as commodity and sign, Around the revolution, coarse homespun clothing was virtuous, a rejection of British trade and the British political economy, with its attendant lust for luxury, which corroded virtue.
At Washington's first inaugural, homespun was still key, but not coarseness a republican state could make clothes as good or better than those of Old Europe.
The Industrial Revolution transformed both the production and cost of custom clothes and of readymades, Readymade clothing, and the clerks who moved to the city to wear them, were a sign of fluidity, the city was fluid, the people in the city were fluid.
With fine clothing or at least the facsimile of fine clothing available to anyone, it was no longer possible to determine who was and who was not a gentleman.
The clerk came to the city, dressed in readymade clothes with starched paper collars driven not by theth century evil of luxury, but theth century enemy of virtue, desire.
Mass consumption and mass production fed one another, the sewing machine was not invented until, until then the seamstress was the machine, putout, workinghours a day on piece work, leading to a new, and pitied creature: the fallen woman.
By the eve of the Civil War, coarse homespun was politicized again, as the clothing of the southern slavers honest yeomen in their own estimation, as opposed to the monied interests of the capitalist north, wearing the American uniform: the suit.
ReadyMade Democracy explores the history of men's dress in America to consider how capitalism and democracy emerged at the center of social life during the century between the Revolution and the Civil War.
The story begins with the elevation of homespun clothing to a political ideology on the eve of Independence, Homespun clothing tied the productive efforts of the household to those of the nation, becoming a most tangible expression of the citizen's attachment to the public's
happiness.
Coarse dress did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it, Nevertheless, exhortations of industry and simplicity became a fixture of American discourse over the following century of industrial revolution, as the massproduced suit emerged as a badge of a uniquely virtuous American polity.
It is here, Zakim argues, in the evolution of homespun into its readymade opposite, that men's dress proves to be both material and metaphor for the rise of democratic capitalismand a site of the new social arrangements of bourgeois life.
In thus illuminating the critical links among culture, ideology, political economy, and fashion in antebellum America, ReadyMade Democracy will be essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the construction of modern life.
The title of this book claims this is "A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic," until, and it seems like that was a publisher's decision because this is a history of the men's garment industry in the U.
S. from about thes to, The author takes for granted that the reader knows as much about fashion as he does, explaining little about what the fashions actually looked like or how they changed overyears they changed a LOT.
Homespun clothing gave way to the Industrial Revolution within about a half of a chapter in this book, thus covering as much of theth century as the author saw fit.
The rest of the book deals with how the market took over and propped up a sartorial system in which all aspiring middleclass white males dressed the same in the midth century.
I guess I would mind this less if the book was actually readable instead of drowning in the academese spoken by the author, A specialist in the material and cultural history of modernity in America, Michael Zakim teaches at Tel Aviv University, .