I have been trying without success to locate a pdf version of the articles bellow. They have been published in the journal Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, which, as a rule, is less about fashion than about culture. Considering that fellow Loungers might be equally interested in reading these articles, I would like to inquiry if someone would not have some of them, somewhere stored in a long forgotten folder. The third article might incidentally prove helpful as historical account of some points discussed in the quite interesting thread recently authored by Sator: “The Frock Overcoat” http://thelondonlounge.net/gl/forum/vie ... php?t=8214
[1] Clothes and the Modern Man in 1930s Oxford
Author: Ugolini, Laura
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 4, November 2000 , pp. 427-446
Abstract:
In 1930s Oxford clothing chain stores, clothes were advertised as reflecting the latest styles, but were also cheap and good quality. These claims were to an extent confirmed by contemporary observers, who suggested that, by the inter-war period, changes in clothing production and distribution had ensured that working-class and lower-middle-class people could afford to dress similarly to the upper-middle-class. However, claims of inter-class uniformity should be viewed with caution, as there is evidence that dress remained an important indicator of status. The article aims to explore the meanings attached to men's clothes in 1930s Oxford, using the example of students and car workers. Ugolini considers the role of clothing in establishing and reinforcing male group identities. The article concludes that the main impetus behind men's choice of clothes seems to have been membership of a male group. To some extent consumption was a way of reinforcing collective masculine identities. It is doubtful though that by the 1930s such identities had become “commercialized”. Neither students nor car workers can easily be categorized as manipulated by advertisers; they seem to have co-existed in a relationship of mutual dependence and distrust. It was the students who were the most visible symbols of 1930s Oxford. The prevailing image of Oxford has its origins in representations of the “modern”, fashionable Oxford man of the inter-war years.
[2] Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant's Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest"
Author: Lehmann, Ulrich
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 4, November 2000 , pp. 467-485
Abstract:
Lehmann uses the structuralist approach of Roland Barthes to analyze Hitchcock's North by Northwest. He argues that the film and Cary Grant's role are best explained by looking at appearances - because they are deceptive - and not at hermeneutical codes, cinematic quotations, or self-referential truths. Lehmann believes his argument is exemplified by Grant's suit, which exerts a continuous presence throughout the duration of the film and thus stands analogous to the suit's normative presence in men's fashion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the end of the film, Grant's character changes attire from the conservative suit to casualwear. Lehmann contends that it is too simplistic to see this as a reflection of a change of attitude, arguing that the new attire is just another surface. The emphasis placed by Hitchcock on the suit, which appears deliberately superficial, suggests that the interest in the surface is much greater than an attempt to account for the character's psychological development. Barthes's reading of fashion can be extended to the appearance of Grant in the film because commodified products surround and clothe the character. One of these products develops in a manner analogous to that of a linguistic constituent in visual language; not for a metaphorical reason, but as an integral part of the narrative.
[3] "Frock Consciousness": Virginia Woolf, the Open Secret, and the Language of Fashion
Author: Cohen, Lisa
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 3, Number 2, May 1999 , pp. 149-174
Abstract:
Virginia Woolf's fiction, criticism, and autobiographical work display a sustained focus on clothes, and on the problems and pleasures of fashionability. From her earliest diary entries on, Woolf is consistently fascinated by clothing and its effects on consciousness, or on the relationship between clothing and character. In general she uses frocks to think about the modernist problem of how to represent character. Woolf wrote of “Frock Consciousness” in her diary, an oxymoron since frock refers to something for the outside, while consciousness describes the mind and spirit inside us.
[4] Fashioning the Gentleman: A Study of Henry Poole and Co., Savile Row Tailors 1861-1900
Author: Anderson, Fiona
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 4, November 2000 , pp. 405-426
Abstract:
This research is based on a case study of Henry Poole and Co. Savile Row Tailors 1861-1900 and on the company's archives, now housed at their premises at 15 Savile Row. The article looks at the relationship between shifts in the composition and lifestyle of the late nineteenth-century wealth, social and power elite and the development of male fashion practices in that period. The dress of socially elite men in the late nineteenth-century, has received scant academic attention to date. This invisibility has contributed to the wholesale acceptance of the psychologist J.C. Flugel's theory of the `Great Masculine Renunciation' which he expounded in his 1932 text The Psychology of Clothes. These ideas have been challenged by Christopher Breward in his text The Hidden Consumer: masculinities, fashion and city life 1860-1914 primarily with reference to working and lower middle-class men in London. This article extends these debates by focusing on men of the class identified by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 as the `leisure class', through an examination of the business activities of a leading Savile Row tailor and the clothing consumption strategies of their customers.
Journal articles on "Frock Consciousness", etc.
Edit: I just tried to copy in the text of the Oxford article but the formatting went to hell and it was impossible to read. I'll have to figure out some way to host the pdf.
That is really nice of you!pvpatty wrote:Edit: I just tried to copy in the text of the Oxford article but the formatting went to hell and it was impossible to read. I'll have to figure out some way to host the pdf.
I just spent half an hour going through the Oxford article in Word and tried to reformat it, so it should be legible now:
Clothes and the Modern Man in 1930s Oxford
Author: Ugolini, Laura
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 4, November 2000 , pp. 427-446
In 1934 an advertisement in The Oxford Times announced that “rational tailoring” had arrived in town: The Fifty Shilling Tailors had just opened a new shop. This event was presented as more than the prosaic opening of a new branch of a well-known menswear chain store. It was “another step in the spread of a New Idea in men’s tailoring.” All men who cared both for their clothes and for “their pockets” were invited to call. They would find clothes that were not only in the very latest styles, but also
both cheap and of good quality. Cheapness was indeed one of The Fifty Shilling Tailors’ main selling points (The Oxford Times 25 May 1934; 27 September 1935; 1 November 1935). As with other chain stores, they were careful to emphasize that all men could afford to shop with them, although the low prices were not, it was generally stressed, inconsistent with the provision of good-quality clothing. Montague Burton believed that his own chain of stores had played a vital part in making elegant clothes available to larger sections of the male population than ever before: “We are justly proud in having made a considerable contribution towards making Britain the best dressed country in the world, so far as men are concerned” (Sigsworth 1990: 89).
The claims of chain stores were to some extent confirmed by contemporary observers, who suggested that, by the inter-war period, changes in the production and distribution of clothes had ensured that working-class and lower-middle-class men and women could afford to dress in very similar ways to the better off among the middle class. George Orwell considered that the “manufacture of cheap clothes,” as well as “the
general softening of manners” had served to tone down “the surface differences between class and class” (Orwell 1965 [1937]: 133). This was the case in both men’s and women’s clothes. According to one Sheffield engineering worker, thanks to the new chain stores, “whereas previously the rich man had a tailor and the poor man bought his clothes off the peg, it became possible for Jack to be as well dressed as his Master, or very nearly” (Benson 1994: 217).
This supposedly new uniformity in dress was viewed with some ambivalence by most (non-working-class) commentators. The new “democracy” of cheap and easily accessible consumer goods made available by stores such as Woolworth’s was one of the themes explored by J. B. Priestley in his influential English Journey, first published in 1934. For the first time, “Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress.” According to Priestley, though, the new consumer goods were simply too cheap: “too much of it is simply a trumpery imitation of something not very good even in the original. There is about it a rather depressing monotony” (Priestley 1997 [1934]: 325–6). In a more positive vein, Lord Elton observed in his autobiography that it was the clothing of “the underpaid, hat-touching wage-earners” of his boyhood that had
been drab and uniform. He commended the transformation of the workers of the past, “with their class-uniforms of coarse, ill-fitting Sunday black, into the independent young artisan in week-end plus-fours” (Elton 1938: 253).
Despite these claims, the notion of a new inter-class homogeneity in interwar clothing should be treated with a degree of caution, as the experiences of a certain David Henry Campbell can help to show. On the night between 25 and the 26 of February 1932, the 21-year-old Campbell broke into the tailoring shop of Castell & Son, in one of Oxford’s premier shopping streets, and stole clothing to the value of £1.10s. The stolen items included a jacket, trousers and a bathing suit. There is little doubt that Campbell’s subsequent discovery and arrest were aided by the unemployed bricklayer’s decision to wear the stolen clothes while residing at Stratton St Mary Public Institution (The Oxford Times 15 April 1933). By wearing garments intended for University undergraduates, rather than those suitable for a young man living on the margins of society, Campbell had made himself conspicuous, and had attracted the unwelcome attention of the law. His example may very well be an extreme one; and yet it seems a healthy reminder that despite the spread in the inter-war years of cheap, mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing of reasonably good quality, dress remained an important indicator of status and identity. Boundaries of “correct” dress had not entirely broken down.
What remains unclear, though, is the exact nature and extent of these boundaries. The emphasis in recent fashion histories has been on the relative “relaxation” of men’s clothing after the First World War, with the abandonment of the stiff formality of the frock coat and of starched collars, in favor of the adoption—at least outside “business hours”—of lighter materials and the more relaxed style of lounge suits, pullovers and
soft collars (Byrde 1979: 92; Chenoune 1993: 163–4; de Marly 1985:125–8). Such an approach, though, while indicative of changing notions of “correct” attire, does not shed light on the relationship between masculine identities and the purchase and consumption of clothes outside a narrow elite, and in the context of the mass production and distribution of menswear. Furthermore, while Christopher Breward and Frank Mort have explored the meanings of fashionable, consuming masculinities in the pre-First World War and post-Second World War periods, the interwar years have received little attention (Breward 1999; Mort 1996).
This article, therefore, aims to shed some light on this period, and to explore the meanings attached to men’s clothes in 1930s Oxford. Using the example of Oxford students and car workers, it will consider the role played by clothing in establishing and reinforcing male group identities. It will question whether, and on what terms, by the 1930s such identities could be defined as “commercialized,” and will suggest that consumers were not simply manipulated by retailers and other commercial forces. Using material ranging from local newspapers and periodicals to memoirs, from fictional accounts to “ephemeral” advertising material, this article seeks to provide a snapshot of male clothing styles and patterns of consumption, which takes into account the distinctions between representations (in retailers’ adverts, newspaper reports, fictional accounts, and so on) and self-representations (through undergraduate publications, autobiographical accounts, and so on), devoting particular attention to the ways in which all discourses—whether originating from retailers, from supposedly disinterested observers, or from the car workers and students themselves—made inventive use of notions of “modern” and “traditional.” Indeed, as a meeting-place between the scholars and citizens of an ancient University town, and the workers in a “modern” car industry,
1930s Oxford provides a powerful picture of the interplay between status and consumption, tradition and modernization that challenges easy generalizations about the relationship between clothing and masculine identities.
It has become almost a cliché to comment that in the period following the First World War, Oxford rapidly became a city of startling contrasts. Alongside its roles as the home of an ancient and venerable University and as a thriving market town, it had also by the 1920s acquired the role of an industrial center, with the establishment in Cowley, on the eastern side of Oxford, of Morris Motors and later of Pressed Steel. By 1939, although 19.2 per cent of adults were still employed in domestic service, mostly in connection with the University, roughly 30 per cent were now being employed by the motor industry. Less than 1 per cent had been so employed before the First World War (Whiting 1983: 8–10).1
Unsurprisingly, the creation of a new identity for Oxford as an industrial town was neither uncontroversial nor uncontested. The changes—both
real and perceived—brought by the growth of the motor industry were widely understood in terms of the arrival of the “modern” world to the city. The timelessness of the Oxford of the early 1920s, described by the novelist Evelyn Waugh as a city in whose “spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day,” had by the 1930s in the eyes of many been “submerged . . . and obliterated” (Waugh 1980 [1945]: 23). The modernization of Oxford has most often been characterized, both by contemporary and by more recent commentators, as an attack on the very material fabric of the city, which by the 1930s was being ruined in order to cater for a new brand of consumer. Industrialization and changing patterns of consumption and modernization were understood as advancing hand in hand. In particular, the disappearance of the small independent shopkeeper, replaced by multiple stores, was seen as the direct result of the incursion into the city of industrial workers. In her history of Oxford, Ruth Fasnacht lamented what she saw as the
dominant trend of the inter-war period: the demolition or “modernization” of buildings, in order to “make way for something considered more likely to appeal to the majority of the new working-class citizens.” In Cornmarket, one of the city center’s main shopping streets, individual shops had been crowded out by branches of multiple stores, “with shop fronts (and with stocks) exactly similar to those found in five hundred other towns” (Fasnacht 1954: 213; Morris 1987 [1965]: 33; Sinclair 1931: 42).
The arrival of a modern world of consumption was heralded not only by chain stores, car parks or the “garishness . . . of big London-controlled enterprises,” but was also symbolized by the presence on the main shopping thoroughfares of the car workers themselves, carrying on their persons the fruits of their reprehensible purchasing habits. “The palefaced mechanics in Oxford bags and tweed coats [who] walk down
the Cornmarket” were complicit, according to John Betjeman, in the destruction of Oxford (Betjeman 1990 [1938]: 9). And yet, a further exploration of the meanings attached to men’s clothing in 1930s Oxford shows a more complex picture than a simple assault upon “tradition” by mechanics dressed in modern mass-produced finery, as local retailers adopted the language of “modernization” in order to capture the custom of University students, rather than that of car workers.
It seems clear that to some extent at least, despite claims of homogeneity, the cost, value and quality of clothes remained visible and important indicators of social status. As Ernest Baker remarked, having visited Oxford after an absence of twenty-five years, “caste and humbug” continued to be rampant, and the only way to ensure civil behavior on the part of residents was by wearing a 50s plus-four suit (The Oxford Times 20 May 1932). J. G. Sinclair expressed himself with even greater asperity, claiming that “Class distinctions in Oxford are as numerous as the legs on a centipede. And as active. A mere shade in the color of your spats sets up a subtle social standard” (Sinclair 1931: 31).
Nevertheless, the role of clothing does not seem for the most part to have been that of exhibiting one’s own, or assessing others’ social status and wealth. It also does not seem to have been that of decoding others’ private character and moral standing. Indeed, the role of clothing in marking out the individual man from the anonymous urban crowd, either on economic or on moral grounds, seems on the whole to have been hardly in evidence (Gunn 1999: 17–18; Sennett 1974: 20–2; Veblen 1994 [1899]: 103–15). Elizabeth Wilson has suggested that in nineteenthcentury Britain, fashion served as a form of classification: “Individuals participated in a process of self-docketing and self-announcement, as dress became the vehicle for the display of the unique individual personality” (Wilson 1985: 155). There are indications that by the inter-war period
the role of clothing had shifted, and had become the means of marking the individual’s entry into a more or less well-defined male group. To return briefly to Campbell’s experiences as a thief, it is unlikely that the stolen clothes gave him away because they were very expensive (they were not), but rather because they did not “fit” with his role as an unemployed down-and-out. As George Orwell remarked of his experiences as a tramp, one only needed to wear the “right clothes” to become one of the “fraternity,” other factors, such as accent, being of far less importance. While begging at back doors, his educated voice never gave him away: “I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw” (Orwell 1965 [1937]: 155). In the same way, by wearing clothing inappropriate to the group he belonged to, Campbell ultimately gave himself away. Campbell’s vicissitudes were of course not typical of the experiences of most Oxford
men. Nevertheless, they do suggest that notions of group, rather than individual, identity might be a useful way of approaching the question of clothing and masculine status.
Historians have most readily identified the importance of clothing as expressing a sense of belonging to a male “group” in the context of studies of youth and of work-based cultures. Examples have ranged from the notorious Napoo gang in pre-First World War Manchester, with its distinctive uniform of navy blue suit, trilby hat and pink neckerchief,
borrowed from American gangster films (Fowler 1992: 144), to the emblematic figure of the nineteenth-century dustman, with his fantail hat, light jacket, breeches, and colorful stockings (Maidment 1998). Despite these studies, the dynamics of the connection between membership of a male group and the purchase, consumption and display of clothing need further exploration, particularly in terms of the “commercialization,” that
this connection is considered to have entailed in the inter-war period (Davies 1992: 97; Fowler 1992). This article focuses on two such male “consumer groups” in Oxford: University undergraduates and car workers. In their case, the development of distinctive clothing styles served to reinforce bonds created by belonging to the same larger body, be it the University (with its associations of tradition and venerability) or the car factory (with its connotations of brashness and modernity), in the context of contemporary debates about the development of inter-war Oxford as a “modern” city.
Undergraduates and ex-undergraduates recognized the importance of appropriate clothing in marking the assumption of the role of students. Donald Willis was a working-class Oxford youth who successfully competed for a University scholarship. He marked the transition from Cowley to University by opening an account with Walters, a tailoring and outfitting business that specialized in University custom, where he was fitted for his first evening dress and dinner jacket, and acquired a suit of plusfours (Willis 1987: 71). With characteristic acidity, J. G. Sinclair emphasized that essential for social success in Oxford, alongside things like “a repertoire of pornographic stories . . . and an exhaustless capacity for suppurating self-conceit” was the possession of at least one pair of plus-fours. He considered that there was a good deal of pressure upon undergraduates to adopt a uniform style of clothing, so that even the Rusk in College student soon discarded “his colliery trousers, or, as the case may be, his porter’s cap” and dashed out to buy a pair of flannel trousers (Sinclair 1931: 10, 98).
Trousers (either plus-fours or wide-bottomed flannels), pullovers, college scarves, soft collars and shapeless jackets were the essentials of normal male undergraduate day wear: they were of equal, if not greater, importance in defining “the undergraduate” than the cap and gown. The Reverend Morse-Boycott, for example, was struck on a visit to Oxford, not only by the undergraduates’ “tattered gowns,” but also by their plus fours and “fancy” pullovers, a combination which apparently made them look like “scarecrows” (The Oxford Times 23 June 1933). Significantly, the choice and acquisition of clothes seems for the most part to have taken place outside parental control. Angus Wilson, who graduated from Merton College in 1935, stated of his choice of clothes that “for the first time I could buy the clothes I wanted and I knew that I wanted these” (Thwaite 1986 [1976]: 95).
Students’ clothing was nevertheless not uniform. With an estimated half of the undergraduates in receipt of some form of financial assistance or scholarship, financial matters alone must have constrained the choice of a considerable number. At the other end of the financial scale “the rich men” seem to have been easily recognizable, not only by their fast and fashionable lifestyle, but also by the fact that “They wear checks. They wear whole suits, well cut . . . They are more often seen in a hat than in cap and gown.” Apart from the fact that they must have represented only a tiny minority, it is significant that they were considered to belong more to London, to races and to country houses than to undergraduate Oxford (Betjeman 1990 [1938]: 37). Among the majority of students, individuality seems to have been asserted through the adoption of particular
details, rather than a wholesale rejection of the undergraduate outfit. According to John Betjeman, the “aesthetes” of the 1920s, such as Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, or Betjeman himself, who had clearly stood out with their “long hair and odd clothes,” had by the 1930s disappeared. The aesthete of this decade was “a little scrubby-looking nowadays; his tie alone flames out” (Betjeman 1990 [1938]: 38). Angus Wilson wore the “regulation undergraduate gray flannels, sports coats and umbrellas,” but added “canary-colored woolen waistcoats with brass buttons . . . foulard spotted scarves, and a pleasing selection of bottle green maroon and dark crimson velvet ties.” The ensemble was not meant as the expression of a unique personality, but “deceptively might have suggested to a stranger that I belonged to a smart Oxford set” (Thwaite 1986 [1976]: 95).
Distinctive clothing was indeed most often associated not with the rejection of the undergraduate identity, but rather with an allegiance to a particular group within it. Items ranged from the ties of particular clubs to sportsmen’s outfits. The latter were ridiculed by P.A.S., a contributor to one of the student magazines, who deprecated the way in which sporting undergraduates would in the afternoon change from Harris tweeds,
whose “serviceable nature” no one would dispute, to shorts, “. . . sweaters . . . studded boots . . . multicolored scarves—[which] are vulgar and unnecessary” (The Isis 10 May 1933).
Political opinion contributed a further clothing code. Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted Fascists were the most obvious example; but it seems clear that all shades of political opinion were attributed a distinctive apparel, even if the reality may have been rather less dramatic. In his advice to first-year students, Michael Sheldon suggested that “If you are a Right politician, a sober suit is suggested, with possibly, a stiff white collar. A red tie is essential for success as a Lansbury . . . and . . . rougher tweeds than usual, and your flannels just cannot be clean” (The Isis 13 October 1937). By 1933, concern was being expressed at the apparently growing tendency among undergraduates to wear political “uniforms” (Oxford Mail 19 May 1933).
The wearing of politically-motivated clothing was perceived as an exclusively University phenomenon, although in fact this represented one of the exceptional occasions when Town and Gown can be seen to have shared a common clothing code. On May Day 1933, for example, a meeting of “Oxford reds” was held in the Oxford Town Hall, with the aim of forming a uniformed body to defend their meetings against Fascist attacks. Among those present were representatives of both City and University organizations: the Oxford Trades and Labor Council, the Oxford City Labor Party and the University Labor Club among others. It was decided that the wearing of some form of uniform had become a necessity. Although the color was never in doubt, there was disagreement as to the nature of the uniform, with some arguing for a red leather jerkin or pullover, while others considered a (red) badge on the arm sufficient. The need for uniforms was expressed in purely practical terms: “In the case of a rough and tumble, you want to know you are not bashing the chap on your side” (Oxford Mail 2 May 1933). In the sense of establishing a group identity, the motives for wearing a political uniform do not seem to differ from those lying behind the wearing of the distinctive clothing
of the sportsman or the aesthete, or indeed more generally of the undergraduate: identities that were established through acts of consumption.
The dynamics that lead a group, in this case University undergraduates, to adopt a collective identity based on a more or less distinctive clothing style are difficult to disentangle. While in cases such as that of the Napoo gang, the influence of contemporary cinema is easy to detect, in the case of students the relationship with commercial forces is a more complex one. Indeed, films such as A Yank at Oxford (1938) seem to have exploited—and possibly reinforced—existing images of undergraduate life and style (Richards 1989 [1984]: 316); it was retailers who had a
more direct impact on students’ fashionable consumption.
Despite the strong connection made by commentators between developments in retailing and the arrival of car workers, there is little doubt that outside East Oxford, traders’ (including menswear retailers’) main strategy continued to be to attract University—and in particular undergraduate—custom. Morris Motors could claim that much of the £ 20,000 paid every week in wages to its workers was spent in Oxford shops (The Oxford Times 2 October 1931), but there seems to have been a general agreement that the greatest asset to Oxford trade remained its relationship with the
University, and particularly with undergraduates (The Oxford Times 4 December 1931).
Oxford menswear retailers may have expressed little interest in attracting the custom of industrial workers, but this does not mean that they deprecated the development of a modern commercial identity for Oxford. By the 1930s, it was common among those writing and commenting on the retailing industry to associate—perhaps unthinkingly—independent shopkeepers with notions of the “traditional” and the “old-fashioned,”
and chain stores with the “modern” (Levy 1948: 89–90). Independent Oxford traders, though, elaborated a distinctive advertising rhetoric, which blended notions of “modernity” and “tradition,” and countered the critics of Oxford’s “modernization” by projecting an image of themselves as up-to-date enterprises, but respectful of the ancient fabric of the city.
