Menswear Revolution

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At my age, should I really be wearing these trendy, cut-off trousers? Find out. Hello. Everything always seemed so effortless to Fred Astaire. His walk was a dance, his clothes a second skin. He was smart, stylish, jaunty, in a word, dapper. Well, no one would ever call me dapper. Rather like other men of my age, my clothes are a lumpy palimpsest, layers from different eras and different obsessions, big fat-soled shoes from the 60s, faded jeans from the 70s.

a rough tweed jacket left over from my rambling days, a bedraggled raincoat that I used to wear on the off chance I might be mistaken for Columbo. It's all pretty... unfashionable, so, well, so resolutely unfashy that no one much notices what I'm wearing. And that's fine by me. I mean, isn't there something aberrant, well?

Something slightly unmasculine about men who dress in order to be observed? Well, it's a good question for my first guest today. He's John Harvey, a Life Fellow of Emanuel College at the University of Cambridge, and he's the author of The Story of Black. And John... joins me on the line from Athens. I mean, John, this idea that men shouldn't be peacocks, that it's not manly, I mean, your book really makes clear that it wasn't really...

true in the past. I mean, your history of men's clothes and the way in which they became less decorative and adorned over time, that's the story you want to tell, isn't it? Chant that development for me a little. That's certainly a change that occurred. If you go back to Shakespeare's time, you find men's clothes have features which I guess you'd associate more now with women, liking for silk, satin, lace, the use of strong colours, embroidery.

Then over the next 200 years, you could say discipline slowly comes more into men and into men's clothes, that you get the man's suit developing slowly and with it a more streamlined persona. You could say men work more as one, that they're geared to bigger conquests.

They build empires and big industries. Maybe you could say that men become more like good soldiers. And you can say that because soldiers over those years become more like good soldiers. That by the end of the... Before the start of the period, they were more like... an armed gang. By the end of the 18th century, soldiers are wearing uniforms, they're drilling by marching in step, they're firing their muskets in sync.

Yes, I mean, yes, do carry on. We're into the 18th century and so on, but you want to talk really about how do we get to the darkness and the blackness? Hello? We seem to have lost the line from Athens. We'll try to get back to John as soon as we can. John was just taking us through the way the developments in men's clothes, and in particular the way in which the idea of a man...

man in a black suit was someone you could trust with your money, someone who really meant business. And I know from my own reading of John's work that... This is allied to the idea that authority, that what you wore stamped your authority. I mean, you may wear it lightly or not so lightly, but it's given to you. You feel it. It's something that other people see. And I always like the emphasis in John's writing about the way that the weight of clothes gave authority.

I think he talks about high priests and judges and monarchs and popes and archbishops, how they wore robes on top of robes, this idea of power. And also, I think it's a sort of final point, just sort of like... picking up on what I think John would have wanted to contribute here when he would want to talk about the way in which...

being covered up, and that men are always more covered up than women. That's a situation where women have always been permitted to wear fewer clothes than men. It's very rare, I was thinking about this today, to see sort of men with sort of like naked shoulders or... naked arms. They just don't seem to do that. So the idea behind that, if you bare your shoulders, you really don't have any authority. You're showing vulnerability, perhaps, maybe fragility.

But when John was talking, when he was beginning to talk then, I was thinking about other aspects of male dress. And I remember being at university and noticing when I walked around. how most people at the university, the dons there, the male dons, always seem to have one overriding characteristic, sartorial characteristic, and that was bagginess. They wore baggy sweaters and baggy trousers and...

baggy jackets. I once asked, there was a cultural theorist in my department at York, and I asked her for an explanation. She said, oh, she said, it's simple, really. She said, it's much like monks, you see. Monks in their voluminous habits. The dons, they... don't want to be distracted from their higher thoughts by mere corporeal sensations well of course matters may have changed since I decided to hang my hat on a pension the Sunday supplements are forever telling me about something called

The revolution in menswear. Well, is that a marketing hype or is it a reality? Well, I can find out in detail from my next guest. He's Jay McCauley-Bowstead, who's a lecturer in cultural and historical studies at London College of Fashion. And he's the author of a new book called Menswear Revolution, The Transformation of Contemporary Men's Fashion.

