interest, market share in 2000.

Medical advancements allowing men and women to alter their gender status have continued to add categories to the gender continuum, and the World Wide Web has augmented this by providing infinite scope for discussion of the process. Scholarly observation and discussion has made the topic of gender expression somewhat self-conscious in practice: "Gender expression is thus not only an aesthetic choice about cosmetics or hairstyle, skirts or suits. It is also implicated in politically fraught behaviors, economic marginalization and exploitation and political consciousness" (Heyes 2003, p. 1111). Despite this complexity, fashion and dress practices are tightly bound into gender definitions and expressions and provide endless scope for further study.

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                                Elizabeth McMahon