Cowley’s shopping area’s claim to be the “Most progressive quarter of Oxford” was therefore contested by city center traders (Oxford Mail 5 May 1933). The shops in the High Street, one of Oxford’s premier shopping areas, were described as “modern emporiums, yet preserving the antiquity of their facades” (Oxford Monthly August 1935). The exclusive department store Elliston & Cavell, which in 1933 had established a separate “Shop for men,” also claimed to be “. . . an example of modern enterprise allied to restraint in deference to its surroundings” (The Oxford Times 20 October 1933). In terms of merchandise, traders were keen to emphasize the way they were able to reconcile “the well-known Oxford quality” (The Oxford Times 20 October 1933) with a responsiveness to “modern” trends. Walters, a tailoring and outfitting firm based
in a lane off the High Street, was typical of a wider trend in rejecting an exclusive concentration on the bespoke trade. “In keeping with the spirit of the age” they acquired “a huge stock of styles, patterns and sizes” of ready-to-wear clothes.2
Significantly, the new chain stores similarly bleded their claims to modernity with an emphasis on their respect for tradition. The Fifty Shilling Tailors were an exception in their relentless claims to modernity, and in their claims to be “new” and “up-to-date.” Indeed, those men who resisted its blandishments were dismissed as prejudiced and as “afraid to try a new idea” (The Oxford Times 22 November 1935). Austin Reed, on the other hand, was more representative of other chain stores. In 1935 the firm bought and renovated the Plough Inn, a building originally dating from the late seventeenth century, and re-opened it as a shop. While stressing the novelty and up-to-date nature of the merchandise for sale, the firm’s respect for the fabric of the building was also emphasized: the architects had been given “a free hand to treat the interior of the premises in a style as much in harmony with the original seventeenth century work
as possible.”3
Retailers may have staked their distinctive place in the “modern” Oxford, but it is clear that—as was mentioned above—this was an Oxford still dominated by the rhythm of University life. By the 1930s in Britain as a whole a shopping calendar whereby changes of season were marked by periodic sales and “events” was well established. While this was also the case in Oxford, here menswear and other retailers at the same time
developed a shopping calendar closely connected to the academic year. This was true even of shops unlikely to be patronized by members of the University. In May 1930, for example, the Co-op announced the arrival of “Eights Week” and issued the call: “Everyone in flannels!” (The Oxford Times 23 May 1930). More specifically, menswear retailers also developed an iconography that made it clear that undergraduates were the customers they aimed to attract.
Figure 1 shows one of Walters’ advertisements. Here it is not so much the gown, crumpled under an arm, but rather the plus-fours, the pullover and the negligently unbuttoned jacket that make it clear that the image on the left is meant to represent a student before his transformation into an elegant businessman (The Isis 6 June 1934). With some minor variations, this image remained emblematic of the 1930s undergraduate, whose style and clothing, to which students were expected to adhere, were instantly recognizable.
Figure 1
Walters advert. The Isis 6 June
1934. Reproduced by permission of the British Library, shelfm. 327, (Copyright The Isis).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
It remains open to question whether styles of undergraduate clothing were informed and influenced by retailers’ adverts. Historians—among others—continue to debate the impact of advertising, and of commercial forces in general on consumers’ decision-making (Breazeale 1994; Greenfield, O’Connell and Read 1999; Marchand 1985: 238–54; Mort and Thompson 1994). For periods before the advent of consumer surveys (which have themselves been shown to be blunt instruments), it is practically Impossible to determine the relative impact on consumer choice and on personal taste of commercial” forces, such as advertising or cinema, and economic factors, such as the accessibility and price of goods. In his study of pre-Second World War working-class culture in Manchester and Salford, Andrew Davies has suggested that “corner lads” was the most common description of young men, “reflecting the centrality of street activities in youth culture as late as the 1930s.” It also suggests a pattern of group identity defined by activities other than the purchase and consumption of goods. In the case of Oxford undergraduates, on the other hand, consumption patterns—and in particular, the purchase and use of certain clothes—were of overwhelming importance in creating and
sustaining a separate identity (Davies 1992: 97).
In this sense, undergraduates’ identity was a “commercial” one. This does not mean that they were in any simple sense “manipulated” by retailers. Rather, their relationship seems to have been an uneasy one of mutual dependence, a relationship in which power cannot be stated to be overwhelmingly on either side. By the 1930s, Oxford tradesmen had a well-established and notorious reputation for being far too ready to
grant long-term credit to undergraduates only recently emancipated from parental control, encouraging them to contract debts from which they could extricate themselves only with the greatest difficulties (Yee 1944: 5). In 1930, the undergraduate journal The Isis had been forced, under pressure from the Oxford Chamber of Trade, to apologize for having accused Oxford traders of “cupidity” and “exorbitant prices” (The Oxford Times 14 March 1930). In contrast to this image of traders preying upon students, Roger Dataller deprecated “the insidious influence” on townspeople of their dependence on the University for custom. This, he considered, inevitably sapped “the dignity of spirit of a full-grown man.” Nevertheless, he himself as a student had been manipulated by a
shrewd shopkeeper into paying more than he meant to—in cash—for a lounge coat (Dataller 1933: 95–6; 149).
Boundaries of correct dress were furthermore policed not only by retailers and advertisers. Paul Nystrom has indicated the strength of the forces that compelled men to conform to particular styles of clothing. For those who refused to conform, “There will be quizzical looks, doubtful stares and critical estimates. He will be thought queer. He will be judged as lacking in brain power and, perhaps, as an undesirable person”
(Nystrom 1928: 9–10). Although in Nystrom’s analysis such opprobrium was seen to originate from a generalized “society,” in fact the most powerful indictments of non-conformity could come from the group to which the individual was perceived as belonging. Pressures to conform to certain canons could therefore be found within the undergraduate community itself. The flouting of such canons could lead to punishment,
including, in some cases, through physical violence: the “debagging” of aesthetes, or the wrecking of their rooms on the part of athletic “hearties” being an obvious example (Graves and Hodge 1995 [1940]: 124).4
Students themselves could present the connection between their identity and particular styles of clothing as a denial of any link with modern commercialism. Their clothing could serve to align them rather with a sense of tradition and of Oxford’s past. D. F. Karaka portrayed undergraduates’ clothing almost as part of the ancient fabric of the city: “. . . with its Gothic structures and dreamy spires, and that drab gray splashed all over—from buildings to bags—Oxford is still as venerable as the Oxford which Arnold knew” (Karaka 1933: 44). In a more open embracing of “tradition” over the “modern,” in May 1931 the editors of The Isis and The Cherwell, the two main undergraduate magazines, united in announcing their intention of wearing the old-fashioned straw
boater while punting on the river as “. . . a symbol of a glorious past.” The boater represented more than a connection with tradition. It also represented a way of differentiating the consumption patterns of students from those of the “plebeian masses.” “The triumph of the felt hat over the boater” on the river was seen as embodying “. . . the indecorous shrieks of the plebeian masses, whose hired punts plough a laborious way through a Sargasso sea of banana skins . . . [and have] forever banished from the river the white silk shirts and immaculate flannel trousers of the aristocracy” (The Cherwell 9 May 1931; The Isis 6 May 1931).
The “plebeian masses” never acquired the same iconic status as undergraduates in their role as consumers of clothing. There is no doubt that the car workers were by the 1930s a visible, and apparently permanent presence on the streets of Oxford, well beyond the confines of the industrial eastern areas. In terms of representations, though, beyond the role as harbingers of “modernity” accorded to them by critics of the city’s
industrialization, Cowley workers remained far less visible than University undergraduates. In particular, car workers’ representation and role as
purchasers and consumers of clothes continued to be a marginal one.
To some extent, this “invisibility” reflects the way in which Cowley as a whole remained marginal to representations of Oxford. Alison Light has noted “the adoration which was afforded to all things Oxford between the wars,” an adoration reflected for example in the frequency with which the city was used as a setting for the increasingly popular detective fiction of the 1930s (Light 1991: 77–8). Nevertheless, despite the occasional disturbing hints of the presence of “another,” less picturesque Oxford— the Coles had their detective, newly arrived from London, remark that the area near the station looked “like a back street of Birmingham”— the “whodunits” of the 1930s focused overwhelmingly on the circumscribed world of the Colleges (Cole and Cole 1938: 87). In a similar way, Cowley is largely absent from most inter-war fiction set in Oxford (Dougill
1998: 168–73). Cowley workers—and the Oxford working-class as a whole—did
not have the same opportunities as those afforded to the University undergraduates for self-representation. Students had avenues such as the undergraduate magazines (although admittedly these did not always necessarily reflect the views of the majority of the student population) to create their own image and identity, as well as to respond to attacks from outside. The satirical response in The Isis to Richard Rumbold’s lampooning of Oxford’s “effeminacy and its young perverts” in the Sunday Referee is a case in point (Figure 2. The Isis, 26 April 1933). In the case of Cowley workers, representations—as harbingers of modern consumerism and chain stores—dominated over self-representations.
Figure 2
“Counterblast.” The Isis 26
April 1933. Reproduced by
permission of the British
Library, shelfm. 77 (Copyright
The Isis).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
HARDCOPY
In 1965 college servants told Jan Morris that before the Second World War, the town boys had tried to look like undergraduates (Morris 1987 [1965]: 90). Nevertheless, there are some indications that, at least as far as the car workers were concerned, styles of clothing were developed with little reference to the University. Looking back on her East Oxford youth, Phyl Surman described how car workers would generally wear standard
dark suits of trousers, jacket and waistcoat, which could be varied by wearing a pullover instead of a waistcoat, or a silk scarf instead of a collar. Caps would be worn for work, but trilby hats and raglan raincoats on a Sunday (Surman 1992: 68). Clothing also served to mark distinctions and differences in status between the various Cowley workers. Because of the cleaner nature of their work, for example, Morris Motors employees could wear a “respectable” jacket and tie at work, while Pressed Steel
men were easily recognizable by their greasy overalls (Whiting 1983: 57). Cleaner work and respectable clothing became enmeshed in creating an image of Morris Motors workers as “superior.” Cowley’s dynamism and changing nature as a community were further reflected in the adoption of “new fashions” by the local young men. These fashions were not copied from cinema stars, often seen as the main focus of working-class emulation, but rather from Welsh immigrants, newly arrived from depressed
mining districts. The new fashion could be seen on Sundays, in the shape of “a smart suit, the most notable feature of which was the doublebreasted waistcoat cut straight across the lower front.” Significantly, “This style was copied and much favored by the young men but was not approved by their more provincial parents” (Surman 1992: 68).
Despite the relatively high wages that car workers could earn—although irregular, earnings averaged out between 70s. and 80s. per week (Whiting 1983: 40)—in terms of the consumption of fashionable clothing, there is little indication that Oxford retailers outside Cowley made any serious effort to attract their custom. It was left to shops such as the Cowley Road drapery and shoe store Buteers to cater for them, and offer items such as men’s khaki shirts as “very suitable for engineers and mechanics,” or
woolen gloves as “very welcome to cyclists and lorry drivers in wet and cold weather” (The Oxford Times 25 September 1931).
Images of working men, or rather of men in working clothes, were extremely rare in adverts in general. Unsurprisingly, the exception was provided once more by Butler’s Stores, which advertised its Lybro overalls
without attempting to disguise their use in connection with manual work (Figure 3. The Oxford Times 28 February 1930). More in general, aside from the image of the undergraduate, much of Oxford retailers’ advertising material, while benefiting from improved printing techniques, did not substantially differ from pre-war conventions. The imagery used did not seek to portray realistic figures, but rather ideal “types.” The
prospective buyer was presented with images of desirable, leisured, or even luxurious masculine lifestyles, or, more rarely, of obstacles overcome and success achieved, all through the wearing of a particular set of often inexpensive clothes. The power of these images lies in their inclusiveness. All Oxford men, except the very poorest—and car workers were not among these—could aspire to the images of manly elegance provided by shops such as the Fifty Shilling Tailors (Figure 4. The Oxford Times 28 September 1934).
Figure 3
Butler’s advert. The Oxford
Times 28 February 1930.
Reproduced by permission of
the British Library, shelfm. 509
(Courtesy of Newsquest
Oxfordshire Ltd).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
Paradoxically, given the association made by many commentators between car workers and chain stores, the latter’s appeal to a working class clientele was far from explicit, although inexpensiveness was often emphasized: a Burton sale brochure, for example, announced that “really good clothes” had been reduced in price “and brought within the reach of every man’s purse.”5 Also, although there is no definite evidence concerning the social status of Burton’s customers (or, indeed, of other chain stores), Frank Mort has suggested that the evidence “points to men in subaltern social groups” (Mort 1996: 137). In 1930s Oxford, though, car workers were not necessarily the social group most strongly influenced by economic considerations in their choice of clothes. It is interesting to find undergraduates in 1935 furtively buying their flannel trousers from Marks & Spencer. According to one observer, “They were all skirmishing to get to the cheap trousers. As soon as one had made his hasty purchase, another would dive out from behind the fancy goods and take his place” (The Isis 5 June 1935). By the 1930s, it was widely acknowledged that undergraduates’ spending power was much reduced in comparison with earlier generations of students (The Oxford Times 4 December 1931).
For many, then, making their purchases from cheap chain stores may have been a necessity. That such purchases were made furtively, though, seems to confirm the stores’ relatively low social status.
Figure 4
Fifty Shilling Tailors advert. The
Oxford Times 28 September
1934. Reproduced by
permission of the British
Library, shelfm. 1304 (Courtesy
of Newsquest Oxfordshire Ltd).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
The merchandise sold by stores such as Burton was not always necessarily acceptable for students. This is clearly reflected in the difficulties experienced by Ralph Glasser, an ex-presser in a Glasgow garment factory, who had won a scholarship to Oxford just before the outbreak of the Second World War. While sitting with other students in a study group, he observed that the others were mostly wearing “loose tweed jackets
and flannel trousers . . . in varying shades of gray or dark blue, with cotton shirts and college ties; a few wore silk shirts in pastel shades and loosely knotted ties of Shantung silk in glowing colors.” Glasser himself “felt staidly overdressed in my gray worsted suit, my only one, bought in Burtons for fifty shillings . . . before leaving Glasgow.” Significantly, he planned to acquire “the uniform of tweed jacket and bags” as soon as he “dared spend more money” (Glasser 1988: 18).
While Glasser’s own sartorial mistakes were made when attempting to enter a socially more privileged milieu, his scathing comments concerning the socialist and academic Richard Crossman indicate that such mistakes were not exclusive to social “climbers.” Glasser compared the elegant gray suit and matching silk tie worn by Crossman for a seminar, with the “shabby flannels . . . tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, gray or dun shirt and red tie” that he had worn at Socialist meetings, and “which he must have thought gave him a proletarian appearance” (Glasser 1988: 18–19). In Glasser’s opinion Crossman’s style of dressing reflected his essential elitism and distance from the working class. It could, though, also reflect the impossibility of defining—and adopting—an accurate and distinctively “working-class” clothing style. It was certainly the case that Cowley car workers never acquired such easily recognizable symbols as undergraduates’ flannel trousers or plusfours.
It was mostly when rules were transgressed that it became clear that boundaries of “correct” dress did in fact exist. Among the workers at Morris Radiators, “dandies” stood out by wearing inappropriately genteel clothing to work, and subverting the distinction between everyday and Sunday clothes. One such “dandy” was a certain Raoul de Oscar-Thorpe, who according to a fellow worker, would always be seen with a walking
stick, yellow gloves and a trilby hat; most importantly, he “came to work in them and all.” Although he was a very good workman and obviously likeable, his style of clothing led to thinly disguised reservations in others’ estimation: “He thought he was a gentleman . . . he was a proper showoff . . . Oh yes, a right dandy. I liked him though” (Exell 1978: 72).
Surveying the inter-war period, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge considered that while in the 1920s Oxford and Cambridge had been “two main hubs of advanced recreational fashion,” by the 1930s they were reduced to the status of “merely suburbs of London” (Graves and Hodge 1995 [1940]: 122). Notions of suburbanization and of homogeneity, though, are not particularly helpful in examining men’s apparel in 1930s Oxford. The main impetus behind men’s choice of clothes seems to have been membership of a male group, however at times ill-defined: to some extent at least, consumption was embraced as a way of reinforcing collective masculine identities. Whether this means, though, that such identities had by the 1930s become “commercialized” is doubtful. Certainly, neither undergraduates nor car workers can easily be pigeon-holed as manipulated by retailers and advertisers: they seem rather to have co-existed in
an uneasy relationship of mutual dependence and distrust. The notion of the “modern” played an important, if ambiguous, role in male consumer discourses of this period. Critics of Oxford’s development as an industrial center may have lamented the arrival of car workers as the shock troops of modernity. And yet it was the undergraduates, with
their flannel trousers and plus-fours, who were by far the most highly visible symbols of the modern Oxford of the 1930s. The “timeless”— and still very influential—image of Oxford, of “stone wall retreats where flanneled youths play croquet amidst the oak and the elm” (Dougill 1998: 235) has in fact its origins in representations of the “modern,” fashionable Oxford man of the inter-war years.
Notes
1. The population of Oxford had grown from 62,000 in 1911 to 97,000
in 1939. In 1911, about 27 per cent of adults had been engaged in
some form of domestic service. Although unemployment reached
3,614 in September 1932, Oxford escaped the worst of the Depression.
2. “Smoothing the way . . .,” Walters brochure, n.d., Oxford Trade 6,
John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
3. “The Plough Inn,” Austin Reed brochure, 1935, Oxford Trade 6, John
Johnson Collection.
4. These incidents seem to have been more common in the 1920s than
the 1930s, possibly as a reflection of the greater general conformity
in dress (and possibly behavior) apparent in the later period.
5. “Record sale,” Montague Burton brochure, n.d., Oxford Trade 6, John
Johnson Collection.
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Clothes and the Modern Man in 1930s Oxford
Author: Ugolini, Laura
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 4, November 2000 , pp. 427-446
In 1934 an advertisement in The Oxford Times announced that “rational tailoring” had arrived in town: The Fifty Shilling Tailors had just opened a new shop. This event was presented as more than the prosaic opening of a new branch of a well-known menswear chain store. It was “another step in the spread of a New Idea in men’s tailoring.” All men who cared both for their clothes and for “their pockets” were invited to call. They would find clothes that were not only in the very latest styles, but also
both cheap and of good quality. Cheapness was indeed one of The Fifty Shilling Tailors’ main selling points (The Oxford Times 25 May 1934; 27 September 1935; 1 November 1935). As with other chain stores, they were careful to emphasize that all men could afford to shop with them, although the low prices were not, it was generally stressed, inconsistent with the provision of good-quality clothing. Montague Burton believed that his own chain of stores had played a vital part in making elegant clothes available to larger sections of the male population than ever before: “We are justly proud in having made a considerable contribution towards making Britain the best dressed country in the world, so far as men are concerned” (Sigsworth 1990: 89).
The claims of chain stores were to some extent confirmed by contemporary observers, who suggested that, by the inter-war period, changes in the production and distribution of clothes had ensured that working-class and lower-middle-class men and women could afford to dress in very similar ways to the better off among the middle class. George Orwell considered that the “manufacture of cheap clothes,” as well as “the
general softening of manners” had served to tone down “the surface differences between class and class” (Orwell 1965 [1937]: 133). This was the case in both men’s and women’s clothes. According to one Sheffield engineering worker, thanks to the new chain stores, “whereas previously the rich man had a tailor and the poor man bought his clothes off the peg, it became possible for Jack to be as well dressed as his Master, or very nearly” (Benson 1994: 217).
This supposedly new uniformity in dress was viewed with some ambivalence by most (non-working-class) commentators. The new “democracy” of cheap and easily accessible consumer goods made available by stores such as Woolworth’s was one of the themes explored by J. B. Priestley in his influential English Journey, first published in 1934. For the first time, “Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress.” According to Priestley, though, the new consumer goods were simply too cheap: “too much of it is simply a trumpery imitation of something not very good even in the original. There is about it a rather depressing monotony” (Priestley 1997 [1934]: 325–6). In a more positive vein, Lord Elton observed in his autobiography that it was the clothing of “the underpaid, hat-touching wage-earners” of his boyhood that had
been drab and uniform. He commended the transformation of the workers of the past, “with their class-uniforms of coarse, ill-fitting Sunday black, into the independent young artisan in week-end plus-fours” (Elton 1938: 253).
Despite these claims, the notion of a new inter-class homogeneity in interwar clothing should be treated with a degree of caution, as the experiences of a certain David Henry Campbell can help to show. On the night between 25 and the 26 of February 1932, the 21-year-old Campbell broke into the tailoring shop of Castell & Son, in one of Oxford’s premier shopping streets, and stole clothing to the value of £1.10s. The stolen items included a jacket, trousers and a bathing suit. There is little doubt that Campbell’s subsequent discovery and arrest were aided by the unemployed bricklayer’s decision to wear the stolen clothes while residing at Stratton St Mary Public Institution (The Oxford Times 15 April 1933). By wearing garments intended for University undergraduates, rather than those suitable for a young man living on the margins of society, Campbell had made himself conspicuous, and had attracted the unwelcome attention of the law. His example may very well be an extreme one; and yet it seems a healthy reminder that despite the spread in the inter-war years of cheap, mass-produced ready-to-wear clothing of reasonably good quality, dress remained an important indicator of status and identity. Boundaries of “correct” dress had not entirely broken down.
What remains unclear, though, is the exact nature and extent of these boundaries. The emphasis in recent fashion histories has been on the relative “relaxation” of men’s clothing after the First World War, with the abandonment of the stiff formality of the frock coat and of starched collars, in favor of the adoption—at least outside “business hours”—of lighter materials and the more relaxed style of lounge suits, pullovers and
soft collars (Byrde 1979: 92; Chenoune 1993: 163–4; de Marly 1985:125–8). Such an approach, though, while indicative of changing notions of “correct” attire, does not shed light on the relationship between masculine identities and the purchase and consumption of clothes outside a narrow elite, and in the context of the mass production and distribution of menswear. Furthermore, while Christopher Breward and Frank Mort have explored the meanings of fashionable, consuming masculinities in the pre-First World War and post-Second World War periods, the interwar years have received little attention (Breward 1999; Mort 1996).
This article, therefore, aims to shed some light on this period, and to explore the meanings attached to men’s clothes in 1930s Oxford. Using the example of Oxford students and car workers, it will consider the role played by clothing in establishing and reinforcing male group identities. It will question whether, and on what terms, by the 1930s such identities could be defined as “commercialized,” and will suggest that consumers were not simply manipulated by retailers and other commercial forces. Using material ranging from local newspapers and periodicals to memoirs, from fictional accounts to “ephemeral” advertising material, this article seeks to provide a snapshot of male clothing styles and patterns of consumption, which takes into account the distinctions between representations (in retailers’ adverts, newspaper reports, fictional accounts, and so on) and self-representations (through undergraduate publications, autobiographical accounts, and so on), devoting particular attention to the ways in which all discourses—whether originating from retailers, from supposedly disinterested observers, or from the car workers and students themselves—made inventive use of notions of “modern” and “traditional.” Indeed, as a meeting-place between the scholars and citizens of an ancient University town, and the workers in a “modern” car industry,
1930s Oxford provides a powerful picture of the interplay between status and consumption, tradition and modernization that challenges easy generalizations about the relationship between clothing and masculine identities.
It has become almost a cliché to comment that in the period following the First World War, Oxford rapidly became a city of startling contrasts. Alongside its roles as the home of an ancient and venerable University and as a thriving market town, it had also by the 1920s acquired the role of an industrial center, with the establishment in Cowley, on the eastern side of Oxford, of Morris Motors and later of Pressed Steel. By 1939, although 19.2 per cent of adults were still employed in domestic service, mostly in connection with the University, roughly 30 per cent were now being employed by the motor industry. Less than 1 per cent had been so employed before the First World War (Whiting 1983: 8–10).1
Unsurprisingly, the creation of a new identity for Oxford as an industrial town was neither uncontroversial nor uncontested. The changes—both
real and perceived—brought by the growth of the motor industry were widely understood in terms of the arrival of the “modern” world to the city. The timelessness of the Oxford of the early 1920s, described by the novelist Evelyn Waugh as a city in whose “spacious and quiet streets men walked and spoke as they had done in Newman’s day,” had by the 1930s in the eyes of many been “submerged . . . and obliterated” (Waugh 1980 [1945]: 23). The modernization of Oxford has most often been characterized, both by contemporary and by more recent commentators, as an attack on the very material fabric of the city, which by the 1930s was being ruined in order to cater for a new brand of consumer. Industrialization and changing patterns of consumption and modernization were understood as advancing hand in hand. In particular, the disappearance of the small independent shopkeeper, replaced by multiple stores, was seen as the direct result of the incursion into the city of industrial workers. In her history of Oxford, Ruth Fasnacht lamented what she saw as the
dominant trend of the inter-war period: the demolition or “modernization” of buildings, in order to “make way for something considered more likely to appeal to the majority of the new working-class citizens.” In Cornmarket, one of the city center’s main shopping streets, individual shops had been crowded out by branches of multiple stores, “with shop fronts (and with stocks) exactly similar to those found in five hundred other towns” (Fasnacht 1954: 213; Morris 1987 [1965]: 33; Sinclair 1931: 42).
