Suitable

Clothing can tell you a lot about the person wearing it, hinting at where they might be from, how they identify, and the kind of work that they might do. The way that people dressed in the Revolutionary era is very different from the way that people dress in the 21st century, but the classic black suit, though its style has changed, traces its origin to fashion changes that began during the Revolutionary War.  

In Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men, costume designer and historian Chloe Chapin tracks the evolution of men’s fashion, beginning in the 18th century. In the early years of the new nation, men began to favor plain, dark clothes, like suits, over the more colorful and ostentatious styles that had previously been worn, in part to convey ideas about equality and democracy. This more serious clothing distanced those wearing it from the idea of “fashion,” which had previously been something for the upper classes. In part thanks to George Washington and other early presidents, black suits eventually became synonymous with masculinity and power, relegating fashion to something frivolous and feminine. 

In this excerpt, Chapin discusses how men in early America thought about fashion. 

Excerpt

The desire for continual novelty in dress, what we think of today as “fashion,” has contributed to much of the Western world’s economy, but Americans in the early republic grumbled about the economic and industrial volatility this created. James Madison railed against the precariousness of clothing trends in his 1792 essay “Fashion,” published in the National Gazette. He referred to an English petition presented the previous year to the Prince of Wales by Birmingham buckle manufacturers who claimed that they were destitute because of the sudden decline in the fashion for buckles, which men had worn on shoes and knee breeches for the past century. Because of previous demand, over 20,000 people had been employed in buckle manufacture in the Birmingham area, but when this aristocratic fashion suddenly collapsed in 1786 on the eve of the French Revolution, their trade collapsed along with it. Madison complained that industry was in danger of being ruined by what he saw as the “mutability” of fashion. He bemoaned the workers’ precarious dependence on fashion’s unpredictability and denounced the whole system for its impulsiveness, in which the livelihood of an entire community could be directed by “the caprice of a single fancy.” He saw English consumer demand for the newest trends as a lack of will and their dependence on fashionability as the lowest point of servility. This dependence, he thought, was the “extremity of evil.” Madison contrasted the servile English to the “independent situation and manly sentiments” of white American citizens, who, he thought, had more dignity than the English because they did not abide by the superfluity of fashion to the same degree.  

In Madison’s time, the European model of fashion was the mechanism that took the aesthetic trends of the wealthiest and most socially and financially influential people and sold them to the world. Fashion distinguished the upper class from their poorer countrymen, and it also supported an aristocratic system of patronage, creating industries to make the costly goods purchased by the upper class to show off to their peers. Because fashion was also part of what marked the elite as elite, once the lower classes or foreigners started adopting fashionable styles, the wealthy moved on to new styles. Clothing may have covered the body and signaled identity, but fashion was a different system, used by the elite to keep themselves perpetually elite.  

Both critics and followers of fashion noted its volatility, especially French writers who were exposed to the extremes of luxury goods under the regime of the French aristocracy. Playwright Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort complained that endless changes of fashion were “the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.” In contrast, the writer and dandy Stendhal declared disdainfully, “Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.” The consequence to the vanity of the rich deciding that something was in fashion, was, of course, that it would eventually go out of fashion.  

In contrast to the European system of fashion, American men of the founding generation believed that republican virtue could only be found in a republic of equal and independent citizens. To become completely virtuous citizens, they believed that men had to be free from dependence on the marketplace; any loss of independence corrupted their virtue. But how could Americans be both independent and equal if they were beholden, as the English were, to the fashionable whims of the upper class? Unfortunately for Madison’s republican ideals, middle-class trades of all kinds relied precisely on change in the marketplace. As the author of an early American book on tailoring explained to his readers, fashion might be a “fickle goddess,” but it was still necessary for business. “The novelty of fashion,” he argued, “is the nursery of trade, the propagator of the arts, and the field of employment to many.” Americans’ desire for fashion, and the trade and industry that their fashion propelled, was always in tension with fears of dependence and servility that would compromise republican virtue. 

Madison himself took virtuous ideals of consumption to an extreme. When he served as the fourth President of the United States, his enslaved valet later recalled, he owned only one suit at a time, which was always black. But surely this was no way to support a growing American industry. Madison couldn’t see that he, too, was part of a fashion system, one that connected political ideals to material styles, which had replaced different ideals and older styles. In fact, when he’d had his portrait painted in 1792, the same year he published his essay on the evils of fashion, he had dressed in a light-colored, grayish-blue coat with oversized, shiny metal buttons and a high, fold-down collar that reached nearly up to his earlobes, mirroring the style of fashionable French Incroyables (Plate 1). In 1792 Madison may have been a bit of a dandy, but only when it was fashionable to be so. When he later adopted plain, black suits, his choice was equally fashionable. 

American men might have followed international styles that originated in the fashionable European cities of Paris and London, but they also invented their own. In 1799 27-year-old Thomas Boylston Adams, the third son of John and Abigail Adams and the younger brother of John Quincy Adams, wrote home to his mother in Boston from Philadelphia with instructions that she could cut up his old chocolate-colored coat “without remorse,” explaining that it had always been too small for him, and, anyway, he disliked the color. Plus, he added, while the buttons were expensive, they were out of fashion. Adams thus acknowledged the color, fit, and fashionability of his old coat, noting the important distinction between being costly and being current. He continued with a description of his current style of dress in Philadelphia: 

“I find my five year old dimmity Coat, which was the first any body undertook to wear here, now quite the rage—a pair of very wide sailors trousers of gingum, a square brimmed hat, very light, a small single breast waistcoat a dimmity coat & a short crop, render your Thomas one of the oddest but most comfortably dressed young men in this City. Not one of these peculiarities will remain such at the end of the season.” 

Here, Adams confidently suggests that he had been the first to wear a particular style of coat in the city of Philadelphia and that these coats (now “quite the rage”) had since become fashionable. Adams was further convinced that soon each of his “odd but comfortable” garments would be adopted by local men and thus transform from strange to stylish. In this brief missive home, Adams thus captured the essence of the fashion cycle: odd, fashionable, old, and finally, obsolete. He also demonstrated how, while some trends—like buckles—were international, fashion also happened in person at a local level in ways that had little to do with distant centers of fashion.  

The aristocratic mercantile fashion system of planned obsolescence was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, and, over the first few decades of the nineteenth century, as more individuals could afford more goods, and as artisans and industry produced more items for purchase, the aesthetic nuances of both textiles and garments were evolving at an increasingly rapid pace, which tempted more purchases and further innovations to produce yet more items. “Fashion” was a collective social performance with ever-changing elements, driven by a system of continuous production and perpetual consumption.