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Great Male Renunciation
- ethbr1 3y agoWow. For all the museums where I'd noticed < 1900s male fashion, I never really considered the timing or mechanism by which it had shift to more modern "not that." Much less that it was wrapped up in the proliferation of democracy in the US and France.
- epolanski 3y agoFun fact, the reason we don't tie the bottom button in a suit is an heritage to some fat English king who couldn't close his suit so people pretended it was a new fashion and it spread.
- casion 3y agoWho is "we" in your sentence? I've never heard of this
- tcgv 3y agoHe's describing a well known formal attire etiquette: https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/advice/a33367/how-to-button-suit-jacket/ https://www.esquire.com/style/mens-fashion/advice/a33367/how...
- mock-possum 3y ago> The two-button jacket should never have both buttons fastened. Sorry, why put two buttons on the jacket then?
- dehugger 3y agoBecause if there was only one button then you couldn't leave the lowest one undone, which is the style. Therefore, two are required.
- rsynnott 3y agoYou know the little pocket within a pocket that most jeans have, in this future year of 2023? It's for a _pocket watch_, originally. Fashion tends to lead to vestigial details hanging around more or less indefinitely.
- kyorochan 3y agoFunnily enough I've always heard that referred to as a "coin pocket", but since I live in a country that has barely used cash for the last 10+ years I thought this was very anachronistic and started putting my keys in there.
- rsynnott 3y agoI used to think it was for (old, zippo-style) lighters. But nah, apparently it started off life as somewhere to put a pocket watch.
- benhurmarcel 3y agoYou mean the Airpods pocket?
- kyorochan 3y agoPeople (arguably) don't do it because it looks better, but to signal that they are in the know about fashion.
- irusensei 3y agoBring it back. With all the frills and fabulous white wigs.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoPrince, David Bowie etc have all blazed the trail LilNasX has confidently picked up the baton for the current generation
- Blackthorn 3y agoI'm constantly stunned by the absolute amazing stylishness of Lil Nas X.
- neotrope 3y agoyou first
- williamdclt 3y agolots of people have gone first, second, hundredth...
- chasil 3y ago...once a year, on fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras).
- selimthegrim 3y agoYou must not live in NOLA.
- averageRoyalty 3y agoWhat's NOLA? North Of Live Ants?
- jpsouth 3y ago
- michaelhoney 3y agoFrom the musical “Hair”: I would just like to say that it is my conviction That longer hair and other flamboyant affectations Of appearance are nothing more than the male's emergence From his drab camouflage into the gaudy plumage Which is the birthright of his sex There is a peculiar notion that elegant plumage And fine feathers are not proper for the man When actually that is the way things are in most species
- fatherzine 3y agoThrough disenchanted materialistic lenses we can only see man plumage manifested in the physical world. Yet it is not the only way.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- morkalork 3y agoJust what % of the population actually wore those clothes back then? Are we comparing ourselves to what the 1% or 0.1% wore?
- Blackthorn 3y agoThis is a really important question! A lot of historical clothing has a survivorship bias component.
- orwin 3y agoIt was notables and nobles clothing, so 10%? plus military. Plus all the textile workers where tint was available, so I guess quite a lot.
- Jensson 3y agoYou think 10% of people were notable or nobles?
- orwin 3y agoYes, and I think I'm lowballing it. Notables include the mercantile bourgeoisie, the administration, the mercenaries, the guard, the local bourgeoisie (guild leaders, lawyers), and the 'small bourgeoisie' in the sense people who owned either specific, important equipment, or important skills outside cities, so not in a guild (horse breeders, miller etc). Nobility is like .5% to 2% depending on your country, the rest, depending on when and where you're talking about post-renaissance can easely get to 10%, maybe even 15% in the lowlands. People think the industrial revolution started with coal an trains, but check Europeans canals and waterworks, as well as how precise steel parts were made. The major productivity increases are from before the US revolution. In fact, I'm certain that one of the French revolution trigger was notables who saw those productivity increase improve their life, then being taken away to found wars or whatever.
- Jensson 3y agoUniforms doesn't count, you don't choose your uniform. That rules out most of the groups you listed.