The arrival of a modern world of consumption was heralded not only by chain stores, car parks or the “garishness . . . of big London-controlled enterprises,” but was also symbolized by the presence on the main shopping thoroughfares of the car workers themselves, carrying on their persons the fruits of their reprehensible purchasing habits. “The palefaced mechanics in Oxford bags and tweed coats [who] walk down
the Cornmarket” were complicit, according to John Betjeman, in the destruction of Oxford (Betjeman 1990 [1938]: 9). And yet, a further exploration of the meanings attached to men’s clothing in 1930s Oxford shows a more complex picture than a simple assault upon “tradition” by mechanics dressed in modern mass-produced finery, as local retailers adopted the language of “modernization” in order to capture the custom of University students, rather than that of car workers.
It seems clear that to some extent at least, despite claims of homogeneity, the cost, value and quality of clothes remained visible and important indicators of social status. As Ernest Baker remarked, having visited Oxford after an absence of twenty-five years, “caste and humbug” continued to be rampant, and the only way to ensure civil behavior on the part of residents was by wearing a 50s plus-four suit (The Oxford Times 20 May 1932). J. G. Sinclair expressed himself with even greater asperity, claiming that “Class distinctions in Oxford are as numerous as the legs on a centipede. And as active. A mere shade in the color of your spats sets up a subtle social standard” (Sinclair 1931: 31).
Nevertheless, the role of clothing does not seem for the most part to have been that of exhibiting one’s own, or assessing others’ social status and wealth. It also does not seem to have been that of decoding others’ private character and moral standing. Indeed, the role of clothing in marking out the individual man from the anonymous urban crowd, either on economic or on moral grounds, seems on the whole to have been hardly in evidence (Gunn 1999: 17–18; Sennett 1974: 20–2; Veblen 1994 [1899]: 103–15). Elizabeth Wilson has suggested that in nineteenthcentury Britain, fashion served as a form of classification: “Individuals participated in a process of self-docketing and self-announcement, as dress became the vehicle for the display of the unique individual personality” (Wilson 1985: 155). There are indications that by the inter-war period
the role of clothing had shifted, and had become the means of marking the individual’s entry into a more or less well-defined male group. To return briefly to Campbell’s experiences as a thief, it is unlikely that the stolen clothes gave him away because they were very expensive (they were not), but rather because they did not “fit” with his role as an unemployed down-and-out. As George Orwell remarked of his experiences as a tramp, one only needed to wear the “right clothes” to become one of the “fraternity,” other factors, such as accent, being of far less importance. While begging at back doors, his educated voice never gave him away: “I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw” (Orwell 1965 [1937]: 155). In the same way, by wearing clothing inappropriate to the group he belonged to, Campbell ultimately gave himself away. Campbell’s vicissitudes were of course not typical of the experiences of most Oxford
men. Nevertheless, they do suggest that notions of group, rather than individual, identity might be a useful way of approaching the question of clothing and masculine status.
Historians have most readily identified the importance of clothing as expressing a sense of belonging to a male “group” in the context of studies of youth and of work-based cultures. Examples have ranged from the notorious Napoo gang in pre-First World War Manchester, with its distinctive uniform of navy blue suit, trilby hat and pink neckerchief,
borrowed from American gangster films (Fowler 1992: 144), to the emblematic figure of the nineteenth-century dustman, with his fantail hat, light jacket, breeches, and colorful stockings (Maidment 1998). Despite these studies, the dynamics of the connection between membership of a male group and the purchase, consumption and display of clothing need further exploration, particularly in terms of the “commercialization,” that
this connection is considered to have entailed in the inter-war period (Davies 1992: 97; Fowler 1992). This article focuses on two such male “consumer groups” in Oxford: University undergraduates and car workers. In their case, the development of distinctive clothing styles served to reinforce bonds created by belonging to the same larger body, be it the University (with its associations of tradition and venerability) or the car factory (with its connotations of brashness and modernity), in the context of contemporary debates about the development of inter-war Oxford as a “modern” city.
Undergraduates and ex-undergraduates recognized the importance of appropriate clothing in marking the assumption of the role of students. Donald Willis was a working-class Oxford youth who successfully competed for a University scholarship. He marked the transition from Cowley to University by opening an account with Walters, a tailoring and outfitting business that specialized in University custom, where he was fitted for his first evening dress and dinner jacket, and acquired a suit of plusfours (Willis 1987: 71). With characteristic acidity, J. G. Sinclair emphasized that essential for social success in Oxford, alongside things like “a repertoire of pornographic stories . . . and an exhaustless capacity for suppurating self-conceit” was the possession of at least one pair of plus-fours. He considered that there was a good deal of pressure upon undergraduates to adopt a uniform style of clothing, so that even the Rusk in College student soon discarded “his colliery trousers, or, as the case may be, his porter’s cap” and dashed out to buy a pair of flannel trousers (Sinclair 1931: 10, 98).
Trousers (either plus-fours or wide-bottomed flannels), pullovers, college scarves, soft collars and shapeless jackets were the essentials of normal male undergraduate day wear: they were of equal, if not greater, importance in defining “the undergraduate” than the cap and gown. The Reverend Morse-Boycott, for example, was struck on a visit to Oxford, not only by the undergraduates’ “tattered gowns,” but also by their plus fours and “fancy” pullovers, a combination which apparently made them look like “scarecrows” (The Oxford Times 23 June 1933). Significantly, the choice and acquisition of clothes seems for the most part to have taken place outside parental control. Angus Wilson, who graduated from Merton College in 1935, stated of his choice of clothes that “for the first time I could buy the clothes I wanted and I knew that I wanted these” (Thwaite 1986 [1976]: 95).
Students’ clothing was nevertheless not uniform. With an estimated half of the undergraduates in receipt of some form of financial assistance or scholarship, financial matters alone must have constrained the choice of a considerable number. At the other end of the financial scale “the rich men” seem to have been easily recognizable, not only by their fast and fashionable lifestyle, but also by the fact that “They wear checks. They wear whole suits, well cut . . . They are more often seen in a hat than in cap and gown.” Apart from the fact that they must have represented only a tiny minority, it is significant that they were considered to belong more to London, to races and to country houses than to undergraduate Oxford (Betjeman 1990 [1938]: 37). Among the majority of students, individuality seems to have been asserted through the adoption of particular
details, rather than a wholesale rejection of the undergraduate outfit. According to John Betjeman, the “aesthetes” of the 1920s, such as Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, or Betjeman himself, who had clearly stood out with their “long hair and odd clothes,” had by the 1930s disappeared. The aesthete of this decade was “a little scrubby-looking nowadays; his tie alone flames out” (Betjeman 1990 [1938]: 38). Angus Wilson wore the “regulation undergraduate gray flannels, sports coats and umbrellas,” but added “canary-colored woolen waistcoats with brass buttons . . . foulard spotted scarves, and a pleasing selection of bottle green maroon and dark crimson velvet ties.” The ensemble was not meant as the expression of a unique personality, but “deceptively might have suggested to a stranger that I belonged to a smart Oxford set” (Thwaite 1986 [1976]: 95).
Distinctive clothing was indeed most often associated not with the rejection of the undergraduate identity, but rather with an allegiance to a particular group within it. Items ranged from the ties of particular clubs to sportsmen’s outfits. The latter were ridiculed by P.A.S., a contributor to one of the student magazines, who deprecated the way in which sporting undergraduates would in the afternoon change from Harris tweeds,
whose “serviceable nature” no one would dispute, to shorts, “. . . sweaters . . . studded boots . . . multicolored scarves—[which] are vulgar and unnecessary” (The Isis 10 May 1933).
Political opinion contributed a further clothing code. Oswald Mosley’s black-shirted Fascists were the most obvious example; but it seems clear that all shades of political opinion were attributed a distinctive apparel, even if the reality may have been rather less dramatic. In his advice to first-year students, Michael Sheldon suggested that “If you are a Right politician, a sober suit is suggested, with possibly, a stiff white collar. A red tie is essential for success as a Lansbury . . . and . . . rougher tweeds than usual, and your flannels just cannot be clean” (The Isis 13 October 1937). By 1933, concern was being expressed at the apparently growing tendency among undergraduates to wear political “uniforms” (Oxford Mail 19 May 1933).
The wearing of politically-motivated clothing was perceived as an exclusively University phenomenon, although in fact this represented one of the exceptional occasions when Town and Gown can be seen to have shared a common clothing code. On May Day 1933, for example, a meeting of “Oxford reds” was held in the Oxford Town Hall, with the aim of forming a uniformed body to defend their meetings against Fascist attacks. Among those present were representatives of both City and University organizations: the Oxford Trades and Labor Council, the Oxford City Labor Party and the University Labor Club among others. It was decided that the wearing of some form of uniform had become a necessity. Although the color was never in doubt, there was disagreement as to the nature of the uniform, with some arguing for a red leather jerkin or pullover, while others considered a (red) badge on the arm sufficient. The need for uniforms was expressed in purely practical terms: “In the case of a rough and tumble, you want to know you are not bashing the chap on your side” (Oxford Mail 2 May 1933). In the sense of establishing a group identity, the motives for wearing a political uniform do not seem to differ from those lying behind the wearing of the distinctive clothing
of the sportsman or the aesthete, or indeed more generally of the undergraduate: identities that were established through acts of consumption.
The dynamics that lead a group, in this case University undergraduates, to adopt a collective identity based on a more or less distinctive clothing style are difficult to disentangle. While in cases such as that of the Napoo gang, the influence of contemporary cinema is easy to detect, in the case of students the relationship with commercial forces is a more complex one. Indeed, films such as A Yank at Oxford (1938) seem to have exploited—and possibly reinforced—existing images of undergraduate life and style (Richards 1989 [1984]: 316); it was retailers who had a
more direct impact on students’ fashionable consumption.
Despite the strong connection made by commentators between developments in retailing and the arrival of car workers, there is little doubt that outside East Oxford, traders’ (including menswear retailers’) main strategy continued to be to attract University—and in particular undergraduate—custom. Morris Motors could claim that much of the £ 20,000 paid every week in wages to its workers was spent in Oxford shops (The Oxford Times 2 October 1931), but there seems to have been a general agreement that the greatest asset to Oxford trade remained its relationship with the
University, and particularly with undergraduates (The Oxford Times 4 December 1931).
Oxford menswear retailers may have expressed little interest in attracting the custom of industrial workers, but this does not mean that they deprecated the development of a modern commercial identity for Oxford. By the 1930s, it was common among those writing and commenting on the retailing industry to associate—perhaps unthinkingly—independent shopkeepers with notions of the “traditional” and the “old-fashioned,”
and chain stores with the “modern” (Levy 1948: 89–90). Independent Oxford traders, though, elaborated a distinctive advertising rhetoric, which blended notions of “modernity” and “tradition,” and countered the critics of Oxford’s “modernization” by projecting an image of themselves as up-to-date enterprises, but respectful of the ancient fabric of the city.
Cowley’s shopping area’s claim to be the “Most progressive quarter of Oxford” was therefore contested by city center traders (Oxford Mail 5 May 1933). The shops in the High Street, one of Oxford’s premier shopping areas, were described as “modern emporiums, yet preserving the antiquity of their facades” (Oxford Monthly August 1935). The exclusive department store Elliston & Cavell, which in 1933 had established a separate “Shop for men,” also claimed to be “. . . an example of modern enterprise allied to restraint in deference to its surroundings” (The Oxford Times 20 October 1933). In terms of merchandise, traders were keen to emphasize the way they were able to reconcile “the well-known Oxford quality” (The Oxford Times 20 October 1933) with a responsiveness to “modern” trends. Walters, a tailoring and outfitting firm based
in a lane off the High Street, was typical of a wider trend in rejecting an exclusive concentration on the bespoke trade. “In keeping with the spirit of the age” they acquired “a huge stock of styles, patterns and sizes” of ready-to-wear clothes.2
Significantly, the new chain stores similarly bleded their claims to modernity with an emphasis on their respect for tradition. The Fifty Shilling Tailors were an exception in their relentless claims to modernity, and in their claims to be “new” and “up-to-date.” Indeed, those men who resisted its blandishments were dismissed as prejudiced and as “afraid to try a new idea” (The Oxford Times 22 November 1935). Austin Reed, on the other hand, was more representative of other chain stores. In 1935 the firm bought and renovated the Plough Inn, a building originally dating from the late seventeenth century, and re-opened it as a shop. While stressing the novelty and up-to-date nature of the merchandise for sale, the firm’s respect for the fabric of the building was also emphasized: the architects had been given “a free hand to treat the interior of the premises in a style as much in harmony with the original seventeenth century work
as possible.”3
Retailers may have staked their distinctive place in the “modern” Oxford, but it is clear that—as was mentioned above—this was an Oxford still dominated by the rhythm of University life. By the 1930s in Britain as a whole a shopping calendar whereby changes of season were marked by periodic sales and “events” was well established. While this was also the case in Oxford, here menswear and other retailers at the same time
developed a shopping calendar closely connected to the academic year. This was true even of shops unlikely to be patronized by members of the University. In May 1930, for example, the Co-op announced the arrival of “Eights Week” and issued the call: “Everyone in flannels!” (The Oxford Times 23 May 1930). More specifically, menswear retailers also developed an iconography that made it clear that undergraduates were the customers they aimed to attract.
Figure 1 shows one of Walters’ advertisements. Here it is not so much the gown, crumpled under an arm, but rather the plus-fours, the pullover and the negligently unbuttoned jacket that make it clear that the image on the left is meant to represent a student before his transformation into an elegant businessman (The Isis 6 June 1934). With some minor variations, this image remained emblematic of the 1930s undergraduate, whose style and clothing, to which students were expected to adhere, were instantly recognizable.
Figure 1
Walters advert. The Isis 6 June
1934. Reproduced by permission of the British Library, shelfm. 327, (Copyright The Isis).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
It remains open to question whether styles of undergraduate clothing were informed and influenced by retailers’ adverts. Historians—among others—continue to debate the impact of advertising, and of commercial forces in general on consumers’ decision-making (Breazeale 1994; Greenfield, O’Connell and Read 1999; Marchand 1985: 238–54; Mort and Thompson 1994). For periods before the advent of consumer surveys (which have themselves been shown to be blunt instruments), it is practically Impossible to determine the relative impact on consumer choice and on personal taste of commercial” forces, such as advertising or cinema, and economic factors, such as the accessibility and price of goods. In his study of pre-Second World War working-class culture in Manchester and Salford, Andrew Davies has suggested that “corner lads” was the most common description of young men, “reflecting the centrality of street activities in youth culture as late as the 1930s.” It also suggests a pattern of group identity defined by activities other than the purchase and consumption of goods. In the case of Oxford undergraduates, on the other hand, consumption patterns—and in particular, the purchase and use of certain clothes—were of overwhelming importance in creating and
sustaining a separate identity (Davies 1992: 97).
In this sense, undergraduates’ identity was a “commercial” one. This does not mean that they were in any simple sense “manipulated” by retailers. Rather, their relationship seems to have been an uneasy one of mutual dependence, a relationship in which power cannot be stated to be overwhelmingly on either side. By the 1930s, Oxford tradesmen had a well-established and notorious reputation for being far too ready to
grant long-term credit to undergraduates only recently emancipated from parental control, encouraging them to contract debts from which they could extricate themselves only with the greatest difficulties (Yee 1944: 5). In 1930, the undergraduate journal The Isis had been forced, under pressure from the Oxford Chamber of Trade, to apologize for having accused Oxford traders of “cupidity” and “exorbitant prices” (The Oxford Times 14 March 1930). In contrast to this image of traders preying upon students, Roger Dataller deprecated “the insidious influence” on townspeople of their dependence on the University for custom. This, he considered, inevitably sapped “the dignity of spirit of a full-grown man.” Nevertheless, he himself as a student had been manipulated by a
shrewd shopkeeper into paying more than he meant to—in cash—for a lounge coat (Dataller 1933: 95–6; 149).
Boundaries of correct dress were furthermore policed not only by retailers and advertisers. Paul Nystrom has indicated the strength of the forces that compelled men to conform to particular styles of clothing. For those who refused to conform, “There will be quizzical looks, doubtful stares and critical estimates. He will be thought queer. He will be judged as lacking in brain power and, perhaps, as an undesirable person”
(Nystrom 1928: 9–10). Although in Nystrom’s analysis such opprobrium was seen to originate from a generalized “society,” in fact the most powerful indictments of non-conformity could come from the group to which the individual was perceived as belonging. Pressures to conform to certain canons could therefore be found within the undergraduate community itself. The flouting of such canons could lead to punishment,
including, in some cases, through physical violence: the “debagging” of aesthetes, or the wrecking of their rooms on the part of athletic “hearties” being an obvious example (Graves and Hodge 1995 [1940]: 124).4
Students themselves could present the connection between their identity and particular styles of clothing as a denial of any link with modern commercialism. Their clothing could serve to align them rather with a sense of tradition and of Oxford’s past. D. F. Karaka portrayed undergraduates’ clothing almost as part of the ancient fabric of the city: “. . . with its Gothic structures and dreamy spires, and that drab gray splashed all over—from buildings to bags—Oxford is still as venerable as the Oxford which Arnold knew” (Karaka 1933: 44). In a more open embracing of “tradition” over the “modern,” in May 1931 the editors of The Isis and The Cherwell, the two main undergraduate magazines, united in announcing their intention of wearing the old-fashioned straw
boater while punting on the river as “. . . a symbol of a glorious past.” The boater represented more than a connection with tradition. It also represented a way of differentiating the consumption patterns of students from those of the “plebeian masses.” “The triumph of the felt hat over the boater” on the river was seen as embodying “. . . the indecorous shrieks of the plebeian masses, whose hired punts plough a laborious way through a Sargasso sea of banana skins . . . [and have] forever banished from the river the white silk shirts and immaculate flannel trousers of the aristocracy” (The Cherwell 9 May 1931; The Isis 6 May 1931).
The “plebeian masses” never acquired the same iconic status as undergraduates in their role as consumers of clothing. There is no doubt that the car workers were by the 1930s a visible, and apparently permanent presence on the streets of Oxford, well beyond the confines of the industrial eastern areas. In terms of representations, though, beyond the role as harbingers of “modernity” accorded to them by critics of the city’s
industrialization, Cowley workers remained far less visible than University undergraduates. In particular, car workers’ representation and role as
purchasers and consumers of clothes continued to be a marginal one.
To some extent, this “invisibility” reflects the way in which Cowley as a whole remained marginal to representations of Oxford. Alison Light has noted “the adoration which was afforded to all things Oxford between the wars,” an adoration reflected for example in the frequency with which the city was used as a setting for the increasingly popular detective fiction of the 1930s (Light 1991: 77–8). Nevertheless, despite the occasional disturbing hints of the presence of “another,” less picturesque Oxford— the Coles had their detective, newly arrived from London, remark that the area near the station looked “like a back street of Birmingham”— the “whodunits” of the 1930s focused overwhelmingly on the circumscribed world of the Colleges (Cole and Cole 1938: 87). In a similar way, Cowley is largely absent from most inter-war fiction set in Oxford (Dougill
1998: 168–73). Cowley workers—and the Oxford working-class as a whole—did
not have the same opportunities as those afforded to the University undergraduates for self-representation. Students had avenues such as the undergraduate magazines (although admittedly these did not always necessarily reflect the views of the majority of the student population) to create their own image and identity, as well as to respond to attacks from outside. The satirical response in The Isis to Richard Rumbold’s lampooning of Oxford’s “effeminacy and its young perverts” in the Sunday Referee is a case in point (Figure 2. The Isis, 26 April 1933). In the case of Cowley workers, representations—as harbingers of modern consumerism and chain stores—dominated over self-representations.
Figure 2
“Counterblast.” The Isis 26
April 1933. Reproduced by
permission of the British
Library, shelfm. 77 (Copyright
The Isis).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON
HARDCOPY
In 1965 college servants told Jan Morris that before the Second World War, the town boys had tried to look like undergraduates (Morris 1987 [1965]: 90). Nevertheless, there are some indications that, at least as far as the car workers were concerned, styles of clothing were developed with little reference to the University. Looking back on her East Oxford youth, Phyl Surman described how car workers would generally wear standard
dark suits of trousers, jacket and waistcoat, which could be varied by wearing a pullover instead of a waistcoat, or a silk scarf instead of a collar. Caps would be worn for work, but trilby hats and raglan raincoats on a Sunday (Surman 1992: 68). Clothing also served to mark distinctions and differences in status between the various Cowley workers. Because of the cleaner nature of their work, for example, Morris Motors employees could wear a “respectable” jacket and tie at work, while Pressed Steel
men were easily recognizable by their greasy overalls (Whiting 1983: 57). Cleaner work and respectable clothing became enmeshed in creating an image of Morris Motors workers as “superior.” Cowley’s dynamism and changing nature as a community were further reflected in the adoption of “new fashions” by the local young men. These fashions were not copied from cinema stars, often seen as the main focus of working-class emulation, but rather from Welsh immigrants, newly arrived from depressed
mining districts. The new fashion could be seen on Sundays, in the shape of “a smart suit, the most notable feature of which was the doublebreasted waistcoat cut straight across the lower front.” Significantly, “This style was copied and much favored by the young men but was not approved by their more provincial parents” (Surman 1992: 68).
Despite the relatively high wages that car workers could earn—although irregular, earnings averaged out between 70s. and 80s. per week (Whiting 1983: 40)—in terms of the consumption of fashionable clothing, there is little indication that Oxford retailers outside Cowley made any serious effort to attract their custom. It was left to shops such as the Cowley Road drapery and shoe store Buteers to cater for them, and offer items such as men’s khaki shirts as “very suitable for engineers and mechanics,” or
woolen gloves as “very welcome to cyclists and lorry drivers in wet and cold weather” (The Oxford Times 25 September 1931).
Images of working men, or rather of men in working clothes, were extremely rare in adverts in general. Unsurprisingly, the exception was provided once more by Butler’s Stores, which advertised its Lybro overalls
without attempting to disguise their use in connection with manual work (Figure 3. The Oxford Times 28 February 1930). More in general, aside from the image of the undergraduate, much of Oxford retailers’ advertising material, while benefiting from improved printing techniques, did not substantially differ from pre-war conventions. The imagery used did not seek to portray realistic figures, but rather ideal “types.” The
prospective buyer was presented with images of desirable, leisured, or even luxurious masculine lifestyles, or, more rarely, of obstacles overcome and success achieved, all through the wearing of a particular set of often inexpensive clothes. The power of these images lies in their inclusiveness. All Oxford men, except the very poorest—and car workers were not among these—could aspire to the images of manly elegance provided by shops such as the Fifty Shilling Tailors (Figure 4. The Oxford Times 28 September 1934).
Figure 3
Butler’s advert. The Oxford
Times 28 February 1930.
Reproduced by permission of
the British Library, shelfm. 509
(Courtesy of Newsquest
Oxfordshire Ltd).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
Paradoxically, given the association made by many commentators between car workers and chain stores, the latter’s appeal to a working class clientele was far from explicit, although inexpensiveness was often emphasized: a Burton sale brochure, for example, announced that “really good clothes” had been reduced in price “and brought within the reach of every man’s purse.”5 Also, although there is no definite evidence concerning the social status of Burton’s customers (or, indeed, of other chain stores), Frank Mort has suggested that the evidence “points to men in subaltern social groups” (Mort 1996: 137). In 1930s Oxford, though, car workers were not necessarily the social group most strongly influenced by economic considerations in their choice of clothes. It is interesting to find undergraduates in 1935 furtively buying their flannel trousers from Marks & Spencer. According to one observer, “They were all skirmishing to get to the cheap trousers. As soon as one had made his hasty purchase, another would dive out from behind the fancy goods and take his place” (The Isis 5 June 1935). By the 1930s, it was widely acknowledged that undergraduates’ spending power was much reduced in comparison with earlier generations of students (The Oxford Times 4 December 1931).
For many, then, making their purchases from cheap chain stores may have been a necessity. That such purchases were made furtively, though, seems to confirm the stores’ relatively low social status.
Figure 4
Fifty Shilling Tailors advert. The
Oxford Times 28 September
1934. Reproduced by
permission of the British
Library, shelfm. 1304 (Courtesy
of Newsquest Oxfordshire Ltd).