I suppose, you know, I sort of bridle a little when I see this word revolution because I seem to read it every Sunday supplement that I come across. But tell me, I mean, what do you mean by the menswear revolution? Yeah, well, I'm not implying that this is the first time ever that men have worn clothes in order to express their identity or have worn clothes that were decorative or exciting and dynamic, of course.

But there have been some big shifts in cultures of menswear recently. There have been shifts across three dimensions in the market. The segment of the market's grown really quite considerably, and it's growing at a... roughly double the rate of women's wear, also on the catwalk. So some of the tendencies that you were identifying about kind of conventional menswear are being challenged.

And not just on the catwalk in Topman right now, you can buy a translucent lace shirt. It's a different way of framing the male body for anything we've seen before. It's certainly a different way of framing the male body and it's a way of framing the male body which I think is being mainstreamed in a way that's distinctive and new. And also...

Talking of that process of mainstreaming, I was thinking, well, this morning I went to Greg's to buy a cup of coffee in Catford. And I saw this guy walking along the road wearing an amazing purple pair of jogging bottoms. track suit and he had it was bright purple and it had rose embroidery on the cuff of the trousers and he was wearing a kind of gilet and trainers and he was just an ordinary guy so I think These kinds of aesthetic shifts are really interesting. Do you think we overlook...

these changes because we do really have an idea that, in a way, there's something about masculine fashion which goes on being fixed and unchanging. I mean, we're talking about those suits. I mean, despite these little... these little flurries of change, these little catwalk mini-revolutions, isn't there something rather fixed and unchanging over the years about men's fashion?

Sure. I mean, the notion of the suit as being something that is fixed and unchanging is very dominant and it's kind of a proxy way of talking about gender, I think. So we have this conception of masculinity as being singular or single, coherent, immutable. And that's a notion that I think you find both in kind of conservative discourses and sometimes in feminist discourses as well. And the thing about fashion is that it, with its association with change and flux...

and playfulness is it kind of, it challenges those. So what happens then when we're talking about men's fashion, both in kind of academic conversations and elsewhere, is either... people deny it exists, or in the way that you were doing, kind of humorously, ironically, I think, or it's presented as being a kind of failed...

and inauthentic mode of masculinity. You see, it's really rather odd because, I mean, we're quite familiar, I suppose, on this programme, we've talked about it quite a bit, about the idea of femininity being something to be performed. You know, I mean, we go back to Judith Butler, the idea that... you're a woman you've got to go out and show that you're a woman demonstrate that you're a woman prove that you're a woman if you like

whereas men don't really need to perform in that way. Is that a shift that you detect? I mean, they are now being asked to perform masculinity, if you like, whatever masculinity might be. I think masculinity has always been a performance. that gender and identity in general has always been performative, and that's something Butler asserts, but Goffman says that as well, this dramaturgic model of identity.

But we're not as comfortable with that notion, or some people aren't as comfortable with that notion when it comes to talking about masculinity. We hang on to this idea of masculinity.

being something that's authentic, even when empirical data... But you see, people are still uncomfortable, aren't they, when they see men wearing clothes which don't express an orthodox masculinity. I mean, you've... personal experience of that haven't you i think you were attacked weren't you yes so this is one of the things i talk about in the introduction to the book and i thought it was important that i did talk about that because

For me, it was a moment at which the kind of contested nature of, the political nature of wearing clothes became very viscerally evident. people found the way that I presented myself so kind of challenging that they had to physically shut it down. And that's something that continues to happen, and not just in these kind of... macroaggressions but in microaggressions as well masculinity is policed and it's policed particularly in terms of fashion so that could be people being you know

called out in the street. You were stabbed simply for wearing, what, flares and a purple angora or something like that? Yes, that's right. Tell me, let's just, because we were talking before to John about historical theories, and I'm glad to say that John's sort of back on the line.

can talk to him again in a moment but just take me just historically i mean i always think if i talk about a revolution in men's fashion if i'm going to use that term then i suppose i've got to go back i mean the 60s and 70s were clearly timed when something really dramatic happened Absolutely. Yeah, so I think the 60s and 70s, there's a lot of stuff going on that's really intriguing. So...