- ksaj 3y agoFrom the links, it's really interesting how the Men's Dress Reform Party seem to be the Great Male Renunciation antithesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_Dress_Reform_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_Dress_Reform_Party
- jackcosgrove 3y agoNow that's how you put the party in political party.
- barrysteve 3y agoGosh, I miss how organized and rich the Old World culture was. Today's culture, is broad and spiritually hollow by comparison.
- locopati 3y agoyes... great if you were rich
- willcipriano 3y agoIn the modern era everyone is rich to their standards.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoAre we though? I sure as heck can't afford to pay a staff of servants.
- PeterisP 3y agoA relevant quote about the change of affordability of certain things from the late Agatha Christie looking back at her early years - "I couldn’t imagine being too poor to afford servants, nor so rich as to be able to afford a car." With respect to material culture - so also with respect to what clothing styles and fashions are possible - anybody who can afford a car is far richer than people who had servants a hundred years ago.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoCars were an arguably overvalued novelty at the time. The more fundamental question should be something like, do you need to work to put food on your table. If yes, then you are not wealthy.
- ben_w 3y agoHere in Berlin, we have a "pfand" (deposit) on various bottles. At a summer barbecue you sometimes get people asking to take your bottles away, so they can collect that deposit themselves. For the larger bottles, just four per day would equal the income of a pre-industrial farmhand.
- spandextwins 3y agoThis is typical of wikipedia. Everybody knows there's formal dress today vs. functional dress for both men and women. Same shit, different day.
- pavel_lishin 3y agoEverybody knows what a horse is.
- silisili 3y agoEverything cyclical. I for one miss the loose fitting jeans of the late 90s/early oughts, which were largely replaced by skinny jeans. Now I'm older and don't care about fashion, so just wear carpenter jeans. But it seems like skinny pants are still in style, apparently in sweatpants form?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- browserman 3y agoYou are in luck; skinny jeans are once again out of style and straight or flared legs are back in.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago> Now I'm older and don't care about fashion, so just wear carpenter jeans. That's where it's at. I almost always wear Duluth Trading Company canvas(?) work shorts / work pants. I'm happy as a clam, but my poor wife...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Jensson 3y agoBright colors used to be a sign of quality, everything expensive had tons of colors. Industrial revolution changed that, now bright colors are associated with cheap toys instead because they are used to cover deficiencies in the production process. So it makes sense that people who care about quality moved away from colorful things.
- BuyMyBitcoins 3y agoI wonder how much of it had to do with the rise in pollution due to coal dust and soot?
- MichaelZuo 3y agoMid to late 1700s was well before widespread industrialization.
- BuyMyBitcoins 3y agoI had an off by one moment while reading the article. I read 18th century as the 1800’s.
- rsynnott 3y agoIt's before widespread use of _steam power_ (that was around 1800), but the First Industrial Revolution started in the mid-18th century, and you'd already be seeing dramatic expansion of population, the economy, iron smelting, etc. The air in London or Paris would definitely have been getting noticeably worse at that point. (At some point, popular culture seems to have decided that the Industrial Revolution was personally invented by Queen Victoria or something, and it gets moved about 50 years later, but in reality by the late 18th century it was well underway).
- MichaelZuo 3y agoLong distance travel also became much more common for wealthy young men during this time period, so the shear impracticality of the style likely prevented a large portion of them from wearing it, even if they preferred the style, for long stretches of time. This was well before the invention of rip-proof or stain-proof fabrics. Also the royal courts of Europe started becoming much less active, as the professional bureaucracy started forming which took care of routine decision making. So the young noble man just back from his travels would have had far less opportunity to show off in formal settings to boot.
- andy_ppp 3y agoMaybe status and power remain constant and it's expression randomly inverts from extreme shows to I'm too important and powerful to behave like that and back...