IMAGE AVAILABLE ON HARDCOPY
The merchandise sold by stores such as Burton was not always necessarily acceptable for students. This is clearly reflected in the difficulties experienced by Ralph Glasser, an ex-presser in a Glasgow garment factory, who had won a scholarship to Oxford just before the outbreak of the Second World War. While sitting with other students in a study group, he observed that the others were mostly wearing “loose tweed jackets
and flannel trousers . . . in varying shades of gray or dark blue, with cotton shirts and college ties; a few wore silk shirts in pastel shades and loosely knotted ties of Shantung silk in glowing colors.” Glasser himself “felt staidly overdressed in my gray worsted suit, my only one, bought in Burtons for fifty shillings . . . before leaving Glasgow.” Significantly, he planned to acquire “the uniform of tweed jacket and bags” as soon as he “dared spend more money” (Glasser 1988: 18).
While Glasser’s own sartorial mistakes were made when attempting to enter a socially more privileged milieu, his scathing comments concerning the socialist and academic Richard Crossman indicate that such mistakes were not exclusive to social “climbers.” Glasser compared the elegant gray suit and matching silk tie worn by Crossman for a seminar, with the “shabby flannels . . . tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, gray or dun shirt and red tie” that he had worn at Socialist meetings, and “which he must have thought gave him a proletarian appearance” (Glasser 1988: 18–19). In Glasser’s opinion Crossman’s style of dressing reflected his essential elitism and distance from the working class. It could, though, also reflect the impossibility of defining—and adopting—an accurate and distinctively “working-class” clothing style. It was certainly the case that Cowley car workers never acquired such easily recognizable symbols as undergraduates’ flannel trousers or plusfours.
It was mostly when rules were transgressed that it became clear that boundaries of “correct” dress did in fact exist. Among the workers at Morris Radiators, “dandies” stood out by wearing inappropriately genteel clothing to work, and subverting the distinction between everyday and Sunday clothes. One such “dandy” was a certain Raoul de Oscar-Thorpe, who according to a fellow worker, would always be seen with a walking
stick, yellow gloves and a trilby hat; most importantly, he “came to work in them and all.” Although he was a very good workman and obviously likeable, his style of clothing led to thinly disguised reservations in others’ estimation: “He thought he was a gentleman . . . he was a proper showoff . . . Oh yes, a right dandy. I liked him though” (Exell 1978: 72).
Surveying the inter-war period, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge considered that while in the 1920s Oxford and Cambridge had been “two main hubs of advanced recreational fashion,” by the 1930s they were reduced to the status of “merely suburbs of London” (Graves and Hodge 1995 [1940]: 122). Notions of suburbanization and of homogeneity, though, are not particularly helpful in examining men’s apparel in 1930s Oxford. The main impetus behind men’s choice of clothes seems to have been membership of a male group, however at times ill-defined: to some extent at least, consumption was embraced as a way of reinforcing collective masculine identities. Whether this means, though, that such identities had by the 1930s become “commercialized” is doubtful. Certainly, neither undergraduates nor car workers can easily be pigeon-holed as manipulated by retailers and advertisers: they seem rather to have co-existed in
an uneasy relationship of mutual dependence and distrust. The notion of the “modern” played an important, if ambiguous, role in male consumer discourses of this period. Critics of Oxford’s development as an industrial center may have lamented the arrival of car workers as the shock troops of modernity. And yet it was the undergraduates, with
their flannel trousers and plus-fours, who were by far the most highly visible symbols of the modern Oxford of the 1930s. The “timeless”— and still very influential—image of Oxford, of “stone wall retreats where flanneled youths play croquet amidst the oak and the elm” (Dougill 1998: 235) has in fact its origins in representations of the “modern,” fashionable Oxford man of the inter-war years.
Notes
1. The population of Oxford had grown from 62,000 in 1911 to 97,000
in 1939. In 1911, about 27 per cent of adults had been engaged in
some form of domestic service. Although unemployment reached
3,614 in September 1932, Oxford escaped the worst of the Depression.
2. “Smoothing the way . . .,” Walters brochure, n.d., Oxford Trade 6,
John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
3. “The Plough Inn,” Austin Reed brochure, 1935, Oxford Trade 6, John
Johnson Collection.
4. These incidents seem to have been more common in the 1920s than
the 1930s, possibly as a reflection of the greater general conformity
in dress (and possibly behavior) apparent in the later period.
5. “Record sale,” Montague Burton brochure, n.d., Oxford Trade 6, John
Johnson Collection.
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Whiting, R. C. 1983. The View from Cowley: The Impact of Industrialization
upon Oxford, 1918–1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Willis, D. 1987. Early Days in Oxford. Oxford: The Amate Press.
Wilson, E. 1985. Adorned in Dreams. Fashion and Modernity. London:
Virago.
Yee, C. 1944. The Silent Traveler in Oxford. London: Methuen & Co.
Last edited by pvpatty on Fri Oct 17, 2008 8:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
Thanks Pvpatty – your half an hour is highly appreciated!
Here is the Cary Grant article. Interesting, if you can read past the post-modern claptrap.
Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant’s Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”
Fashion Theory, Volume 4, Issue 4, pp.467–486
Introduction
When an English expert on the films of Alfred Hitchcock published a revised version of his study from the late 1960s, he bemoaned in his new introduction the fact that semiotic and structuralist views had pervaded film studies in an unqualified manner. In his criticism (Wood 1991: 8) he singled out the “constantly recurring, peculiarly irritating trait” of being told “[Roland] Barthes shows that . . .”.
In the course of this essay I will be repeatedly claiming ‘Roland Barthes shows that . . .’—or something to that effect. Not out of academic petulance or slavish adherence to a safe and established mode of
interpretation, but because I regard the structuralist approach as the most appropriate towards Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. For me, this film has a visual cinematic narrative that offers much more surface than depth, more disguises than realities and more commodified images than meaning. I will argue that Hitchcock’s film and the role that Cary Grant plays in it are explained best by looking at appearances—precisely because they are deceptive—and not at hermeneutical codes, cinematic quotations or selfreferential truths.1 Because the outermost surface of this film’s narrative - I am discounting cinematic techniques—is occupied by the costumes, my argument will be exemplified by one of these, namely Grant’s suit, which exerts a continuous presence throughout the duration of the film and thus stands analogous to the suit’s normative presence in men’s fashion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In attempting such a precise, some might say “restrictive,” methodological focus I am aware that the essay can be criticized for not talking sufficiently about Hitchcock and the intricacies of his film-making, and, likewise, for not probing deeply enough into the aspects of consumption in male fashion and its sociological significance. However, the original structuralist interpretation of mass media and commodities—something
in which Barthes excelled—was politicized to a great degree. Thus I feel that a Hollywood tale about a spying game at the height of the Cold War offers a convincing topic to which to apply such a concentrated critical “reading.” Furthermore, the care that Hitchcock took in deciding upon the costumes for his films—for North by Northwest he spent days with his female lead Eva Marie Saint at Bergdorf Goodman in New York to
select her outfits—renders clothing an integral part of the interpretative mise-en-scène. Therefore the reproach of not taking Hitchcock seriously by concentrating on a mere suit can be countered by arguing that the director deliberately cultivated surfaces in order to expose the perfunctoriness of his subject-matter—a fact that the elaborate übertheoretical discourses around the “meaning” of Hitchcockian cinema choose
to eschew because otherwise their work would lose the ripeness of its references.
To develop my argument, I have selected the dozen scenes in which the suit explicitly works as a signifier on screen or is topical for the dialog, thus carrying a significance that considerably exceeds its function within the storyline.
Methodology
The sartorial details observed in the following are not to be taken as metaphors for behavioral patterns, nor are they meant to be symbolic for the character’s psyche. They should be read first as visual signifiers within a semiotic analysis.
When Roland Barthes first elaborated in 1957 on such an analysis, reversing the dominance of semiotics over linguistics in favor of, perhaps surprisingly, fashion-writing, he established a tripartite analogy between fashion and language.
In his essay “Histoire et sociologie du vêtement” he paralleled the linguistic classification of language and the socially commodified significance of clothes. In linguistics the differentiation exists between langage, the language spoken within an anthropological framework; langue, spoken within a cultural grouping or society; and parole, the
individual manner of speaking everybody uses for him- or herself. This classification finds its equivalent in the differences between vêtement, clothing in general; costume, as national or cultural sign of recognition; and habillement, individual sartorial expression (Barthes 1957: 435).2 Langue is seen by Barthes (1967a: 28) as an institution, “a body abstracted by constraints,” similar to the formalist attire of the suit that constrains the corporeal. Whereas parole is the part within the institution
that is momentarily chosen by the individual and actualized for means of communication, both verbal and sartorial.
A decade later, with the publication of Système de la Mode, Barthes altered the above distinction and switched vêtement and costume. The latter was reduced to the most general of meanings, while vêtement now became an equivalent to the structuralist langue (Barthes 1967a: 28). Yet by substituting vêtement for costume, Barthes lost something important in his application of clothing to writing (in its historical and cultural
context): the literal connotation of the male suit—le costume in French. Because langue is defined as a “structural institution,” its equivalent has to be the homonym of the suit, as the one sartorial constituent in men’s fashion since the early part of the nineteenth century.3 This shift, which is critically accounted for in Barthes’s publications in the decade after his original essay,4 obfuscates this significance of the suit, which represents the norm in a patriarchal and commodified Western society. Thus it is
more fitting for the present argument to remain with the first study— quite apart from the fact that “costume” is used in English to denote the clothes of an actor, which patently is not what Grant wears in Hitchcock’s film, because he essentially plays himself and not a character.
Barthes explained in his essay of 1957 that a matter of personal dressing
(“un fait d’habillement”) constitutes first of all a deteriorated, i.e. nonnormative,
state of costume. Yet this state can be transformed into a secondary costume, when the deterioration functions as a collective sign, as a value: a minimal variation of the suit can become a matter of costume itself, the moment it is rendered a normative constituent of a certain group, a notion particularly expressive in dandyism (Barthes 1957: 437). More recent ‘post’-structuralist writing has qualified assessments such as the above as rather formulistic. Yet for me Barthes’s (and also Michel Butor’s (1974)) texts on clothing remain convincing indeed—not least because of their formation.
In the following I will argue how the suit as the sartorial surface functions as a signifier in an old-fashioned narrative that tells of the hero’s trials and tribulations, and shows him being pursued, ridiculed and assaulted until he liberates himself from normative constraints to gain first freedom of action, and then love and respect as an individual. That such “liberation” is ultimately but a perfunctory gesture that remains embedded in the normative confines of cinematic and social language has to be expected from a US production of the 1950s and does not conflict with the present reading of the film.
Scene 1
(First day, late afternoon; the Oak Room, Plaza Hotel, New York City)
The film North by Northwest was scripted by Ernest Lehman, shot by Robert Burks and directed by Alfred Hitchcock for release in July 1959. It is on the surface, which is what concerns me here, an espionage thriller in the best tradition of Hollywood’s Cold War paranoia. The comical or absurd elements and the casting of Cary Grant as a Madison Avenue executive mistaken for a government spy who is chased and attacked until he turns the tables on his foes, adds the element of light-hearted entertainment to a sometimes convoluted tale of pursuit, betrayal and double bluff.
In the opening part of the film—I will adhere to its chronology, although, for obvious reasons, not going through it scene by scene—we encounter Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) meeting with business associates in a Manhattan bar. He is dressed in a lightweight, threebuttoned gray suit, a white shirt with French cuffs, a gray silk tie, lightgray socks and dark brown shoes. His three companions are attired in dark suits: the character Mr Wade with white tie and pochette, Mr Nelson with a dark tie, and fellow advertising man Mr Weltner with a somber red tie. In this scene, where Grant is seen sitting comparatively still for the first time, the observer is offered a contrasted reading of Thornhill versus the other characters in the film, a reading that functions through the clothes and is maintained until the very last part of the story.5 This contrast, pertaining as much to the fictional persona as it does to the actor Grant, of whom Hitchcock asked nothing more than variations on his habitual superficial charm and ironic superiority, is established by clothing Thornhill in a bespoke suit by Savile Row tailors Kilgour, French & Stanbury—an establishment frequented by Grant as well.6 The supporting cast in this scene offers off-the-peg backgrounds, providing the common sartorial language (costume) of the 1950s, so paradigmatically embodied by Gregory Peck’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in the eponymous film of 1956. Grant/Thornhill sits cross-legged and mannered, displaying the (for an American audience, European) sophistication of assorted socks and brown shoes, while the other characters remain stiffly reserved behind their desk. His is therefore a parole, a subtle but clearly expressed deviation from the norm, which prompts speculations about his social and individual behavior.7 In the subsequent dialogue these speculations are fueled by Lehman and Hitchcock, in the customary ironic subversion of his heroes’ roles, by employing an oedipal spiel of Grant fussing about getting a message to his mother—a device that ridicules the polished parole/habillement of the actor almost as much as it throws his character into the subsequent turbulence of the narrative.
Scene 2
(First day, early evening; library of country mansion)
Thornhill, fatefully having been mistaken for the government spy George Kaplan, is taken to villain Philip Vandamm (played by James Mason) who, in the apparent guise of Lester Townsend, eyes up his opponent for a first sparring.
Vandamm: “Not what I expected; a little taller, a little more polished than the others.”
Thornhill [with heavy irony]: “Oh, I’m so glad you are pleased, Mr Townsend!”
Here, the sartorial surface of the suit begins to assert its dominance over all other epistemological strands in the narrative. Both men mistake each other for somebody else, yet both make no apparent effort to look through the respective guise. On the contrary, they seem to take positive delight in assessing the other’s outer appearance.
Vandamm is attired in a three-piece, neo-Edwardian dark suit, and is wearing a slate-gray tie. He is to be read as somebody who is well-tailored, yet exceedingly so: his sartorial signifier is too respectable, too elaborately stiff to be telling the truth about the man, in dialectical relation with the relaxed elegance of Thornhill’s suit, who stands like an actor—which Grant never lets us forget he is, in more than just one sense, throughout the film—in front of a (stage) curtain, awaiting applause or condemnation,
which is duly forthcoming from the villain.
Scene 2b
Vandamm’s sidekick Leonard (played by Martin Landau) enters the room in a fitted navy suit with a blue tie, taking Thornhill’s handsome surface for nothing more (but also nothing less) than it is, while protecting his own views behind an equally polished mask, whose reserve will break only in the film’s climactic last quarter.
Vandamm: “Ah, Leonard. Have you met our distinguished guest?”
Leonard: “He is a well-tailored one, isn’t he?!”
Thornhill’s misplaced internalization of oedipal laws, hinted at in the beginning, finds its projection in the physical approval of himself by a criminal, who is—by common critical consent—cast as a gay character. In his series of interviews, French director François Truffaut (1983: 107) praised Hitchcock for his decision to render Vandamm such a
debonair character of immaculate dress and manners, because it adds “the element of homosexual rivalry, with the male secretary [i.e. Leonard] clearly jealous of [the heroine Eve Kendall, played by] Eva Marie Saint.”8 Yet the matter is far from being so well-cut. Fastidiousness in dress here signifies a narcissistic core, which supports the sartorial surface of all three men. Thornhill’s elegance is first and foremost to be read as a
designed corrective to a loss of moral values: he drinks too much, depends too strongly on his mother, already has two failed marriages behind him and steals other people’s taxis. Those who merely glance at him, read Thornhill as a well turned-out surface that is hard to resist or criticize. Yet even the comparatively relaxed care about his appearance generates the perception of his being too groomed and handsome, too polished in all walks of life, and too aloof in the presence of women, especially. All
of which puts his masculinity in question. A speculation that pursued Grant as a film-star throughout his career, and one that Hitchcock evidently enjoyed playing with.
In Vandamm’s case, sartorial elegance is a guise for a more sinister subversion of core values in contemporary society. His suit, as well as the mansion to which Thornhill is taken and his assorted entourage, is a respectable front, masking espionage whose ultimate aim is to destroy the American way of life. Logically, his accent and clothes appear out of place, alien (English in this case) to the eyes and ears of the contemporary audience.
Leonard’s suit signifies concealment, too. It is a front for “immoral” desires: the tailoring accommodates the gun that is later used for intimidation and murder; the somber and anonymous cloth is used to deflect attention from any effeminate behavior (shorthand for indulgence in gay sex); and the tight stiffness of the cut emphasizes the extreme economy, or even lack, of movement that betrays the single-minded pursuit of an
unsocial ideal.
Scene 2c
In the ensuing struggle, Thornhill is forced on to the sofa and plied with Bourbon; the suit is seriously assaulted and soiled for the first time. Indeed, here one begins to read “the suit” exclusively as a signifier and the character as the signified: the hero is defined through his surface and the pursuit in the course of the film’s narrative concentrates on the garment, whose light gray wool absurdly distinguishes the fugitive in his quest.
The fact that the cloth and shape of the suit show remarkable endurance and make a complete recovery from the pursuits and assaults in the preceding scenes, must be read as Hitchcock’s effort to present the hero as an stable and identifiable commodity to the audience. Although his superficial parole might be suspicious, the actual signifiers, the suit as a sartorial constituent, the pristine white shirt and the straight tie, must remain intact. Nothing is torn, frayed or irreparably soiled. The hero always looks as if the general form of his garment, his costume/langue, that is the underlying adherence to the sartorial and social norm, cannot be penetrated; the American way of life (at least in perfunctory perception) cannot be seriously damaged or turned inside-out.
So Thornhill escapes by driving intoxicated with turned-up lapels and crumpled suit down a cliff road; he is picked up by the police and spends the rest of the night in jail. The next morning he is questioned, fined and subsequently released. Still wearing the same suit, he then attempts to peel away at least one of the surfaces in the narrative, that is, his mistaken identity as George Kaplan.
Scene 3
(Second day, around noon; room 796 at the Plaza Hotel, New York City)
Thornhill clandestinely enters Kaplan’s room accompanied by his mother Clara Thornhill (played by Jessie Royce Landis). A valet delivers a black suit from the dry cleaner, affirming that his order came from the telephone and not from the owner of the suit himself.
Thornhill: “I am beginning to think nobody in the hotel has actually seen Kaplan.”
Mother: “Maybe he has his suits mended by invisible weavers.”
This statement appears enigmatic, even for the highly irrational character that the mother embodies (with the absence of a “father,” any hope for a reality principle within this oedipal dependence seems to have been abandoned from the start). However, what Clara Thornhill actually hints at is an invisible power that mends and repairs the surface of the social fabric. In the case of the film’s narrative, as we will learn later, this power is the government agency dealing in counter-espionage, who eventually assist Thornhill to regain his position in society. The construct of “George Kaplan”—whom we now suspect, along with Thornhill, of hardly being traceable—is only signified by a dark suit whose anonymous and ordinary sartorial language prevents any identification through a possible parole.
Scene 3b
Thornhill takes the cleaned suit from the wardrobe and slips on the jacket. Awkwardly tailored, it is too wide in the shoulders and waist, whereas the sleeves are much too short for Thornhill’s arms. Uneasy about such an affront to his sartorial sensibilities, he shifts his shoulders and looks accusingly at his protruding left shirt sleeve and cuff.
Mother: “I don’t think that one does anything for you.”
Scene 3c
Thornhill takes the trousers and holds them in front of him. The waist is too wide, and the cut is conservative, with badly executed turn-ups when compared to the perfect length of his own trouser legs, which fall gracefully on to the polished surface of his shoes.
Mother [ironically]: “Ah now, that’s much better.”
Thornhill: “Obviously, they have mistaken me for a much shorter man.”
Thornhill’s/Grant’s parole is not yet easily subsumed into the clothing mainstream of langue—much as his work as an advertising executive has schooled him in the past constantly to think of new words and sentences repeatedly to re-express the selfsame commodities—to find new surfaces for old products, so to speak.
The sartorial shell of Kaplan’s suit is not distinguished enough for the hero; worse still, it is inadequately short. And one need not be aware of Hitchcock’s penchant for amateur psychoanalysis and for popularizing Freudian ideas in his films (cf. Marnie, Psycho), to read the shortness of the sleeves and trousers as what it is meant to be: the inferiority of one male member in contrast to another.
The fact that the mother ironically praises the shortness of the trousers indicates how completely oedipal control has been exerted on the hero. Normative langue is preferred over individual parole. Even if the former
is ill-fittingly short, it is sanctioned by societal and maternal judgment precisely because it is impotent, that is, less threatening or suspicious.9
Scene 4
(Second day, evening; sleeping compartment on the “Twentieth Century Ltd.” train from New York to Chicago)
Having added the accusation of being a murderer to his already convoluted assortment of characters, Thornhill is now pursued on to the fast train from New York to Chicago, where he is taken in—in the most improbable of manners—by the industrial designer Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who hides Thornhill in the upper bunk of her compartment. After the immediate danger has passed, the hero is released from his
confinement. When the bed is lowered, Thornhill removes a pair of broken sunglasses from the breast pocket of his suit, which—miraculously— appears immaculate despite the cramped conditions. The encounter with Eve might have broken one of the surfaces, the reflecting, concealing one of the sunglasses; but Thornhill’s individual sartorial surface still remains untouched.
On the contrary, in embracing Eve, still fully clothed, Thornhill is reminded of what makes him attractive: the fact that he is a well-dressed commodity whose inner feeling or epistemic situation mean less to his surroundings than the sartorial signifier that clothes him.
Scene 5
Thornhill: “What else do you know?”
Eve: “You’ve got taste in clothes, taste in food . . .”
Thornhill: “And taste in women. I like your flavor.”
In the profusion of his various roles, advertising executive, man-abouttown, doting son, alleged government spy, suspected murderer and, now, sophisticated lover, the aspiration and danger within the cultural discourse of 1950s America are projected upon the surface of Thornhill/Grant. There appears to be no conflict between the made-to-measure clothes and the identity tailored to each situation of the pursuit.10
The three linguistic shifts that Bathes observed in the transposition of sartorial commodity to language are also manifest in the Thornhill character: the “real” shifts to “image”; the “real” shifts to “language,” i.e. it is described; and, thirdly, the “image” itself shifts to “language.” And the linguistic operation that functions in fashion writing applies in equal measure to the narrative around the hero in North by Northwest, multifaceted as he is.11 Instead of Thornhill or Grant (it is difficult to distinguish an objective or disinterested “real” in the context of Hollywood) we get an immaculate attire, seemingly indestructible. This “image” is perpetually thematized in the film. It is chased, crumpled and squashed, but also constantly referred to and discussed within the “language” of
the film, both in visual and dialog form. When Thornhill leaves the train with Eve, he is (if only for a very brief period of time), yet in another guise which has been purchased from
a porter. Walking beside her, Thornhill becomes concerned about his “image” or rather the real state of his suit:
Scene 6
(Third day, nine o’clock in the morning; platform at Central Station,
Chicago)
Thornhill: “Which one of these has my suit in it?”
Eve: “The small one, underneath your right arm.”
Thornhill: “Oh thanks. That ought to do the suit a lot of good.”
Eve: “I am sure Mr Kaplan won’t mind a few wrinkles.”
The “image” shifts to “language” as the perfected surface of the clothing becomes a cause for concern. Never mind the real danger of the situation Thornhill finds himself in, pursued by spies, by detectives and policemen on the concourse, and by Eve, who, unbeknownst to him conspires with Vandamm and Leonard: his concern is the creases in his suit where there ought to be none.
But one has to sympathize with Thornhill; apart from the suit there is nothing left for him. His bourgeois identity has been stripped away during the narrative and his identification, which has been supported so powerfully by his elegance and sense of style, is now entirely dependent on the continuity of his apparel.
Eve’s response to this ontological dilemma appears casual. Why indeed should George Kaplan mind creases in the suit?! For her part she can be sure that the meeting between Kaplan and Thornhill will never take place, while the latter should deduce from Kaplan’s badly tailored suit (not to mention his dandruff) that it is not the state of his appearance that matters, but the fact that it is not detected in the first place.
Yet again, Thornhill changes back into the stylistic motif of the gray cloth, which looks as cleaned and pressed as in the first scene, the ironed white shirt and the immaculate tie. As vaguely defined as his character may remain, his pursuers should by now pay particular attention to the sartorial shell as the only means of identification; yet precisely this signifier is still worn by Thornhill for his promised meeting with Kaplan on the plains of rural Illinois.
Scene 7
(Third day, early afternoon; Prairie Stop, Highway 41, Illinois)
Thornhill stands alienated in his city suit in an empty and open landscape, waiting in the wind and dust of passing vehicles for his rendezvous with Kaplan. He goes through a well-choreographed sequence of moves, signaling his anticipation. Hands are thrust into trouser pockets only to be taken out again, cuffs are tugged, and the jacket is adjusted and finally unbuttoned.
Just in time—as a biplane (“dusting crops where there ain’t no crops”) begins to swoop down and fire on him. Thanks to some impressive sprints, some headlong dives into the field and a clever escape trick under a truck, which is then hit by the plane, Thornhill manages to survive this, the most brutal assault on his character so far. The absurd magnitude of this pursuit—why resort to the elaborate plan of chasing a man over an open field in a plane, when you could as easily lure him into a hotel room in Chicago to finish him off?!—seems to complete the hero’s degradation. His elegant parole is subjected to murderous (though cinematically dramatized) reality, and for the first time in the film’s narrative an existentialist void is created around, if not within, the character.
Eventually, Thornhill returns to Chicago to seek out Kaplan. In the hotel he becomes aware of Eve’s betrayal.
Scene 8
(Third day, evening; room 463 in the Ambassador Hotel, Chicago)
Although he is covered in flecks and patches of white and sand-colored dust, which are disapprovingly noticed by the concierge, in substance Thornhill’s appearance is miraculously unaffected. Again, the beholder notices no tears or rents in the cloth; the crease in the trousers is sharp, the lie of the collar immaculate, the shirt remains stubbornly ironed and the tie perfectly in place. Again, the effects of existential danger are merely touching the surface; the essence of the suit, as the signifier, stays intact.
However, for the first time a sense of inner conflict or drama appears; not enough actually to affect the sign of Thornhill/Grant, but clearly manifest in the visual communication with Eve’s character:
Eve: “. . . I want you to leave right now . . . So, please: Good-bye,
good luck. No conversations; just leave.”
Thornhill: “Right away?”
Eve: “Yes.”
Thornhill: “No questions asked?!”
Eve: “Yes.”
Thornhill: “No, I can’t do that.”
Eve: “Please!”
Thornhill: “After dinner.”
Eve: “Now!”
Thornhill: “After dinner; fair is fair.”
Eve: “All right. On one condition: that you let the hotel valet do
something with this suit first. You belong in the stockyards, looking
like that.”
What appears as a commonplace metaphor of bourgeois cleanliness, might suggest that a soiled Thornhill is not a Thornhill to speak of. His identity so much depends on the clothing-“image” that any imperfection can shift it back to the “real.”
Scene 8b
Thornhill sits on the bed, assuming the same confident position as in the hotel bar at the beginning of the film. He telephones the valet while trying to decipher Eve’s note-pad to find out her true identity and intentions:
Thornhill: “How quickly can you get a suit sponged and pressed?—
Yes, fast.”
- . . . -
Thornhill: “Twenty minutes!?—Fine . . .”
- . . . -
Thornhill [to Eve who is in the bathroom]: “He’ll be right up.”
Eve: “Better take your things off.”
Thornhill empties his pockets—still not devoid of small amount of banknotes and some personal belongings.
Scene 8c
Thornhill [walks up to Eve from behind]: “Yeah. Now, what can a man do with his clothes off for twenty minutes?—Could he not have taken an hour?!”
Eve [slipping off his jacket]: “You could always take a cold shower.”
Thornhill: “That’s right.—When I was a little boy, I wouldn’t even let my mother undress me.”
Eve: “You are a big boy now.”
Thornhill [in shirtsleeves]: “Yes.”
Such an exchange is very much part of Hitchcock’s cinematic vocabulary. In order to alter the tempo or ease the tension within a thriller, elements of “ironic” dialog are woven into the narrative. In this and other cases, the director (and scriptwriter) seem to enjoy overt references to Freud, who had pervaded American cultural consciousness in the 1950s through the dissemination of psychoanalytical practice. Obviously, the sexual
overture and subsequent frustration, followed by a transposition of oedipal dependence, is introduced to suggest the singularity of Eve’s position towards Thornhill. The fact, however, that she is allowed actively to remove part of the suit suggests an interest in her peeling away the surface and getting at Thornhill’s identity. Ironically, this occurs at the very moment when he himself decides to accept the double guise of an alleged agent.
After having accused Eve of teasing and criminal role-play, Thornhill
walks into the bathroom and relinquishes the last part of his suit to her.
Scene 8d
Eve: “Trousers please.”
Thornhill: “Certainly.—Here you are.”
In handing the suit to the valet, Eve inadvertently assists Thornhill in a sartorial rite of passage into the spying game. Like the fictitious George Kaplan, for whom Eve, Vandamm and Leonard still mistake Thornhill, he himself has his suit now cleaned in a hotel, by invisible hands and, one suspects, with the cleaning bill picked up by some imaginary source.
Without his suit, yet still in his shirt and tie (Freud and his disciple Stefan Hollós would surely have commented on such a display),12 Thornhill then performs his first act as a spy proper by deciphering Eve’s note.
Scene 9
(Third day, night; auction room of [. . .] & Oppenheim Galleries on 1212 North Michigan Ave, Chicago)
Thornhill, freshly showered and in his sponged and pressed suit, his shoes polished, enters the auction room to approach Vandamm, standing with Eve and Leonard at the front of the bidding public. Vandamm has now, despite the late hour, changed into a light gray suit with a dark tie; an unexpected sartorial faux pas by the fastidious spy. One assumes that Thornhill, who obviously has to continue wearing the same suit, would have known when to change into dark evening attire.
The contrast in tailoring—Thornhill’s fitted suit which depends on the perfect cut of the shoulders and the collar, versus Vandamm’s suit with its slightly over-cut shoulders and wider sleeves—signifies the conflict of parole and langue. Gray does not equal gray; Thornhill’s cloth is identifiably individual, while Vandamm intends to submit to the general sartorial language that is apparent in the gray-suited men around him (one of them being “The Professor,” who supervises the spying game).
Leonard wears his habitually stiff, dark suit and blue tie, which is tight at the waist and slim in the shoulders, tentatively suggesting the cut of a feminine tailleur—beneath which he is sporting his gun.
In a genuine flashback to the “screwball” school of comedy, Thornhill upsets the proceedings in order to get arrested by the police. In the ensuing punch-up his suit is ruffled once more, his sleeves again manhandled by police officers.
Scene 10
(Third day, night; Chicago airport)
“The Professor” (played by Leo G. Carroll) and Thornhill finally get to meet and talk about the past days. He is confronted with an elaborate spy story of bluff and counter-bluff, as well as with the fact that, despite the sartorial langue discussed in the New York hotel room, there is no such person as George Kaplan:
Thornhill: “What do you mean, ‘there is no such person’?! I’ve been
in his hotel room, I tried on his clothes. He has got short sleeves
and dandruff.”
The Professor: “Believe me Mr. Thornhill, he doesn’t exist.—Which
is why I am going to have to ask you to go on being him for the
next twenty-four hours.”13
This controlling instantiation of the government agency appears to accept now Thornhill’s parole, which, although deviating from the social construct they are meant to uphold, has become a form of langue: a value, a sign for the collective, with whom he begins to be identified more and more. By taking him into the societal fold of gray suited men who are productive for the common good and directed towards normative material goals (which the urbane and cynical advertising executive was not necessarily), Thornhill’s suit loses importance as parole and begins to relinquish its leading role in the narrative.
Scene 11
(Fourth Day, morning; self-service restaurant opposite Mount Rushmore, Rapid City, South Dakota)
Thornhill meets with Vandamm, who is absurdly dapper in a “landed gentry”-sort of way, in his light tweed suit and green waistcoat with matching tie and dark hat. He proposes a trade-off between Eve and a safe passage for the spies. Eve then provokes a public conflict that climaxes in her putting two bullet holes into Thornhill’s suit before fleeing screaming from the scene. Leonard, ever suspicious of the surfaces presented to him, is confronted with a layer of fake blood on the Professor’s hand. Finally, Thornhill’s body is carried away—covered by a matching gray blanket—to a clearing in a wood, where he meets Eve.
Despite this last and most intimate assault, the shooting from close range, the suit is as immaculate as ever. Undamaged, it signifies once again the deceptive surface of the narrative; and the beholder understands that the blank bullets were just another “reality” that has turned out to be a fictional construct.
In order to prevent Thornhill from joining Eve in her final role-play, the Professor instructs a state trooper to punch Thornhill out. The scene where he hits the pine needles is the last instance where we see the suit.
Scene 12
(Fourth day, afternoon; room in hospital)
We look at Thornhill without his clothes for the first time, pacing restlessly in a towel before a radio. The Professor unlocks the door to the hospital room.
The Professor: “Here we are.”
Thornhill: “Hello.” The Professor [throwing a box on the bed where Thornhill rests]: “Slacks and a shirt . . .” [waving a shoe box]—“And these . . .”.
Thornhill: “Thank you.”
The Professor: “That’ll do for you around here, for the next couple
of days.”
From this moment on, and ironically in his confinement, Thornhill is initiated officially into the spying game. A few hours ago he had, for the first time, played a part that was not for himself, made to impress or deceive other members of his social set; this time his role play was designed to assist society at large. He has been drafted into the ranks of the government. Logically, this needs to be ritualized by a change of clothing.
Thus the Professor, as the representative of normative society, has bought for him sartorial signifiers that are perfect examples of the popular American costume/langue: a wide, button-down, “Brooks Brothers”-type of shirt, slate-gray pleated trousers, a black leather belt and black penny loafers.
Yet the outfit is not “respectable” in terms of bourgeois apparel; it is absurdly casual. The Professor qualifies his choice with the line: “That’ll do for you around here”—meaning the hospital room to which he has to confine himself in order not to expose Eve as a fraud. Nevertheless, this outfit provides Thornhill with the security of a socially sanctioned costume/langue—although in the guise of leisurewear—that he requires to step out of his previous egotistical character (with its signifier, the polished parole/habillement of the gray suit) and, after his escape act, to become active in saving “his girl,” the American way of life and Western civilization as a whole.
Despite such inherent “logic,” there are also cinematic reasons for a switch in Thornhill’s clothing: Hitchcock himself said that he required a large white shirt to distinguish Grant from the other actors during the long shots and tracking movements in the dark on Mount Rushmore.
Indeed, given Thornhill’s/Grant’s acrobatics in the last part of the film it makes more sense to dress him in casual wear than in a suit, although the latter had not prevented his character from performing stunts and engaging in fights beforehand.
Conclusion
It would be simplistic to read the eventual change of attire from conservative mainstay to casualwear, from timeless Savile Row to fifties Americana, or from individualized bespoke suit to mass-produced clothing, as a sartorial éducation sentimentale that heralds a changeof attitude in the hero. Granted, the narrative suggests that Thornhill
learns to assume responsibility in the end, that he recognizes the need for commitment towards relationships, and perhaps even to society at large, and that he appears determined to fulfill his role as an altruistic and engaged citizen from then on.
But is this not again another surface? Is there anything in his vague characterization to show us a glimpse of Thornhill’s true identity?
As a commercial enterprise a Hollywood film has to end on a moral high note, and Hitchcock abided by such narrative norms. However, the emphasis that has been placed throughout the greatest part of the film on the suit, the parole, which appears deliberately, even cynically, superficial, suggests that the interest in the surface is much greater than any attempt to account for the character’s internal development or his
psychological progress.
Barthes’s reading of fashion can be extended to the appearance of Thornhill/Grant in Hitchcock’s film because commodified products surround and clothe the character. One of these products develops in a manner analogous to that of a linguistic constituent in (visual) language; not for any metaphorical or symbolic reason—after all it is just a contemporary suit—but as integral part of the narrative, as a visual lead that
constructs thematic coherence.
As such the hunt for the spy appears on the surface as merely a narrative that envelops a central sartorial motif, and the story of the film is therefore indeed written in the language of a pure suit.
Notes
1. See Hartman (1981: 14) for a description of Alain Resnais’s L’Année
dernière à Marienbad: “The face of those worded images remains
smooth, slippery; they are pictures determined not to be words; they
insist on a pictographic as well as semiotic content, a nonsensous visual
stenography.” While this is a commonly held view of such deliberate
artificiality—common because American critics tend to regard thus
Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant’s Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” 483
European “art-house” cinema that eschews clear narratives—it can
be applied in equal measure to Hitchcock’s rather more superficial
products of the 1950s and 1960s.
The different views on Hitchcock’s cinematic narrative are extended
to a general reflection between the stylistic and the structural as
“dialectically related projections of the two poles of the dilemma of
modernist form” by Fredric Jameson (1992: 48).
An account of North by Northwest that employs Barthes’s
structuralist reading of texts can be found in Bellour 1975; an extended
version of the essay is contained in Bellour 1979: 131–246. After the
initial application of structuralism the texts turn to a Lacanian analysis
and, in the later version, to a minute reading of the sequence on the
Illinois plains.
2. See also Ferdinand de Saussure’s disciple Charles Bally who in 1909
already had considered “fashion itself a form of language [langage]”
(Bally 1970 [1909]: 11–12).
3. See e.g. Harvey 1995: 23–39 and Breward 1999: 24–53.
4. One reason for this shift can be traced back to an earlier essay on
“Les Maladies du costume de théâtre” that Barthes republished
in conjunction with “L’Activité structuraliste” as an important
early example of his methodological approach. In this essay the term
costume was exclusively employed to denote clothes worn on stage
or in films. Therefore it seems as if the shift in meaning from costume
to vêtement became necessary because the latter had no overtones
of masquerade or garb (Barthes 1964 [1955]: 53–62, 1964 [1963]:
213–20).
Introducing Barthes to the Anglo-American reader, the Partisan
Review published these two essays together: see “The Structuralist
Activity” and “The Diseases of the Costume” (Barthes 1967b: 82–97).
5. See Naremore 1988: 214–17 for an enthusiastic celebration of Grant’s
dress sense in North by Northwest.
6. William Rothman (1983: 13) wrote: “But a further joke is in the idea
that Cary Grant could ever be mistaken for a ‘Roger Thornhill’ in the
first place. Roger Thornhill is only a fictional character, created by
Hitchcock and subject to his authorship—no more real than the nonexistent
decoy ‘George Kaplan’. Hitchcock’s real agent is—Cary Grant.
Grant’s complete visibility in the world of North by Northwest is an
acknowledgment of his familiar way of inhabiting the screen.”
7. Stanley Cavell (1981: 766) in his equation of North by Northwest
with the theme of Hamlet locates a similar observation in the auction
room-comedy halfway through the film. The demand on Thornhill is
to “. . . be decorous, be socialized; but society has been forcing an
identity and a guilt upon him that he does not recognize as his own,
so the natural hope for a way out is to abdicate from that society.”
8. See Corber 1993: 253n12; and “The Murderous Gays: Hitchcock’s
Homophobia” (Wood 1991: 336–57, 365).
484 Ulrich Lehmann
Lesley Brill (1988: 9) sartorially connects the villains: “With their
dark suits and cold refinement, VanDamm [sic] and Leonard are
strongly linked when they first appear in Townsend’s library.”
9. See Bellour’s “psychoanalytical” reading of the suit in this hotel room
scene and the later one of Thornhill and Eve in Chicago—perhaps
springing the “trap” that Lehman and Hitchcock laid out in view of
such a suggested interpretation (1975: 255).
10. Again, cf. Hartman (1981: 23): “That film is almost too healthy.
Roger learns vigilance without being traumatized. The psyche is not
involved, or not as a perverse emptiness, always escaping from being
watched and therefore ever wary.”
11. A less structuralist reading of the “image” comes from Jameson
(1992: 48): “The main body of the film can then be seen as a quest
or a test, trial by fire, struggle with the adversary, the experience of
betrayal, action not with images but within images . . .”.
12. See Freud 1940 [1900]: 357–8; Hollós 1923: 73 and Flügel 1930:
27.
13. A dialectical pun by the scriptwriter; “determinatio est negatio”,
Spinoza would have said. There exists no Kaplan, yet his existence
has to be continuous.
References
Bally, Charles. 1970 [1909]. Traité de stylistique française, Vol.1. Geneva:
Georg.
Barthes, Roland. 1957. “Histoire et sociologie du vêtement”. Annales:
Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, vol.12, no.3, June/September 1957:
430–41. Paris: Colin.
——. 1964 [1955]. “Les Maladies du costume de théâtre.” In Essais
critiques, pp. 53–62. Paris: Seuil. (Originally published in Théâtre
populaire (Paris), no.12, March/April 1955.)
——. 1964 [1963]. “L’Activité structuraliste”. In Essais critiques, pp. 213–
20. Paris: Seuil. (Originally published in Lettres nouvelles, Paris, 1963.)
——. 1967a. Système de la mode. Paris: Seuil.
——. 1967b. “The Structuralist Activity” and “The Diseases of
Costume,” trans. R. Howard. Partisan Review (New York), vol.34,
no.1 (Winter 1967): 82–8, 89–97.
Bellour, Raymond. 1975. “Le Blocage symbolique.” Communications,
no.23 (“Psychanalyse et cinéma”): 235–63. Paris: Seuil.
——. 1979. L’Analyse du film. Paris: Albatros.
Breward, Christopher. 1999. The Hidden Consumer: Masculinity, Fashion
and City Life 1860–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brill, Leslie. 1988. “North by Northwest and Romance”. In The
Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films, pp. 3–21.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant’s Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” 485
Butor, Michel. 1974. “mode et moderne”. In Répertoire IV, pp. 399–414.
Paris: Minuit.
Cavell, Stanley. 1981. “North by Northwest”. Critical Inquiry, vol.7
(Summer 1981): 761–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Corber, Robert J. 1993. In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock,
Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar
America. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Flügel, Joh[an]n Carl. 1930. The Psychology of Clothes. London:
Hogarth.
Freud, Sigmund. 1940 [1900]. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J.
Strachey. London: Hogarth.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1981. “Plenty of Nothing: Hitchcock’s North by
Northwest.” The Yale Review, vol.71, no.1 (Autumn 1981): 13–27.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Harvey, John. 1995. Men in Black. London: Reaktion.
Hollós, Stephan. 1923. “Schlangen und Krawattensymbolik.” Internationale
Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, vol.9: 73–4. Vienna and
Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Jameson, Fredric. 1992. “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest.” In
Slavoj Zizek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About
Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock), pp. 47–72. London: Verso.
Naremore, James. 1988. “Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959).”
In Acting in the Cinema, pp. 213–35. Berkeley, CA and London:
University of California Press.
Rothman, William. 1983. “North by Northwest: Hitchcock’s Monument
to the Hitchcock Film.” North Dakota Quarterly, vol.51 (Summer
1983): 11–23. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota.
Truffaut, François. 1983. Hitchcock: The Definitive Study of Alfred
Hitchcock by François Truffaut. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wood, Robin. 1991. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. London: Faber & Faber.
Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant’s Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”
Fashion Theory, Volume 4, Issue 4, pp.467–486
Introduction
When an English expert on the films of Alfred Hitchcock published a revised version of his study from the late 1960s, he bemoaned in his new introduction the fact that semiotic and structuralist views had pervaded film studies in an unqualified manner. In his criticism (Wood 1991: 8) he singled out the “constantly recurring, peculiarly irritating trait” of being told “[Roland] Barthes shows that . . .”.
In the course of this essay I will be repeatedly claiming ‘Roland Barthes shows that . . .’—or something to that effect. Not out of academic petulance or slavish adherence to a safe and established mode of
interpretation, but because I regard the structuralist approach as the most appropriate towards Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. For me, this film has a visual cinematic narrative that offers much more surface than depth, more disguises than realities and more commodified images than meaning. I will argue that Hitchcock’s film and the role that Cary Grant plays in it are explained best by looking at appearances—precisely because they are deceptive—and not at hermeneutical codes, cinematic quotations or selfreferential truths.1 Because the outermost surface of this film’s narrative - I am discounting cinematic techniques—is occupied by the costumes, my argument will be exemplified by one of these, namely Grant’s suit, which exerts a continuous presence throughout the duration of the film and thus stands analogous to the suit’s normative presence in men’s fashion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In attempting such a precise, some might say “restrictive,” methodological focus I am aware that the essay can be criticized for not talking sufficiently about Hitchcock and the intricacies of his film-making, and, likewise, for not probing deeply enough into the aspects of consumption in male fashion and its sociological significance. However, the original structuralist interpretation of mass media and commodities—something
in which Barthes excelled—was politicized to a great degree. Thus I feel that a Hollywood tale about a spying game at the height of the Cold War offers a convincing topic to which to apply such a concentrated critical “reading.” Furthermore, the care that Hitchcock took in deciding upon the costumes for his films—for North by Northwest he spent days with his female lead Eva Marie Saint at Bergdorf Goodman in New York to
select her outfits—renders clothing an integral part of the interpretative mise-en-scène. Therefore the reproach of not taking Hitchcock seriously by concentrating on a mere suit can be countered by arguing that the director deliberately cultivated surfaces in order to expose the perfunctoriness of his subject-matter—a fact that the elaborate übertheoretical discourses around the “meaning” of Hitchcockian cinema choose
to eschew because otherwise their work would lose the ripeness of its references.
To develop my argument, I have selected the dozen scenes in which the suit explicitly works as a signifier on screen or is topical for the dialog, thus carrying a significance that considerably exceeds its function within the storyline.
Methodology
The sartorial details observed in the following are not to be taken as metaphors for behavioral patterns, nor are they meant to be symbolic for the character’s psyche. They should be read first as visual signifiers within a semiotic analysis.
When Roland Barthes first elaborated in 1957 on such an analysis, reversing the dominance of semiotics over linguistics in favor of, perhaps surprisingly, fashion-writing, he established a tripartite analogy between fashion and language.
In his essay “Histoire et sociologie du vêtement” he paralleled the linguistic classification of language and the socially commodified significance of clothes. In linguistics the differentiation exists between langage, the language spoken within an anthropological framework; langue, spoken within a cultural grouping or society; and parole, the
individual manner of speaking everybody uses for him- or herself. This classification finds its equivalent in the differences between vêtement, clothing in general; costume, as national or cultural sign of recognition; and habillement, individual sartorial expression (Barthes 1957: 435).2 Langue is seen by Barthes (1967a: 28) as an institution, “a body abstracted by constraints,” similar to the formalist attire of the suit that constrains the corporeal. Whereas parole is the part within the institution
that is momentarily chosen by the individual and actualized for means of communication, both verbal and sartorial.
A decade later, with the publication of Système de la Mode, Barthes altered the above distinction and switched vêtement and costume. The latter was reduced to the most general of meanings, while vêtement now became an equivalent to the structuralist langue (Barthes 1967a: 28). Yet by substituting vêtement for costume, Barthes lost something important in his application of clothing to writing (in its historical and cultural
context): the literal connotation of the male suit—le costume in French. Because langue is defined as a “structural institution,” its equivalent has to be the homonym of the suit, as the one sartorial constituent in men’s fashion since the early part of the nineteenth century.3 This shift, which is critically accounted for in Barthes’s publications in the decade after his original essay,4 obfuscates this significance of the suit, which represents the norm in a patriarchal and commodified Western society. Thus it is
more fitting for the present argument to remain with the first study— quite apart from the fact that “costume” is used in English to denote the clothes of an actor, which patently is not what Grant wears in Hitchcock’s film, because he essentially plays himself and not a character.
Barthes explained in his essay of 1957 that a matter of personal dressing
(“un fait d’habillement”) constitutes first of all a deteriorated, i.e. nonnormative,
state of costume. Yet this state can be transformed into a secondary costume, when the deterioration functions as a collective sign, as a value: a minimal variation of the suit can become a matter of costume itself, the moment it is rendered a normative constituent of a certain group, a notion particularly expressive in dandyism (Barthes 1957: 437). More recent ‘post’-structuralist writing has qualified assessments such as the above as rather formulistic. Yet for me Barthes’s (and also Michel Butor’s (1974)) texts on clothing remain convincing indeed—not least because of their formation.
In the following I will argue how the suit as the sartorial surface functions as a signifier in an old-fashioned narrative that tells of the hero’s trials and tribulations, and shows him being pursued, ridiculed and assaulted until he liberates himself from normative constraints to gain first freedom of action, and then love and respect as an individual. That such “liberation” is ultimately but a perfunctory gesture that remains embedded in the normative confines of cinematic and social language has to be expected from a US production of the 1950s and does not conflict with the present reading of the film.