- FooBarBizBazz 3y agoSomehow this relates to a political(?) bombing?! So I went to the Wikipedia article, and from there ended up at > The Men's Dress Reform Party (MDRP) was a reform movement in interwar Britain. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_Dress_Reform_Party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_Dress_Reform_Party which > saw [the everyday man's] clothes as "depressing"[2] and lacking in creativity and which was affiliated with the Sunlight Leage. But: > Then, in 1940, the Sunlight League also dissipated after a bomb destroyed their offices and the death of its founder, Dr. Saleeby. Emphasis: "a bomb destroyed their offices". What? This just raises more questions. ... Also, I wonder if this has any relation to a story by D. H. Lawrence called Sun. Hm.
- PeterisP 3y agoThe bombing likely was caused by a popular early-1940s London activity called 'the Blitz' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz), and while it certainly had political causes, I don't think that it was directly related to the political position of the Sunlight League or the Men's Dress Reform Party.
- huytersd 3y agoI’m thankful for the great renunciation.
- hermitcrab 3y agoWhen I travelled around, India some 30 years ago, it very noticeable that the women nearly all wore colourful saris and the men nearly all wore drab coloured clothing. The opposite of much of the animal kingdom.
- xyzelement 3y agoThe linked wiki has a suggestion that makes sense: // that men "abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful" and "henceforth aimed at being only useful". This resonates. I am around 40 and was born in Eastern Europe and the environment I grew up in was all about “man is valued as a good provider / defender “ and looks matter less for us. Obviously it’s better to be handsome than gross, but it’s better to be useful but gross vs pretty but useless. So to this day, it rubs me the wrong way when a man puts too much effort into looks vs “quality.” So this theory resonates as a historical thing
- epolanski 3y agoPushing the idea that vanity is feminine does no good anyone.
- jokethrowaway 3y agoWomen are largely valued for their physical beauty and capacity to bear children, men are largely valued for their status and their willingness to die for society.
- motohagiography 3y agoThere could be another factor here, where fashion is how people signal their alignment to perceptions of power. Beau Brummel's relative minimalism was taken from standard riding kit at the time, just without the flourish of cavalry. The style lives on today in the form of the shadbelly[0] worn in competition in dressage. Given it was toned down military dress, it was literally the tactical cavalry wear of the time. The analogy or equivalent to Brummel's style today would be something closer to a luxury brand with technical cred from their tactical lines like Arc'teryx, Prada, Beretta's clothing line, and perhaps Fjallraven. I have an opinion about this because I looked at a business re-designing men's riding clothing, as over a couple decades I found the now-unisex attire discourages men from riding horses in any non-western disciplines. I gave up the idea because I could just buy clothes from some of those makers above and ride in them instead. The silhouette looks a lot more more "Horse Soldiers," than "Downton Abbey," but building a new retail brand for a market I was inventing wasn't a startup play. But that's what I was able to interpret about menswear along the way. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadbelly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadbelly
- defrost 3y agoIt's easier to appreciate the line of the shadbelly when the horses are smaller ... https://youtu.be/GYjB2L6G9fE?t=35 https://youtu.be/GYjB2L6G9fE?t=35
- emmelaich 3y agoBenjamin Franklin is mentioned, but his visit to Paris un-wigged and meeting with Louis XV had quite an impact. American was looked to as the place of modernity.
- mollerhoj 3y agoIn most species, males are more colorful than females - since they are the ones during the attraction. Our culture seem to have flipped this logic somehow
- rsynnott 3y agoThat's largely birds, and some fish; most mammals are less sexually dimorphic.
- Balgair 3y agoThe timing of this with the larger global conflicts that started in the period seem to me to be totally tied together. My impression is not that of an increase in democracy and anti-jacobianism, but one of increased militarism. I don't know where I heard it, but, 'men's fashion marches with the army'. That's something I've always seen as a truism, and maybe one born from the time period in question. The explanation I heard was that this was due to the inherent value that society places upon men to do the dangerous work of war fighting. So, in peacetime, men whose dress imitates and looks akin to the dress in the military are then seen as more masculine. Crucially, you can't just dress like a solider when out and about unless there is a war on or if you are required to dress as such by being on duty. Stolen valor and all that jazz. You can only imitate. Male fashion is just such a deliciously complex topic, especially since this renunciation, as it's all about the very tiny details and very subtle changes. So very military these things are!