Scene 1
(First day, late afternoon; the Oak Room, Plaza Hotel, New York City)
The film North by Northwest was scripted by Ernest Lehman, shot by Robert Burks and directed by Alfred Hitchcock for release in July 1959. It is on the surface, which is what concerns me here, an espionage thriller in the best tradition of Hollywood’s Cold War paranoia. The comical or absurd elements and the casting of Cary Grant as a Madison Avenue executive mistaken for a government spy who is chased and attacked until he turns the tables on his foes, adds the element of light-hearted entertainment to a sometimes convoluted tale of pursuit, betrayal and double bluff.
In the opening part of the film—I will adhere to its chronology, although, for obvious reasons, not going through it scene by scene—we encounter Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) meeting with business associates in a Manhattan bar. He is dressed in a lightweight, threebuttoned gray suit, a white shirt with French cuffs, a gray silk tie, lightgray socks and dark brown shoes. His three companions are attired in dark suits: the character Mr Wade with white tie and pochette, Mr Nelson with a dark tie, and fellow advertising man Mr Weltner with a somber red tie. In this scene, where Grant is seen sitting comparatively still for the first time, the observer is offered a contrasted reading of Thornhill versus the other characters in the film, a reading that functions through the clothes and is maintained until the very last part of the story.5 This contrast, pertaining as much to the fictional persona as it does to the actor Grant, of whom Hitchcock asked nothing more than variations on his habitual superficial charm and ironic superiority, is established by clothing Thornhill in a bespoke suit by Savile Row tailors Kilgour, French & Stanbury—an establishment frequented by Grant as well.6 The supporting cast in this scene offers off-the-peg backgrounds, providing the common sartorial language (costume) of the 1950s, so paradigmatically embodied by Gregory Peck’s Man in the Gray Flannel Suit in the eponymous film of 1956. Grant/Thornhill sits cross-legged and mannered, displaying the (for an American audience, European) sophistication of assorted socks and brown shoes, while the other characters remain stiffly reserved behind their desk. His is therefore a parole, a subtle but clearly expressed deviation from the norm, which prompts speculations about his social and individual behavior.7 In the subsequent dialogue these speculations are fueled by Lehman and Hitchcock, in the customary ironic subversion of his heroes’ roles, by employing an oedipal spiel of Grant fussing about getting a message to his mother—a device that ridicules the polished parole/habillement of the actor almost as much as it throws his character into the subsequent turbulence of the narrative.
Scene 2
(First day, early evening; library of country mansion)
Thornhill, fatefully having been mistaken for the government spy George Kaplan, is taken to villain Philip Vandamm (played by James Mason) who, in the apparent guise of Lester Townsend, eyes up his opponent for a first sparring.
Vandamm: “Not what I expected; a little taller, a little more polished than the others.”
Thornhill [with heavy irony]: “Oh, I’m so glad you are pleased, Mr Townsend!”
Here, the sartorial surface of the suit begins to assert its dominance over all other epistemological strands in the narrative. Both men mistake each other for somebody else, yet both make no apparent effort to look through the respective guise. On the contrary, they seem to take positive delight in assessing the other’s outer appearance.
Vandamm is attired in a three-piece, neo-Edwardian dark suit, and is wearing a slate-gray tie. He is to be read as somebody who is well-tailored, yet exceedingly so: his sartorial signifier is too respectable, too elaborately stiff to be telling the truth about the man, in dialectical relation with the relaxed elegance of Thornhill’s suit, who stands like an actor—which Grant never lets us forget he is, in more than just one sense, throughout the film—in front of a (stage) curtain, awaiting applause or condemnation,
which is duly forthcoming from the villain.
Scene 2b
Vandamm’s sidekick Leonard (played by Martin Landau) enters the room in a fitted navy suit with a blue tie, taking Thornhill’s handsome surface for nothing more (but also nothing less) than it is, while protecting his own views behind an equally polished mask, whose reserve will break only in the film’s climactic last quarter.
Vandamm: “Ah, Leonard. Have you met our distinguished guest?”
Leonard: “He is a well-tailored one, isn’t he?!”
Thornhill’s misplaced internalization of oedipal laws, hinted at in the beginning, finds its projection in the physical approval of himself by a criminal, who is—by common critical consent—cast as a gay character. In his series of interviews, French director François Truffaut (1983: 107) praised Hitchcock for his decision to render Vandamm such a
debonair character of immaculate dress and manners, because it adds “the element of homosexual rivalry, with the male secretary [i.e. Leonard] clearly jealous of [the heroine Eve Kendall, played by] Eva Marie Saint.”8 Yet the matter is far from being so well-cut. Fastidiousness in dress here signifies a narcissistic core, which supports the sartorial surface of all three men. Thornhill’s elegance is first and foremost to be read as a
designed corrective to a loss of moral values: he drinks too much, depends too strongly on his mother, already has two failed marriages behind him and steals other people’s taxis. Those who merely glance at him, read Thornhill as a well turned-out surface that is hard to resist or criticize. Yet even the comparatively relaxed care about his appearance generates the perception of his being too groomed and handsome, too polished in all walks of life, and too aloof in the presence of women, especially. All
of which puts his masculinity in question. A speculation that pursued Grant as a film-star throughout his career, and one that Hitchcock evidently enjoyed playing with.
In Vandamm’s case, sartorial elegance is a guise for a more sinister subversion of core values in contemporary society. His suit, as well as the mansion to which Thornhill is taken and his assorted entourage, is a respectable front, masking espionage whose ultimate aim is to destroy the American way of life. Logically, his accent and clothes appear out of place, alien (English in this case) to the eyes and ears of the contemporary audience.
Leonard’s suit signifies concealment, too. It is a front for “immoral” desires: the tailoring accommodates the gun that is later used for intimidation and murder; the somber and anonymous cloth is used to deflect attention from any effeminate behavior (shorthand for indulgence in gay sex); and the tight stiffness of the cut emphasizes the extreme economy, or even lack, of movement that betrays the single-minded pursuit of an
unsocial ideal.
Scene 2c
In the ensuing struggle, Thornhill is forced on to the sofa and plied with Bourbon; the suit is seriously assaulted and soiled for the first time. Indeed, here one begins to read “the suit” exclusively as a signifier and the character as the signified: the hero is defined through his surface and the pursuit in the course of the film’s narrative concentrates on the garment, whose light gray wool absurdly distinguishes the fugitive in his quest.
The fact that the cloth and shape of the suit show remarkable endurance and make a complete recovery from the pursuits and assaults in the preceding scenes, must be read as Hitchcock’s effort to present the hero as an stable and identifiable commodity to the audience. Although his superficial parole might be suspicious, the actual signifiers, the suit as a sartorial constituent, the pristine white shirt and the straight tie, must remain intact. Nothing is torn, frayed or irreparably soiled. The hero always looks as if the general form of his garment, his costume/langue, that is the underlying adherence to the sartorial and social norm, cannot be penetrated; the American way of life (at least in perfunctory perception) cannot be seriously damaged or turned inside-out.
So Thornhill escapes by driving intoxicated with turned-up lapels and crumpled suit down a cliff road; he is picked up by the police and spends the rest of the night in jail. The next morning he is questioned, fined and subsequently released. Still wearing the same suit, he then attempts to peel away at least one of the surfaces in the narrative, that is, his mistaken identity as George Kaplan.
Scene 3
(Second day, around noon; room 796 at the Plaza Hotel, New York City)
Thornhill clandestinely enters Kaplan’s room accompanied by his mother Clara Thornhill (played by Jessie Royce Landis). A valet delivers a black suit from the dry cleaner, affirming that his order came from the telephone and not from the owner of the suit himself.
Thornhill: “I am beginning to think nobody in the hotel has actually seen Kaplan.”
Mother: “Maybe he has his suits mended by invisible weavers.”
This statement appears enigmatic, even for the highly irrational character that the mother embodies (with the absence of a “father,” any hope for a reality principle within this oedipal dependence seems to have been abandoned from the start). However, what Clara Thornhill actually hints at is an invisible power that mends and repairs the surface of the social fabric. In the case of the film’s narrative, as we will learn later, this power is the government agency dealing in counter-espionage, who eventually assist Thornhill to regain his position in society. The construct of “George Kaplan”—whom we now suspect, along with Thornhill, of hardly being traceable—is only signified by a dark suit whose anonymous and ordinary sartorial language prevents any identification through a possible parole.
Scene 3b
Thornhill takes the cleaned suit from the wardrobe and slips on the jacket. Awkwardly tailored, it is too wide in the shoulders and waist, whereas the sleeves are much too short for Thornhill’s arms. Uneasy about such an affront to his sartorial sensibilities, he shifts his shoulders and looks accusingly at his protruding left shirt sleeve and cuff.
Mother: “I don’t think that one does anything for you.”
Scene 3c
Thornhill takes the trousers and holds them in front of him. The waist is too wide, and the cut is conservative, with badly executed turn-ups when compared to the perfect length of his own trouser legs, which fall gracefully on to the polished surface of his shoes.
Mother [ironically]: “Ah now, that’s much better.”
Thornhill: “Obviously, they have mistaken me for a much shorter man.”
Thornhill’s/Grant’s parole is not yet easily subsumed into the clothing mainstream of langue—much as his work as an advertising executive has schooled him in the past constantly to think of new words and sentences repeatedly to re-express the selfsame commodities—to find new surfaces for old products, so to speak.
The sartorial shell of Kaplan’s suit is not distinguished enough for the hero; worse still, it is inadequately short. And one need not be aware of Hitchcock’s penchant for amateur psychoanalysis and for popularizing Freudian ideas in his films (cf. Marnie, Psycho), to read the shortness of the sleeves and trousers as what it is meant to be: the inferiority of one male member in contrast to another.
The fact that the mother ironically praises the shortness of the trousers indicates how completely oedipal control has been exerted on the hero. Normative langue is preferred over individual parole. Even if the former
is ill-fittingly short, it is sanctioned by societal and maternal judgment precisely because it is impotent, that is, less threatening or suspicious.9
Scene 4
(Second day, evening; sleeping compartment on the “Twentieth Century Ltd.” train from New York to Chicago)
Having added the accusation of being a murderer to his already convoluted assortment of characters, Thornhill is now pursued on to the fast train from New York to Chicago, where he is taken in—in the most improbable of manners—by the industrial designer Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who hides Thornhill in the upper bunk of her compartment. After the immediate danger has passed, the hero is released from his
confinement. When the bed is lowered, Thornhill removes a pair of broken sunglasses from the breast pocket of his suit, which—miraculously— appears immaculate despite the cramped conditions. The encounter with Eve might have broken one of the surfaces, the reflecting, concealing one of the sunglasses; but Thornhill’s individual sartorial surface still remains untouched.
On the contrary, in embracing Eve, still fully clothed, Thornhill is reminded of what makes him attractive: the fact that he is a well-dressed commodity whose inner feeling or epistemic situation mean less to his surroundings than the sartorial signifier that clothes him.
Scene 5
Thornhill: “What else do you know?”
Eve: “You’ve got taste in clothes, taste in food . . .”
Thornhill: “And taste in women. I like your flavor.”
In the profusion of his various roles, advertising executive, man-abouttown, doting son, alleged government spy, suspected murderer and, now, sophisticated lover, the aspiration and danger within the cultural discourse of 1950s America are projected upon the surface of Thornhill/Grant. There appears to be no conflict between the made-to-measure clothes and the identity tailored to each situation of the pursuit.10
The three linguistic shifts that Bathes observed in the transposition of sartorial commodity to language are also manifest in the Thornhill character: the “real” shifts to “image”; the “real” shifts to “language,” i.e. it is described; and, thirdly, the “image” itself shifts to “language.” And the linguistic operation that functions in fashion writing applies in equal measure to the narrative around the hero in North by Northwest, multifaceted as he is.11 Instead of Thornhill or Grant (it is difficult to distinguish an objective or disinterested “real” in the context of Hollywood) we get an immaculate attire, seemingly indestructible. This “image” is perpetually thematized in the film. It is chased, crumpled and squashed, but also constantly referred to and discussed within the “language” of
the film, both in visual and dialog form. When Thornhill leaves the train with Eve, he is (if only for a very brief period of time), yet in another guise which has been purchased from
a porter. Walking beside her, Thornhill becomes concerned about his “image” or rather the real state of his suit:
Scene 6
(Third day, nine o’clock in the morning; platform at Central Station,
Chicago)
Thornhill: “Which one of these has my suit in it?”
Eve: “The small one, underneath your right arm.”
Thornhill: “Oh thanks. That ought to do the suit a lot of good.”
Eve: “I am sure Mr Kaplan won’t mind a few wrinkles.”
The “image” shifts to “language” as the perfected surface of the clothing becomes a cause for concern. Never mind the real danger of the situation Thornhill finds himself in, pursued by spies, by detectives and policemen on the concourse, and by Eve, who, unbeknownst to him conspires with Vandamm and Leonard: his concern is the creases in his suit where there ought to be none.
But one has to sympathize with Thornhill; apart from the suit there is nothing left for him. His bourgeois identity has been stripped away during the narrative and his identification, which has been supported so powerfully by his elegance and sense of style, is now entirely dependent on the continuity of his apparel.
Eve’s response to this ontological dilemma appears casual. Why indeed should George Kaplan mind creases in the suit?! For her part she can be sure that the meeting between Kaplan and Thornhill will never take place, while the latter should deduce from Kaplan’s badly tailored suit (not to mention his dandruff) that it is not the state of his appearance that matters, but the fact that it is not detected in the first place.
Yet again, Thornhill changes back into the stylistic motif of the gray cloth, which looks as cleaned and pressed as in the first scene, the ironed white shirt and the immaculate tie. As vaguely defined as his character may remain, his pursuers should by now pay particular attention to the sartorial shell as the only means of identification; yet precisely this signifier is still worn by Thornhill for his promised meeting with Kaplan on the plains of rural Illinois.
Scene 7
(Third day, early afternoon; Prairie Stop, Highway 41, Illinois)
Thornhill stands alienated in his city suit in an empty and open landscape, waiting in the wind and dust of passing vehicles for his rendezvous with Kaplan. He goes through a well-choreographed sequence of moves, signaling his anticipation. Hands are thrust into trouser pockets only to be taken out again, cuffs are tugged, and the jacket is adjusted and finally unbuttoned.
Just in time—as a biplane (“dusting crops where there ain’t no crops”) begins to swoop down and fire on him. Thanks to some impressive sprints, some headlong dives into the field and a clever escape trick under a truck, which is then hit by the plane, Thornhill manages to survive this, the most brutal assault on his character so far. The absurd magnitude of this pursuit—why resort to the elaborate plan of chasing a man over an open field in a plane, when you could as easily lure him into a hotel room in Chicago to finish him off?!—seems to complete the hero’s degradation. His elegant parole is subjected to murderous (though cinematically dramatized) reality, and for the first time in the film’s narrative an existentialist void is created around, if not within, the character.
Eventually, Thornhill returns to Chicago to seek out Kaplan. In the hotel he becomes aware of Eve’s betrayal.
Scene 8
(Third day, evening; room 463 in the Ambassador Hotel, Chicago)
Although he is covered in flecks and patches of white and sand-colored dust, which are disapprovingly noticed by the concierge, in substance Thornhill’s appearance is miraculously unaffected. Again, the beholder notices no tears or rents in the cloth; the crease in the trousers is sharp, the lie of the collar immaculate, the shirt remains stubbornly ironed and the tie perfectly in place. Again, the effects of existential danger are merely touching the surface; the essence of the suit, as the signifier, stays intact.
However, for the first time a sense of inner conflict or drama appears; not enough actually to affect the sign of Thornhill/Grant, but clearly manifest in the visual communication with Eve’s character:
Eve: “. . . I want you to leave right now . . . So, please: Good-bye,
good luck. No conversations; just leave.”
Thornhill: “Right away?”
Eve: “Yes.”
Thornhill: “No questions asked?!”
Eve: “Yes.”
Thornhill: “No, I can’t do that.”
Eve: “Please!”
Thornhill: “After dinner.”
Eve: “Now!”
Thornhill: “After dinner; fair is fair.”
Eve: “All right. On one condition: that you let the hotel valet do
something with this suit first. You belong in the stockyards, looking
like that.”
What appears as a commonplace metaphor of bourgeois cleanliness, might suggest that a soiled Thornhill is not a Thornhill to speak of. His identity so much depends on the clothing-“image” that any imperfection can shift it back to the “real.”
Scene 8b
Thornhill sits on the bed, assuming the same confident position as in the hotel bar at the beginning of the film. He telephones the valet while trying to decipher Eve’s note-pad to find out her true identity and intentions:
Thornhill: “How quickly can you get a suit sponged and pressed?—
Yes, fast.”
- . . . -
Thornhill: “Twenty minutes!?—Fine . . .”
- . . . -
Thornhill [to Eve who is in the bathroom]: “He’ll be right up.”
Eve: “Better take your things off.”
Thornhill empties his pockets—still not devoid of small amount of banknotes and some personal belongings.
Scene 8c
Thornhill [walks up to Eve from behind]: “Yeah. Now, what can a man do with his clothes off for twenty minutes?—Could he not have taken an hour?!”
Eve [slipping off his jacket]: “You could always take a cold shower.”
Thornhill: “That’s right.—When I was a little boy, I wouldn’t even let my mother undress me.”
Eve: “You are a big boy now.”
Thornhill [in shirtsleeves]: “Yes.”
Such an exchange is very much part of Hitchcock’s cinematic vocabulary. In order to alter the tempo or ease the tension within a thriller, elements of “ironic” dialog are woven into the narrative. In this and other cases, the director (and scriptwriter) seem to enjoy overt references to Freud, who had pervaded American cultural consciousness in the 1950s through the dissemination of psychoanalytical practice. Obviously, the sexual
overture and subsequent frustration, followed by a transposition of oedipal dependence, is introduced to suggest the singularity of Eve’s position towards Thornhill. The fact, however, that she is allowed actively to remove part of the suit suggests an interest in her peeling away the surface and getting at Thornhill’s identity. Ironically, this occurs at the very moment when he himself decides to accept the double guise of an alleged agent.
After having accused Eve of teasing and criminal role-play, Thornhill
walks into the bathroom and relinquishes the last part of his suit to her.
Scene 8d
Eve: “Trousers please.”
Thornhill: “Certainly.—Here you are.”
In handing the suit to the valet, Eve inadvertently assists Thornhill in a sartorial rite of passage into the spying game. Like the fictitious George Kaplan, for whom Eve, Vandamm and Leonard still mistake Thornhill, he himself has his suit now cleaned in a hotel, by invisible hands and, one suspects, with the cleaning bill picked up by some imaginary source.
Without his suit, yet still in his shirt and tie (Freud and his disciple Stefan Hollós would surely have commented on such a display),12 Thornhill then performs his first act as a spy proper by deciphering Eve’s note.
Scene 9
(Third day, night; auction room of [. . .] & Oppenheim Galleries on 1212 North Michigan Ave, Chicago)
Thornhill, freshly showered and in his sponged and pressed suit, his shoes polished, enters the auction room to approach Vandamm, standing with Eve and Leonard at the front of the bidding public. Vandamm has now, despite the late hour, changed into a light gray suit with a dark tie; an unexpected sartorial faux pas by the fastidious spy. One assumes that Thornhill, who obviously has to continue wearing the same suit, would have known when to change into dark evening attire.
The contrast in tailoring—Thornhill’s fitted suit which depends on the perfect cut of the shoulders and the collar, versus Vandamm’s suit with its slightly over-cut shoulders and wider sleeves—signifies the conflict of parole and langue. Gray does not equal gray; Thornhill’s cloth is identifiably individual, while Vandamm intends to submit to the general sartorial language that is apparent in the gray-suited men around him (one of them being “The Professor,” who supervises the spying game).
Leonard wears his habitually stiff, dark suit and blue tie, which is tight at the waist and slim in the shoulders, tentatively suggesting the cut of a feminine tailleur—beneath which he is sporting his gun.
In a genuine flashback to the “screwball” school of comedy, Thornhill upsets the proceedings in order to get arrested by the police. In the ensuing punch-up his suit is ruffled once more, his sleeves again manhandled by police officers.
Scene 10
(Third day, night; Chicago airport)
“The Professor” (played by Leo G. Carroll) and Thornhill finally get to meet and talk about the past days. He is confronted with an elaborate spy story of bluff and counter-bluff, as well as with the fact that, despite the sartorial langue discussed in the New York hotel room, there is no such person as George Kaplan:
Thornhill: “What do you mean, ‘there is no such person’?! I’ve been
in his hotel room, I tried on his clothes. He has got short sleeves
and dandruff.”
The Professor: “Believe me Mr. Thornhill, he doesn’t exist.—Which
is why I am going to have to ask you to go on being him for the
next twenty-four hours.”13
This controlling instantiation of the government agency appears to accept now Thornhill’s parole, which, although deviating from the social construct they are meant to uphold, has become a form of langue: a value, a sign for the collective, with whom he begins to be identified more and more. By taking him into the societal fold of gray suited men who are productive for the common good and directed towards normative material goals (which the urbane and cynical advertising executive was not necessarily), Thornhill’s suit loses importance as parole and begins to relinquish its leading role in the narrative.
Scene 11
(Fourth Day, morning; self-service restaurant opposite Mount Rushmore, Rapid City, South Dakota)
Thornhill meets with Vandamm, who is absurdly dapper in a “landed gentry”-sort of way, in his light tweed suit and green waistcoat with matching tie and dark hat. He proposes a trade-off between Eve and a safe passage for the spies. Eve then provokes a public conflict that climaxes in her putting two bullet holes into Thornhill’s suit before fleeing screaming from the scene. Leonard, ever suspicious of the surfaces presented to him, is confronted with a layer of fake blood on the Professor’s hand. Finally, Thornhill’s body is carried away—covered by a matching gray blanket—to a clearing in a wood, where he meets Eve.
Despite this last and most intimate assault, the shooting from close range, the suit is as immaculate as ever. Undamaged, it signifies once again the deceptive surface of the narrative; and the beholder understands that the blank bullets were just another “reality” that has turned out to be a fictional construct.
In order to prevent Thornhill from joining Eve in her final role-play, the Professor instructs a state trooper to punch Thornhill out. The scene where he hits the pine needles is the last instance where we see the suit.
Scene 12
(Fourth day, afternoon; room in hospital)
We look at Thornhill without his clothes for the first time, pacing restlessly in a towel before a radio. The Professor unlocks the door to the hospital room.
The Professor: “Here we are.”
Thornhill: “Hello.” The Professor [throwing a box on the bed where Thornhill rests]: “Slacks and a shirt . . .” [waving a shoe box]—“And these . . .”.
Thornhill: “Thank you.”
The Professor: “That’ll do for you around here, for the next couple
of days.”
From this moment on, and ironically in his confinement, Thornhill is initiated officially into the spying game. A few hours ago he had, for the first time, played a part that was not for himself, made to impress or deceive other members of his social set; this time his role play was designed to assist society at large. He has been drafted into the ranks of the government. Logically, this needs to be ritualized by a change of clothing.
Thus the Professor, as the representative of normative society, has bought for him sartorial signifiers that are perfect examples of the popular American costume/langue: a wide, button-down, “Brooks Brothers”-type of shirt, slate-gray pleated trousers, a black leather belt and black penny loafers.
Yet the outfit is not “respectable” in terms of bourgeois apparel; it is absurdly casual. The Professor qualifies his choice with the line: “That’ll do for you around here”—meaning the hospital room to which he has to confine himself in order not to expose Eve as a fraud. Nevertheless, this outfit provides Thornhill with the security of a socially sanctioned costume/langue—although in the guise of leisurewear—that he requires to step out of his previous egotistical character (with its signifier, the polished parole/habillement of the gray suit) and, after his escape act, to become active in saving “his girl,” the American way of life and Western civilization as a whole.
Despite such inherent “logic,” there are also cinematic reasons for a switch in Thornhill’s clothing: Hitchcock himself said that he required a large white shirt to distinguish Grant from the other actors during the long shots and tracking movements in the dark on Mount Rushmore.
Indeed, given Thornhill’s/Grant’s acrobatics in the last part of the film it makes more sense to dress him in casual wear than in a suit, although the latter had not prevented his character from performing stunts and engaging in fights beforehand.
Conclusion
It would be simplistic to read the eventual change of attire from conservative mainstay to casualwear, from timeless Savile Row to fifties Americana, or from individualized bespoke suit to mass-produced clothing, as a sartorial éducation sentimentale that heralds a changeof attitude in the hero. Granted, the narrative suggests that Thornhill
learns to assume responsibility in the end, that he recognizes the need for commitment towards relationships, and perhaps even to society at large, and that he appears determined to fulfill his role as an altruistic and engaged citizen from then on.
But is this not again another surface? Is there anything in his vague characterization to show us a glimpse of Thornhill’s true identity?
As a commercial enterprise a Hollywood film has to end on a moral high note, and Hitchcock abided by such narrative norms. However, the emphasis that has been placed throughout the greatest part of the film on the suit, the parole, which appears deliberately, even cynically, superficial, suggests that the interest in the surface is much greater than any attempt to account for the character’s internal development or his
psychological progress.
Barthes’s reading of fashion can be extended to the appearance of Thornhill/Grant in Hitchcock’s film because commodified products surround and clothe the character. One of these products develops in a manner analogous to that of a linguistic constituent in (visual) language; not for any metaphorical or symbolic reason—after all it is just a contemporary suit—but as integral part of the narrative, as a visual lead that
constructs thematic coherence.
As such the hunt for the spy appears on the surface as merely a narrative that envelops a central sartorial motif, and the story of the film is therefore indeed written in the language of a pure suit.
Notes
1. See Hartman (1981: 14) for a description of Alain Resnais’s L’Année
dernière à Marienbad: “The face of those worded images remains
smooth, slippery; they are pictures determined not to be words; they
insist on a pictographic as well as semiotic content, a nonsensous visual
stenography.” While this is a commonly held view of such deliberate
artificiality—common because American critics tend to regard thus
Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant’s Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” 483
European “art-house” cinema that eschews clear narratives—it can
be applied in equal measure to Hitchcock’s rather more superficial
products of the 1950s and 1960s.
The different views on Hitchcock’s cinematic narrative are extended
to a general reflection between the stylistic and the structural as
“dialectically related projections of the two poles of the dilemma of
modernist form” by Fredric Jameson (1992: 48).
An account of North by Northwest that employs Barthes’s
structuralist reading of texts can be found in Bellour 1975; an extended
version of the essay is contained in Bellour 1979: 131–246. After the
initial application of structuralism the texts turn to a Lacanian analysis
and, in the later version, to a minute reading of the sequence on the
Illinois plains.
2. See also Ferdinand de Saussure’s disciple Charles Bally who in 1909
already had considered “fashion itself a form of language [langage]”
(Bally 1970 [1909]: 11–12).
3. See e.g. Harvey 1995: 23–39 and Breward 1999: 24–53.
4. One reason for this shift can be traced back to an earlier essay on
“Les Maladies du costume de théâtre” that Barthes republished
in conjunction with “L’Activité structuraliste” as an important
early example of his methodological approach. In this essay the term
costume was exclusively employed to denote clothes worn on stage
or in films. Therefore it seems as if the shift in meaning from costume
to vêtement became necessary because the latter had no overtones
of masquerade or garb (Barthes 1964 [1955]: 53–62, 1964 [1963]:
213–20).
Introducing Barthes to the Anglo-American reader, the Partisan
Review published these two essays together: see “The Structuralist
Activity” and “The Diseases of the Costume” (Barthes 1967b: 82–97).
5. See Naremore 1988: 214–17 for an enthusiastic celebration of Grant’s
dress sense in North by Northwest.
6. William Rothman (1983: 13) wrote: “But a further joke is in the idea
that Cary Grant could ever be mistaken for a ‘Roger Thornhill’ in the
first place. Roger Thornhill is only a fictional character, created by
Hitchcock and subject to his authorship—no more real than the nonexistent
decoy ‘George Kaplan’. Hitchcock’s real agent is—Cary Grant.
Grant’s complete visibility in the world of North by Northwest is an
acknowledgment of his familiar way of inhabiting the screen.”
7. Stanley Cavell (1981: 766) in his equation of North by Northwest
with the theme of Hamlet locates a similar observation in the auction
room-comedy halfway through the film. The demand on Thornhill is
to “. . . be decorous, be socialized; but society has been forcing an
identity and a guilt upon him that he does not recognize as his own,
so the natural hope for a way out is to abdicate from that society.”
8. See Corber 1993: 253n12; and “The Murderous Gays: Hitchcock’s
Homophobia” (Wood 1991: 336–57, 365).
484 Ulrich Lehmann
Lesley Brill (1988: 9) sartorially connects the villains: “With their
dark suits and cold refinement, VanDamm [sic] and Leonard are
strongly linked when they first appear in Townsend’s library.”
9. See Bellour’s “psychoanalytical” reading of the suit in this hotel room
scene and the later one of Thornhill and Eve in Chicago—perhaps
springing the “trap” that Lehman and Hitchcock laid out in view of
such a suggested interpretation (1975: 255).
10. Again, cf. Hartman (1981: 23): “That film is almost too healthy.
Roger learns vigilance without being traumatized. The psyche is not
involved, or not as a perverse emptiness, always escaping from being
watched and therefore ever wary.”
11. A less structuralist reading of the “image” comes from Jameson
(1992: 48): “The main body of the film can then be seen as a quest
or a test, trial by fire, struggle with the adversary, the experience of
betrayal, action not with images but within images . . .”.
12. See Freud 1940 [1900]: 357–8; Hollós 1923: 73 and Flügel 1930:
27.
13. A dialectical pun by the scriptwriter; “determinatio est negatio”,
Spinoza would have said. There exists no Kaplan, yet his existence
has to be continuous.
References
Bally, Charles. 1970 [1909]. Traité de stylistique française, Vol.1. Geneva:
Georg.
Barthes, Roland. 1957. “Histoire et sociologie du vêtement”. Annales:
Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, vol.12, no.3, June/September 1957:
430–41. Paris: Colin.
——. 1964 [1955]. “Les Maladies du costume de théâtre.” In Essais
critiques, pp. 53–62. Paris: Seuil. (Originally published in Théâtre
populaire (Paris), no.12, March/April 1955.)
——. 1964 [1963]. “L’Activité structuraliste”. In Essais critiques, pp. 213–
20. Paris: Seuil. (Originally published in Lettres nouvelles, Paris, 1963.)
——. 1967a. Système de la mode. Paris: Seuil.
——. 1967b. “The Structuralist Activity” and “The Diseases of
Costume,” trans. R. Howard. Partisan Review (New York), vol.34,
no.1 (Winter 1967): 82–8, 89–97.
Bellour, Raymond. 1975. “Le Blocage symbolique.” Communications,
no.23 (“Psychanalyse et cinéma”): 235–63. Paris: Seuil.
——. 1979. L’Analyse du film. Paris: Albatros.
Breward, Christopher. 1999. The Hidden Consumer: Masculinity, Fashion
and City Life 1860–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brill, Leslie. 1988. “North by Northwest and Romance”. In The
Hitchcock Romance: Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films, pp. 3–21.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Language of the PurSuit: Cary Grant’s Clothes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” 485
Butor, Michel. 1974. “mode et moderne”. In Répertoire IV, pp. 399–414.
Paris: Minuit.
Cavell, Stanley. 1981. “North by Northwest”. Critical Inquiry, vol.7
(Summer 1981): 761–76. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Corber, Robert J. 1993. In the Name of National Security: Hitchcock,
Homophobia, and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar
America. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Flügel, Joh[an]n Carl. 1930. The Psychology of Clothes. London:
Hogarth.
Freud, Sigmund. 1940 [1900]. The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J.
Strachey. London: Hogarth.
Hartman, Geoffrey H. 1981. “Plenty of Nothing: Hitchcock’s North by
Northwest.” The Yale Review, vol.71, no.1 (Autumn 1981): 13–27.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Harvey, John. 1995. Men in Black. London: Reaktion.
Hollós, Stephan. 1923. “Schlangen und Krawattensymbolik.” Internationale
Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, vol.9: 73–4. Vienna and
Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
Jameson, Fredric. 1992. “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest.” In
Slavoj Zizek (ed.), Everything You Always Wanted to Know About
Lacan (But Were Afraid To Ask Hitchcock), pp. 47–72. London: Verso.
Naremore, James. 1988. “Cary Grant in North by Northwest (1959).”
In Acting in the Cinema, pp. 213–35. Berkeley, CA and London:
University of California Press.
Rothman, William. 1983. “North by Northwest: Hitchcock’s Monument
to the Hitchcock Film.” North Dakota Quarterly, vol.51 (Summer
1983): 11–23. Grand Forks, ND: University of North Dakota.
Truffaut, François. 1983. Hitchcock: The Definitive Study of Alfred
Hitchcock by François Truffaut. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Wood, Robin. 1991. Hitchcock’s Films Revisited. London: Faber & Faber.
Last edited by pvpatty on Fri Oct 17, 2008 8:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
By the way if anyone is finding it too hard to read this much text on here, just send me a PM or email and I will email you the articles in pdf, properly formatted.
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Frog in Suit
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Most interesting. Thank you.
For the sake of comparison, there is a brief passage in Brideshead Revisited, when the narrator's older cousin Jasper advises him on dress: "...Clothes. Dress as you would in a country house. Never wear a tweed coat and flannel trousers--always a suit. And go to a London tailor; you get better cut and longer credit..."
That, of course, was in the early twenties, ten years or more before the period described in the article.
Frog in Suit
For the sake of comparison, there is a brief passage in Brideshead Revisited, when the narrator's older cousin Jasper advises him on dress: "...Clothes. Dress as you would in a country house. Never wear a tweed coat and flannel trousers--always a suit. And go to a London tailor; you get better cut and longer credit..."
That, of course, was in the early twenties, ten years or more before the period described in the article.
Frog in Suit
Good advice, but of course the other piece of advice he is given is to always wear a tall hat on Sundays, regardless of what he does on Sunday mornings. I suspect most of us do not have one, so cannot follow all of the wise words of the late Edwardians. For that matter, I doubt all of us have full tweed suits.
I have found some other articles that I will put up in due course:
Historicizing Masculine Appearance: John Chute and the Suits at The Vyne, 1740-76
Author: Claro, Daniel
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 147-174(28)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Authors: McNeil, Peter; Riello, Giorgio
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 175-204(30)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Ptychoseis = Folds + Pleats: Drapery from Ancient Greek Dress to Twenty-first-century Fashion
Author: Doy, Gen
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 251-260(10)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
(No abstract available)
Fashion and Worldliness: Language and Imagery of the Clothed Body
Author: Calefato, Patrizia
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 1, Number 1, February 1997 , pp. 69-90(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Cole, Shaun
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 2, May 2000 , pp. 125-140(16)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Wilson, Elizabeth
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 2, Number 3, August 1998 , pp. 225-244(20)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Anderson, Fiona
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 3, September 2005 , pp. 283-304(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Historicizing Masculine Appearance: John Chute and the Suits at The Vyne, 1740-76
Author: Claro, Daniel
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 147-174(28)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
The Art and Science of Walking: Gender, Space, and the Fashionable Body in the Long Eighteenth CenturyThis inquiry begins with an attempt to contextualize two silk suits currently preserved at The Vyne, a country house in Hampshire, England. Their recent attic discovery forms the extent of their documented provenance, although details of style and form suggest a construction date of approximately 1765. At that time, John Chute Esq owned The Vyne as well as a townhouse in London. So that the two silk suits may be more fully attributed, this focused study assembles evidence documenting Chute's taste and consumption of luxury goods from his Grand Tour of 1740-1746 to his death in 1776. Although Chute's architectural designs for The Vyne and for Strawberry Hill have received scholarly attention, he is perhaps best known for his friendships with celebrated literary figures Horace Walpole and Thomas Gray. Twentieth-century historians writing about these gentlemen describe Chute as affected, flamboyant, and feminine, even while his letters, portraits, textiles and decorative furnishings suggest a far more complex masculine identity that was rooted in a particular context. Locating Chute's story amidst eighteenth-century debates over clothing, comportment, and gender, the concept of historicism underpins this effort to identify what it meant to be called, as Chute was, “effeminate” in appearance and manner.
Authors: McNeil, Peter; Riello, Giorgio
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 175-204(30)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
One which may be of particular interest to our resident tailors:In the early eighteenth century mobility within the urban or rural environments was confined to restricted areas. In the town, the bad state of streets did not allow “walking for pleasure” outside the private parks or pleasure gardens. This situation underwent a sudden change in the mid-eighteenth century. The provision of public spaces in which to walk was part of the urban improvement measures of many British towns. This paper examines how these changes were mirrored in material artefacts such as footwear. Patterns, clogs and other devices designed to keep feet above ground level quickly disappeared, allowing easier mobility. However, these changes were negotiated in different ways in the public sphere by men and women. While men's footwear embraced functional notions, women's shoes became expressive of a female environment increasingly considered to be a domestic and private space. Men's boots contrasted with light and flimsy neoclassical women's shoes. By the end of the century boots became symbolic of democracy and participation in public affairs. The product's image was reshaped by military values - the famous Wellington boots are a good example of this phenomenon. Women, on the other hand, wore stylish but impractical shoes that were unsuitable for outdoor activities. The reason for these changes were political and social and were supplemented by a vast medical literature - mainly for women - on health and posture. The physical barriers that prevented free mobility gave way to more socially, culturally and psychologically constructed barriers.
Ptychoseis = Folds + Pleats: Drapery from Ancient Greek Dress to Twenty-first-century Fashion
Author: Doy, Gen
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 251-260(10)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
(No abstract available)
Fashion and Worldliness: Language and Imagery of the Clothed Body
Author: Calefato, Patrizia
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 1, Number 1, February 1997 , pp. 69-90(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
"Macho Man": Clones and the Development of a Masculine StereotypeClothes and adornments are the forms through which our bodies relate to the world and to other bodies. In every society and culture dress is a form of projection, or simulation, of the world, valid both for society and for the individual; expressing itself in signs and objects through which the human body is placed in its surroundings. Dress is articulated by a sort of sociocultural syntax, which could be called "costume" in the context of traditional societies and ritual functions, and "fashion" in the context of modernity and esthetic functions. Calefato argues that fashion has turned the body into a sign, a thing. A body permeated by discourse, of which clothes and objects are an intrinsic part, is a body exposed to transformations, to grotesque openings towards the world. She concludes that images of contemporary life - replicas in a world of stereotypes - as described in the article, and elsewhere in social discourse and representation, can thus be seen as a transformation of the stereotype until it explodes as excess with regard to the "world" while yet remaining profoundly within it.
Author: Cole, Shaun
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 2, May 2000 , pp. 125-140(16)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Bohemian Dress and the Heroism of Everyday LifeNineteenth Century theories of homosexuality proposed that gay men had a female soul trapped inside a male body. As a result effeminacy became the culturally accepted meaning and stereotype of homosexuality, and the adoption of female clothing or attributes made a public announcement of a man's sexual orientation. Until the 1970s, the social and legal climates in Britain and the US meant that for most gay men the adoption of an overt gay identity was impossible. Dress choice therefore followed the conventions of the day and relied on "secret" signifiers such as red ties. The counterculture movement of the 1960s prompted gay men to challenge public attitudes towards them. Activist groups such as the Gay Liberation Front called for an end to gender-prescribed behaviour and dressing. There was a move towards a more macho look; the cowboy and the biker were two archetypes that were influential in the adoption of "butch" dress styles. As more gay men adopted the look, they became known as clones. Cole argues that the legacy of the clone was the masculinization of homosexuality and an emphasis on overtly masculine physiques and images, which became one of the primary modes of self-presentation for gay men during the 1980s and 1990s.
Author: Wilson, Elizabeth
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 2, Number 3, August 1998 , pp. 225-244(20)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Spinning the Ephemeral with the Sublime: Modernity and Landscape in Men's Fashion Textiles 1860-1900This article addresses the notion of the bohemian, historically a much-contested figure labelled both artist and artistic parasite, tracing its routes in post-Revolutionary France through to its “disguise” in modern culture. Wilson sees the various bohemian styles as revealing something of the nature of the ambiguous groups which formed them. Bohemians came about due to the specific conditions of a disillusioned France, at the crossroad of artistic expression and political repression in a newly developing consumer society. She provides an account of the differing categories of the bohemian whilst noting that they were united in their self-identification against the dominant beliefs of post-1789 France. The bohemian, argues Wilson, is still very much alive, as can be seen in the succession of youth subcultures which have emerged since 1960 - hippies, punks to New Agers - the only difference is they are not called “bohemian” any longer. The argument of the essay contests that Bohemians preceded postmodernism years before its accepted advent, with the bohemian eclectic mix of styles, the dressing up, eccentricity and use of humble rather than elevated materials. For Wilson, it is no longer satisfactory to classify such movements as subculture but instead their natures should be recognized and understood within mainstream culture, which is comprised of both the dominant and the resisting.
Author: Anderson, Fiona
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 3, September 2005 , pp. 283-304(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
There are more to come!This article explores the links between the design and consumption of tweed cloth as a menswear textile in the late nineteenth century and rural and urban landscapes. The origins of the tweed industry and its success from the 1830s were largely driven by the consumption of cloth for sporting and leisure wear. However, the range of cloths produced including saxonies, Cheviots and homespun tweeds meant that by 1900 it was also widely worn within a variety of urban contexts, mainly as overcoatings, trouserings and suitings. Promotional literature from tweed manufacturers and from London-based cloth merchants, features a concerted emphasis on links between the Scottish rural landscape and the colourings and patterns of tweed designs. The article argues that tweed represents both fleeting innovation and the presence of the rural within male urban fashionable identities of the late nineteenth century. It thus eloquently epitomizes the dual role of fashion within modernity as encapsulating the transitory and the sublime.
Last edited by pvpatty on Fri Oct 17, 2008 8:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
I Love a Man in a Uniform: The Dandy Esprit de Corps
Author: Hoare, Philip
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 3, September 2005 , pp. 263-282(20)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Jobling, Paul
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 1, March 2005 , pp. 57-84(28)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
The Cultural Politics of the Uniform
Author: Craik, Jennifer
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 7, Number 2, 1 June 2003 , pp. 127-147(21)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Cwerner, Saulo B.
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 5, Number 1, February 2001 , pp. 79-92(14)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Paulicelli, Eugenia
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 8, Number 1, 1 March 2004 , pp. 3-34(32)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Matthews David, Alison
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 7, Number 1, 1 March 2003 , pp. 3-37(35)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Vincent, Sue
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 3, Number 2, May 1999 , pp. 197-218(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: McVeigh, Brian
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 1, Number 2, May 1997 , pp. 189-214(26)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Tailoring the Nation: Fashion Writing in Nineteenth-Century Argentina
Author: Root, Regina A.
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 1, February 2000 , pp. 89-117(29)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Macaraeg, Ruel A.
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2007 , pp. 41-64(24)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Harvey, John
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2007 , pp. 65-94(30)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Author: Hoare, Philip
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 3, September 2005 , pp. 263-282(20)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
"Virility in Design": Advertising Austin Reed and the "New Tailoring" during the Interwar Period in BritainDrawing on 20th century anecdotal, biographical and historical sources, I illustrate a theory of how gentlemen's fashion and military style have co-existed, cross-fertilised and interbred. I begin with the effect of the First World War on the heirs of the fin de siècle, showing how figures such as Osbert Sitwell, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon conflated a poetic decadent dandyisim with the apocalyptic military aesthetic of the new Georgian age. In the 1920s and 1930s, I employ the dandy personae of Noël Coward, Stephen Tennant and Marsden Hartley to demonstrate the post-war generation's reaction to the war in both parody and homage; specifically in the way gay men adapted military styling to their own ends. In the Second World War, I discern a link between the emerging style of the New Edwardians - James Pope-Hennessy, Neil 'Bunny' Roger, Richard Buckle, and Cecil Beaton - and the connexion between Guards officers who had affected an Edwardian style in both uniform and civvies, and the Teddy Boys who came after them. In the 1940s and 1950s, I persue this notion through dandy figures such as Dirk Bogarde, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Bobby Astor. In the 1960s, I look at the way Carnaby Street and Haight-Ashbury appropriated imperial uniform even as the old empires were crumbling and Vietnam was under way. In the post-modern 1970s and 1980s, I look at how glam rock and punk ironised and deconstructed the military image. I conclude with a brief survey of how early 21st century fashion reacts to and reflects new eras of conflict.
Author: Jobling, Paul
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 1, March 2005 , pp. 57-84(28)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Founded on 7 July 1900, Austin Reed went on to be one of the foremost men's outfitters in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, huge amounts of expenditure were dedicated to company publicity (it spent the equivalent of two and a quarter million pounds between January and September 1933 on press advertising alone). Moreover, under the aegis of the advertising agency F.C. Pritchard Wood and Partners, Austin Reed espoused modernist principles of graphic design and garnered a reputation for cutting-edge press and poster publicity during the 1920s and 1930s. Thus the company managed to ally the commercial imperative to sell with the need to strike up a symbolic association for its products with male consumers. This article concentrates on the evolution of such advertising, principally in the “New Tailoring” campaign, and the contribution of the copywriter W.D.H. McCullough and commercial artists like Tom Purvis, Fran Sutton and Fougasse. Instrumental to the success of the campaign were the harmonious interplay of text and image, and the imbrication of class and masculinity, such that the critic Eliot Hodgkin commended Austin Reed in 1935 for the “strength and virility” of its promotions.
The Cultural Politics of the Uniform
Author: Craik, Jennifer
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 7, Number 2, 1 June 2003 , pp. 127-147(21)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Clothes at Rest: Elements for a Sociology of the WardrobeThis article speculates on the pervasive motif of uniforms in clothing and fashion. Why do uniforms hold such a fascination in modern and post-modern cultures? What is the relationship between the aesthetics of uniforms and clothing styles? The answers to these questions, I argue, can be found in the ambivalent connotations associated with uniforms in Western European culture. While ostensibly uniforms signify order, conformity and discipline, uniforms also are a fetishised cultural artefact embodying ambiguous erotic impulses and moral rectitude. This double-faced character of uniforms is related to their codification in military dress. This precursor shaped the diversity of uniforms in civil society - school uniforms, professional uniforms (e.g. in the medical profession, police, academic) and quasi-uniforms (men's “white collar” suits; sub-societal codes - e.g. Sloane rangers, ladies who lunch, Amish; and sub-cultural codes - e.g. goths, surfers, rappers). The influence of the uniform extends to everyday clothing and culture. This article explores the cultural politics of the uniform as a persistent feature in contemporary culture.
Author: Cwerner, Saulo B.
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 5, Number 1, February 2001 , pp. 79-92(14)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Fashion Writing under the Fascist Regime: An Italian Dictionary and Commentary of Fashion by Cesare Meano, and Short Stories by Gianna Manzini, and Alba De CespedesThere is a noticeable gap in the vast literature on fashion and clothing across the social sciences and the humanities. It is almost invariably taken for granted that clothes are being worn, without taking into account that most of the time, clothes are stored away, unseen, and forgotten. This article aims to redress this situation by looking closely at the wardrobe as a place where clothes are stored. Cwerner argues that the wardrobe commands a set of distinctive and identifiable spatial practices: forms of structuring, delimiting, and organizing clothes, as well as the social meanings and identities articulated by these forms. The article provides a tentative theoretical formation about the meanings and spaces of wardrobes in everyday dress practices. It aims to show that the storage habits and procedures associated with clothes are closely related to the meanings, functions and identities activated by dress and fashion. The wardrobe articulates a set of material and symbolic practices that are fundamental for the constitution of selfhood, identity, and well-being. Cwerner concludes that empirical studies of wardrobe practices are needed in order to specify the determinations that affect how particular people, or groups, relate to clothes in the intimacy of their homes.
Author: Paulicelli, Eugenia
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 8, Number 1, 1 March 2004 , pp. 3-34(32)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Decorated Men: Fashioning the French Soldier 1852-1914A detailed analysis of material largely neglected by Italian dress historians and cultural critics, and practically unknown to Anglo-American scholars, the article illustrates the key role played by the discourse on fashion during the fascist regime. In particular, the article focuses on two sources: Cesare Meano's Commentario dizionario italiano della moda (Commentary and Italian dictionary on fashion), published in 1936, and fashion writing in the magazine Bellezza. Under fascism, fashion became a state affair and in conjunction with other media was singled out by the regime as a powerful engine to mold and discipline the social body in both its public and personal manifestations. The analysis confirms fashion's two fold structure that gives rise to different practices and discourses: one leaning towards the law and the codification of manners and style; the other towards agency or the individual freedom to make up and create his/her own image and identity. An examination of fascist Italy's fashion policy reveals how aesthetics and style served not only the politics and policies of the regime, but also an individual creativity that shared little or nothing with the diktats of fascist bureaucrats.
Author: Matthews David, Alison
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 7, Number 1, 1 March 2003 , pp. 3-37(35)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
To Fashion a Self: Dressing in Seventeenth-Century EnglandThis article reintroduces the French soldier into the fashionable landscape of the nineteenth century. Using the Second Empire cavalry officer as a case study, it takes issue with John Flugel's theory of the Great Masculine Renunciation by exploring the officer's sexualized image in caricatures, photographs and literature. It then addresses the constant dialogue between military uniforms and women's fashions. In the section “Fashioning Uniformity,” the uniform embodies the tension between standardizing nationalist projects and the struggle for individual identity. Finally, it explores how the French Army tried to use fashion to rehabilitate its public image after losing the Franco-Prussian War.
Author: Vincent, Sue
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 3, Number 2, May 1999 , pp. 197-218(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Wearing Ideology: How Uniforms Discipline Minds and Bodies in JapanThis article uses evidence from writing, correspondence, and bills to examine the role of dress in the seventeenth-century. Vincent concludes that clothing played a particular role in seventeenth-century culture. Functional analysis illuminates the utility and economic value of apparel; but a closer scrutiny reveals its importance in the care and presentation of self. To create a dressed identity successfully, the consumer needed a critical and sophisticated sartorial competence. This was used to make decisions that both maintained, and helped make their social, aesthetic and sexual selves. Early modern society encoded garments with meaning, but dress also returned meaning, and both things helped to shape its contextual society and the individual identities of the wearers.
Author: McVeigh, Brian
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 1, Number 2, May 1997 , pp. 189-214(26)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
I investigate the salience of uniforms in everyday Japan. Uniforms, of course, are certainly not unique to Japan, but their ubiquity in this nation-state points to some important linkages between politicoeconomic projects, bodily management, the construction of subjectivity, and material culture in the form of dress. In this article I examine these linkages by first briefly delineating the politicoeconomic ideology that has a vested interest in reproducing these linkages through uniforms, which are tangible symbols of the enormous power and extensiveness of politicoeconomic structures. These macrostructures form the matrix in which the use of objects, micro practices, and their concomitant subjectivity is structured. Next, I describe how uniforms can be viewed as material markers of a life cycle managed by powerful politicoeconomic institutions. I focus on student uniforms, since these are key socializing objects in Japan's politicoeconomic order. I also highlight the variable of gender in regulated attire.
Tailoring the Nation: Fashion Writing in Nineteenth-Century Argentina
Author: Root, Regina A.
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 4, Number 1, February 2000 , pp. 89-117(29)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Dressed to Kill: Toward a Theory of Fashion in Arms and ArmorIn Tailoring the Nation: Fashion Writing in Nineteenth-Century Argentina, Regina A. Root analyzes how fashion writing served as a means to defy censors and to challenge the traditional and tyrannical practices of Confederate Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-1852). During this period, all citizens of an emerging Argentine nation were required to wear crimson insignia and display icons of Confederate power; individuals who transgressed were executed. Because this canonization of taste occurred alongside emerging sentiments to build an Argentine nation, customs were assigned a pivotal role in the development of an Argentine nation. At the same time, government censors often thwarted open political discussion and so fashion also emerged as a metaphor for political change and renovation. Nineteenth-century authors writing for periodicals such as La Moda, El Iniciador, and La Camelia disguised their ideological leanings in descriptions of appearance and dress and plotted directions for the restructuring of postcolonial Argentine society. Published in March 2000, this essay was the first on Latin American fashion to appear in Fashion Theory.
Author: Macaraeg, Ruel A.
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2007 , pp. 41-64(24)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Showing and Hiding: Equivocation in the Relations of Body and DressWhile much data on arms and armor in the context of historic costume is available, analysis of weapons with regard to fashion has not been previously attempted. This article makes preliminary contributions to this effort by applying the principles of fashion theory to the analysis of social violence as manifested in the accessorization, display, and contextualized use of weapons. Three topics are addressed: how fashion principles are used to delimit actual violence by indexing relative status and power relationships between individuals; how these principles can be both generalized across cultures and correlated to levels of social complexity; and how the fashion of arms and armor has endured and even flourished in modern times despite the eradication of weapons from contemporary civilian fashion. The conclusions offered are intended to stimulate discussion and further research into the role of fashion as a primary medium for the discursive construction of social forces.
Author: Harvey, John
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2007 , pp. 65-94(30)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
The article discusses the way in which, for several centuries in the West, both men and women, in antithetical ways, have used the clothes they wear simultaneously to show and to hide their bodies. To a degree both erotic and ethical boundaries, and the conflicted boundary between the sexes, are marked by contrasted forms of equivocal display. Particular comparison is made between the play in women's dress between revealing and concealing their skin with the tendency in men's dress to mime layers of uncoverings while never finally exposing more than face and hands. The article discusses symmetries and asymmetries of dress, and the differing kinds of body that clothes construct—the smart body, the exaggerated body. It considers too the way in which display has been shared out, with women and men willing to show distinctly different parts of their bodies. In closing, the article reviews the role of teasing in human culture more broadly, and recapitulates the run of the sacred coverings and uncoverings in the Passion in the New Testament.
Some of these articles I will really have to email to people so that they can see the images in them. As I posted above, just send me a PM.
On a lighter note, some may be interested in this article:
Masque-ulinities: Changing Dress as a Display of Masculinity in the Superhero Genre
Author: Weltzien, Friedrich
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 229-250(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
On a lighter note, some may be interested in this article:
Masque-ulinities: Changing Dress as a Display of Masculinity in the Superhero Genre
Author: Weltzien, Friedrich
Source: Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2005 , pp. 229-250(22)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Dress is an important resource in defining gender as a social dimension. This article questions to what extent gender is constructed by the act of changing dress - the difference between two alternative costumes and the circumstances under which the change is performed. Weltzien employs the gender studies theory which defines masculinity as a masquerade, and focuses on the popular genre of the superhero comic book as an example of the construction of masculinity through the transformation from casual wear to a masked costume and back. Weltzien relates superheroes to historical and theoretical models in which dress changes men, with the aim to dismantle the mechanics of gender construction of dress in the second half of the twentieth century. The article concludes that the metamorphosis of the superhero is not a linear movement, it is an endless circle without ever attaining a final goal. It is a steady doing and undoing of two separate identities, which restlessly constructs masculinity within the act of changing costume. The echoes of ancient and renaissance models of the warrior constitute a sort of masquerade, but the concealment of superpowers behind a camouflage of casual wear is a masquerade too - changing role models in the sense of the “Larve”.
Full text. There are many images included in this article, email me if you would like to see them.
Exhibition Review: Ptychoseis = Folds + Pleats: Drapery from Ancient Greek
Dress to Twenty first-century
Fashion Theory, Volume 9, Issue 2, pp. 251–260
Reviewed by Gen Doy
Gen Doy is Professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and is the author of Drapery:Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture, I. B. Tauris, 2002.
Benaki Museum, 138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece,
June 22–October 17 2004
This exhibition was organized by the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation in collaboration with the Cultural Olympiad and was at the modern annexe of the Benaki Museum, Athens. There was an international conference to accompany the exhibition, and this allowed for an elaboration, and a more in-depth discussion, of aspects of pleats and drapery in dress and fashion that was not always possible in the space allocated to
the exhibits.
Clearly Athens was a wonderful venue for such a show, and just as the conference was coming to an end towards the end of June, the major part of the National Archeological Museum reopened (many museums had been closed for a considerable time for refurbishment before the opening of the Olympic Games) enabling visitors to view once more the ancient works of art whose draperies inspired the concept of the exhibition.
Delegates to the conference were also treated to a guided tour of the older building housing the main collection of the Benaki Museum, with its very fine display of regional “folk” dress, versions of which then made an appearance on television screens as the medals were presented at the games by assistants wearing traditional regional Greek costume.
However, the exhibition started not with ancient Greek folds and draperies, but with the latest in cutting-edge fashion technology from Issey Miyake—a garment made from a piece of clothing cut from polyester monofilament-twill fabric using heat, and fastened together with industrial snaps. Issey Miyake’s designs also appeared at the end of the show, encapsulating the exhibition. Personally, I found they were not among my favorites, but other visitors were extremely impressed by Miyake’s futuristic vision given form by sophisticated technology. The dark spaces at the start of the exhibition, where we soon encountered sculpted classical draperies, were succeeded by lighter exhibition spaces where there was a really interesting section devoted to traditional “folk” dress worn by both men and women. The painstaking construction of folds in these pleated
skirts and trousers were, in my opinion, easily as impressive as the later designer clothing, considering they were made without the use of any expensive technology. The colors of these clothes were also very striking. Photographs in this section showed people in the nineteenth century and earlier part of the twentieth century wearing and making pleated garments, and a specially commissioned video, Infusion, by Marcus Tomlinson gave an imaginative view of the pleated skirt sometimes worn by men
in Greece, the fustanella. This section devoted to folk dress was the most
impressive, for me, and a real eye-opener. Distinctions between art and craft were questioned by the skill and invention demonstrated by the conception and construction of these pieces of clothing. This section also included material on men, something that was rather lacking elsewhere in the exhibition. Do pleated and folded garments mean something different when worn (and made) by men and women? I think so, but
perhaps more could have been done with gender issues in both the exhibition and the conference. However, the conference had two interesting papers on pleated clothing worn by men, one paper by Bernard Berthod on ecclesiastical garments worn by the catholic clergy, and one by Naomi Tarrant on the Scottish kilt, and its development from unstructured to structured garment.
The remainder of the exhibition was devoted to the display of draped and pleated clothing from the eighteenth century onwards. The section at the very end was devoted to Issey Miyake’s pleated garments suspended on metal poles, which were lowered and raised on what resembled huge fishing rods, so that the unique properties of the light polyester garments could be displayed as the edges seemed to flutter in the air. These clothes are cut and “sewn” with a sealer machine using ultrasonic waves, enabling
complex shapes to be generated.
In this show there were fine examples of clothes from almost all of the designers I could think of who used draperies, pleats, and folds: Mme Vionnet, Lucien Lelong, Mme Grès, Charles James, Vivienne Westwood, and Alexander McQueen among them. This later section of the show could really have benefited from a more analytical framework, as it seemed to be basically a selection of, admittedly, very striking dresses. However, the textures and colors of the clothing, as well as the construction, were quite stunning. I walked round with a French delegate to the conference and I learned much from her, especially about a particular example of a walking dress from the 1870s with a bustle, in a amazing yellow color tinged with green. This apparently, is a color known in French as “caca d’oie” or “goose poo.” This additional information really changed my perception of this highly fashionable outfit!
Figure 1
Infusion, still from the short film
by Marcus Tomlinson, 2004. ©
Atopos—Marcus Tomlinson.
The weighty catalog that accompanies this show takes a truly international look at folded and pleated clothing, in terms of both designer fashion and popular/folk dress.1 There are excellent photographs and plenty of “food for thought,” as one of the organizers, Ioanna Papantoniou, put it at the conference. Yet once again, a lot of the “food for thought” was visual rather than theoretical or analytical, and some of the exhibit labels were basic identifications of designs, not interpretive. This issue was also apparent at the conference, where there were numerous papers that had very interesting material, but were primarily descriptive. It seems that there is quite a difference between the kind of approach we see in many of the articles published in this journal, for example, where there is a more interdisciplinary approach and a willingness
to take on ideas and theories from subject areas outside dress, and a more empirical and descriptive approach to fashion and dress, which was much in evidence at the conference. However, I must stress that I speak as something of an outsider, as I am not a fashion specialist, and was invited to address the conference as the author of a book on drapery in visual culture, which, among other things, discussed dress. I did notice a parallel with photographic studies, where there is a similar difference of
approach, and sometimes opinion, between members of photographic societies and younger scholars who have been through university courses that encouraged them to range over a whole number of disciplines and theories including psychoanalysis, feminism, and Marxism. Dress and fashion are appropriate subjects for interdisciplinary approaches by their very nature, since they involve gender, the body, technology, social and cultural studies, and history, to mention just some of the areas to which dress relates. Yet, while it is interesting to take on the findings and information generated by research in other disciplines, it is perhaps even more instructive to engage with the theories and methods that inform the best work in these related subject areas. Maybe this involves thinking through the differences in emphasis between trans-disciplinary work and interdisciplinary work, or even cultural work.
Figure 2
Detail of Fustanella, traditional
Greek men’s skirt.
Peloponnesian Folklore
Foundation, Nafplion. Concept:
Vasilis Zidianakis, photo:
Romylos Parisis.
Exhibition Review 255
Figure 3
A picture from the exhibition:
“Folds of the world”—dress
from the Sarakatsani people in
Northern Greece, early
twentieth century.
Peloponnesian Folklore
Foundation, Nafplion. Photo:
Eurokinissi.
However, the conference was very instructive for me, not just for the content of the papers, but for the variety of presentation styles that emerged, some more successful than others. Annette Soumilas, for example, presented a hypothetical conversation about pleats and folds between Mme Vionnet and Issey Miyake, completely constructed from actual statements made by the two designers. The difficulty for many speakers
was, in a short time, to preserve a focus on a specific issue, while widening their perspective to make some more general or speculative comments.
Some of the more successful attempts to do this were in the contributions of Yvonne de Sike, who raised the issue of globalization and the impact on traditionally made hand-pleated garments, and Linda Welters, who discussed the concept of “cultural authentication” where people try to customize imported or mass-produced products by imbedding them with particular personalities and identities. One thing that I was interested in was the possible revival of draped and folded clothing in the current
“revival” of Islamic dress in the Western world, which was a topic that could have been developed more, and was only present in the exhibition in the form of photographs of Moroccan dress by Gaëtan de Clérambault. There is a lot of discussion and published material on the veil, but less on the other garments worn by both men and women muslims. The apparent impracticality of some of these garments in the modern world
(the main reason for the disappearance of the clothing worn in the amazing photographs taken by de Clérambault in Morocco in the early twentieth
century), does not seem to have hindered their popularity among students in the UK, for example. The exhibition tended to give the impression that folk/traditional clothing has disappeared in recent years, as it disappeared from the later sections of the exhibition.
Figure 4
Cypriot pantaloons placed
between reeds to be pleated,
1980. Peloponnesian Folklore
Foundation, Nafplion. Photo:
Romylos Parisis.
Figure 5
Madame Grès, evening dress,
c. 1944. © The Kyoto
Costume Institute. Photo:
Takashi Hatakeyama.
Figure 6
Cristobal Balenciaga, cocktail
dress, Spring/Summer 1955.
© The Kyoto Costume
Institute. Photo: Takashi
Hatakeyama.
Figure 7
Yohjo Yamamoto, vest and
skirt, Fall/Winter 1991. © The
Kyoto Costume Institute.
Photo: Takashi Hatakeyama.
In conclusion, I learnt a great deal from the conference and the catalog, and probably not so much from the exhibition, but as an enjoyable, sensually pleasing experience, the exhibition was very successful. Folds and pleats can be amazingly seductive, whether revealing or concealing, and open to all kinds of alluring interpretations. This exhibition and the well-produced and illustrated catalog will surely inspire interesting responses from researchers in both practice and theory.
Figure 8
Walking dress, 1870s. Benaki
Museum, Athens. Photo: Makis
Skiadaresis.
Note
1. Catalog published by the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation and
Hellenic Cultural Organization, 2004.
Exhibition Review: Ptychoseis = Folds + Pleats: Drapery from Ancient Greek
Dress to Twenty first-century
Fashion Theory, Volume 9, Issue 2, pp. 251–260
Reviewed by Gen Doy
Gen Doy is Professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and is the author of Drapery:Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture, I. B. Tauris, 2002.
Benaki Museum, 138 Pireos Street, Athens, Greece,
June 22–October 17 2004
This exhibition was organized by the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation in collaboration with the Cultural Olympiad and was at the modern annexe of the Benaki Museum, Athens. There was an international conference to accompany the exhibition, and this allowed for an elaboration, and a more in-depth discussion, of aspects of pleats and drapery in dress and fashion that was not always possible in the space allocated to
the exhibits.
Clearly Athens was a wonderful venue for such a show, and just as the conference was coming to an end towards the end of June, the major part of the National Archeological Museum reopened (many museums had been closed for a considerable time for refurbishment before the opening of the Olympic Games) enabling visitors to view once more the ancient works of art whose draperies inspired the concept of the exhibition.
Delegates to the conference were also treated to a guided tour of the older building housing the main collection of the Benaki Museum, with its very fine display of regional “folk” dress, versions of which then made an appearance on television screens as the medals were presented at the games by assistants wearing traditional regional Greek costume.
However, the exhibition started not with ancient Greek folds and draperies, but with the latest in cutting-edge fashion technology from Issey Miyake—a garment made from a piece of clothing cut from polyester monofilament-twill fabric using heat, and fastened together with industrial snaps. Issey Miyake’s designs also appeared at the end of the show, encapsulating the exhibition. Personally, I found they were not among my favorites, but other visitors were extremely impressed by Miyake’s futuristic vision given form by sophisticated technology. The dark spaces at the start of the exhibition, where we soon encountered sculpted classical draperies, were succeeded by lighter exhibition spaces where there was a really interesting section devoted to traditional “folk” dress worn by both men and women. The painstaking construction of folds in these pleated
skirts and trousers were, in my opinion, easily as impressive as the later designer clothing, considering they were made without the use of any expensive technology. The colors of these clothes were also very striking. Photographs in this section showed people in the nineteenth century and earlier part of the twentieth century wearing and making pleated garments, and a specially commissioned video, Infusion, by Marcus Tomlinson gave an imaginative view of the pleated skirt sometimes worn by men
in Greece, the fustanella. This section devoted to folk dress was the most
impressive, for me, and a real eye-opener. Distinctions between art and craft were questioned by the skill and invention demonstrated by the conception and construction of these pieces of clothing. This section also included material on men, something that was rather lacking elsewhere in the exhibition. Do pleated and folded garments mean something different when worn (and made) by men and women? I think so, but
perhaps more could have been done with gender issues in both the exhibition and the conference. However, the conference had two interesting papers on pleated clothing worn by men, one paper by Bernard Berthod on ecclesiastical garments worn by the catholic clergy, and one by Naomi Tarrant on the Scottish kilt, and its development from unstructured to structured garment.
The remainder of the exhibition was devoted to the display of draped and pleated clothing from the eighteenth century onwards. The section at the very end was devoted to Issey Miyake’s pleated garments suspended on metal poles, which were lowered and raised on what resembled huge fishing rods, so that the unique properties of the light polyester garments could be displayed as the edges seemed to flutter in the air. These clothes are cut and “sewn” with a sealer machine using ultrasonic waves, enabling
complex shapes to be generated.
In this show there were fine examples of clothes from almost all of the designers I could think of who used draperies, pleats, and folds: Mme Vionnet, Lucien Lelong, Mme Grès, Charles James, Vivienne Westwood, and Alexander McQueen among them. This later section of the show could really have benefited from a more analytical framework, as it seemed to be basically a selection of, admittedly, very striking dresses. However, the textures and colors of the clothing, as well as the construction, were quite stunning. I walked round with a French delegate to the conference and I learned much from her, especially about a particular example of a walking dress from the 1870s with a bustle, in a amazing yellow color tinged with green. This apparently, is a color known in French as “caca d’oie” or “goose poo.” This additional information really changed my perception of this highly fashionable outfit!
Figure 1
Infusion, still from the short film
by Marcus Tomlinson, 2004. ©
Atopos—Marcus Tomlinson.
The weighty catalog that accompanies this show takes a truly international look at folded and pleated clothing, in terms of both designer fashion and popular/folk dress.1 There are excellent photographs and plenty of “food for thought,” as one of the organizers, Ioanna Papantoniou, put it at the conference. Yet once again, a lot of the “food for thought” was visual rather than theoretical or analytical, and some of the exhibit labels were basic identifications of designs, not interpretive. This issue was also apparent at the conference, where there were numerous papers that had very interesting material, but were primarily descriptive. It seems that there is quite a difference between the kind of approach we see in many of the articles published in this journal, for example, where there is a more interdisciplinary approach and a willingness
to take on ideas and theories from subject areas outside dress, and a more empirical and descriptive approach to fashion and dress, which was much in evidence at the conference. However, I must stress that I speak as something of an outsider, as I am not a fashion specialist, and was invited to address the conference as the author of a book on drapery in visual culture, which, among other things, discussed dress. I did notice a parallel with photographic studies, where there is a similar difference of
approach, and sometimes opinion, between members of photographic societies and younger scholars who have been through university courses that encouraged them to range over a whole number of disciplines and theories including psychoanalysis, feminism, and Marxism. Dress and fashion are appropriate subjects for interdisciplinary approaches by their very nature, since they involve gender, the body, technology, social and cultural studies, and history, to mention just some of the areas to which dress relates. Yet, while it is interesting to take on the findings and information generated by research in other disciplines, it is perhaps even more instructive to engage with the theories and methods that inform the best work in these related subject areas. Maybe this involves thinking through the differences in emphasis between trans-disciplinary work and interdisciplinary work, or even cultural work.
Figure 2
Detail of Fustanella, traditional
Greek men’s skirt.
Peloponnesian Folklore
Foundation, Nafplion. Concept:
Vasilis Zidianakis, photo:
Romylos Parisis.
Exhibition Review 255
Figure 3
A picture from the exhibition:
“Folds of the world”—dress
from the Sarakatsani people in
Northern Greece, early
twentieth century.
Peloponnesian Folklore
Foundation, Nafplion. Photo:
Eurokinissi.
However, the conference was very instructive for me, not just for the content of the papers, but for the variety of presentation styles that emerged, some more successful than others. Annette Soumilas, for example, presented a hypothetical conversation about pleats and folds between Mme Vionnet and Issey Miyake, completely constructed from actual statements made by the two designers. The difficulty for many speakers
was, in a short time, to preserve a focus on a specific issue, while widening their perspective to make some more general or speculative comments.
Some of the more successful attempts to do this were in the contributions of Yvonne de Sike, who raised the issue of globalization and the impact on traditionally made hand-pleated garments, and Linda Welters, who discussed the concept of “cultural authentication” where people try to customize imported or mass-produced products by imbedding them with particular personalities and identities. One thing that I was interested in was the possible revival of draped and folded clothing in the current
“revival” of Islamic dress in the Western world, which was a topic that could have been developed more, and was only present in the exhibition in the form of photographs of Moroccan dress by Gaëtan de Clérambault. There is a lot of discussion and published material on the veil, but less on the other garments worn by both men and women muslims. The apparent impracticality of some of these garments in the modern world
(the main reason for the disappearance of the clothing worn in the amazing photographs taken by de Clérambault in Morocco in the early twentieth
century), does not seem to have hindered their popularity among students in the UK, for example. The exhibition tended to give the impression that folk/traditional clothing has disappeared in recent years, as it disappeared from the later sections of the exhibition.
Figure 4
Cypriot pantaloons placed
between reeds to be pleated,
1980. Peloponnesian Folklore
Foundation, Nafplion. Photo:
Romylos Parisis.
Figure 5
Madame Grès, evening dress,
c. 1944. © The Kyoto
Costume Institute. Photo:
Takashi Hatakeyama.
Figure 6
Cristobal Balenciaga, cocktail
dress, Spring/Summer 1955.
© The Kyoto Costume
Institute. Photo: Takashi
Hatakeyama.
Figure 7
Yohjo Yamamoto, vest and
skirt, Fall/Winter 1991. © The
Kyoto Costume Institute.
Photo: Takashi Hatakeyama.
In conclusion, I learnt a great deal from the conference and the catalog, and probably not so much from the exhibition, but as an enjoyable, sensually pleasing experience, the exhibition was very successful. Folds and pleats can be amazingly seductive, whether revealing or concealing, and open to all kinds of alluring interpretations. This exhibition and the well-produced and illustrated catalog will surely inspire interesting responses from researchers in both practice and theory.
Figure 8
Walking dress, 1870s. Benaki
Museum, Athens. Photo: Makis
Skiadaresis.
Note
1. Catalog published by the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation and
Hellenic Cultural Organization, 2004.
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