At the formal level, how garments are constructed, if you look at the detail, if you look at the fibres that are being used, if you look at the kind of colours and pattern, all these things are shifting. And there's a kind of movement of the garment closer to the body. And of course, there are a series of subcultures and youth cultures which are feeding into... feeding into menswear, especially as we move into the early 70s. So menswear no longer is connoting authority.

dignity, it's about modernity, it's about the zeitgeist, it's about being with it. Often quite silly, colourful, silly and playful. The end is a way I think you want to talk about, by the way, in which this in a way closes down and we return in the sort of 80s, 90s to a rather more orthodox idea. I mean, you want to suggest almost perhaps that the age crisis contributed to a sort of homophobia. and gay men in fashion were dying. So we almost have a closing down of this experimentation. Well...

I think when you talk about the 80s, it's like that cliche of travel writing, that it's a city of contrasts. It's a kind of period of sharp polarisations between left and right, between progressive and conservative, and between... subculture and mainstream culture. So actually in the early 80s, subcultural menswear is extremely kind of dramatic and strange and androgynous.

But there's also this kind of corporate power look with the big, expansive shoulders and kind of 40s nostalgic tailoring, which I think as the decade progresses and we move into the early 90s, which is...

but of course the period of family values and back to basics and also a declining economy. I think all of that feeds into a much more kind of quiet, subdued... which, as you kind of suggested, the body... disappears it's interesting i mean you talk now about if we talk about now this quieter aesthetic emerging from that sort of the earlier foppishness and so on you you've got this shift and i noticed this i must say the this folky work where is

I mean, just tell me a little bit about that. I mean, it's also the difference between sportswear and tailoring. I mean, everywhere. I mean, the proliferation of shops which appear to be selling sportswear to people who can't possibly be actively in. world in sports yes well i think i think that's right there

seems to have been a breakdown, or there's an increasing porosity in a way between sportswear and tailoring, between formally distinct genres of menswear, which I think is linked to several things. It's linked to a kind of increasing... diversity of masculinity, the kind of proliferation of identities, of forms of masculinity. It's also linked, I think, to the way in which status is expressed today. And I think...

That has shifted. So no longer do we express status through knowledge of elite culture solely, the kind of pure gaze that... Pierre Bourdieu would have spoken about, but through a kind of cultural omnivorousness, so one knows about hip-hop and street style and...

avant-garde theatre. Yeah, I did find, I just got to pop in one of your last observations, which I did find interesting because people don't really go to the office so much now. There's all this working at home. And of course, you don't really put on a suit to work at home. I mean, so that...

In a way, today, what a person wears doesn't necessarily signify their status as it used to be. Things can become a bit more playful. But just hold it for a moment, Joe, because I want to go back over to John. John, I'm so sorry we lost you on the line. from Athens. I don't know whether you were able to hear what Jay was talking about, but if you did, I wonder what your comments on the ways in which he was talking about, for example, the changing ways in which men now

appear to be wearing things so that they can be looked at. I mean, in John's book, I'm just looking at some of the pictures in here, plenty of shorts and shorter trousers on the catwalk. This doesn't exactly... fit does it with what you would want to call the regimentation or the army like look of men for sure that has changed and men show their bodies more than they did but i

I think the change is not... You can see the change on the beach and you can see the change in relaxed places. But it's also true, I think, that you don't see many shorts. or many bare sleeves in the street, actually, or in a shopping mall or at a football match. And in the world of offices which still exist and money markets...

quite a lot of men, I think, have stayed pretty much as enclosed as their forebears were. And in fact, they're very different from women. Women have slowly exposed their arms, their upper arms, their... busts eventually their shoulders. With men, there's been a great taboo about ever uncovering their shoulders. And you see that still, I think. I mean, Jay mentions in his book a great fashion show.

raf simon's black palms which one can look up on the internet and as jay mentions it begins with men wearing only trousers you see their torsos you see get a very good sense of their bodies. But actually that's only the first few minutes. Afterwards all the models wear tops and I think men's dress materials now are softer and lighter and a lot more fun than they were.

but there's still a kind of clinging presence of many of the taboos, which I think still affect many men. But the clothes that Jay is talking about are hardly monochrome or constrained, are they, in the way that you were characterising men's wear?

No, there are strong reds, yellows, there are clear blues in Jay's book, but actually quite a lot of the fashions are pretty monochrome. There is a lot of black and white with a sort of, or a grey tone or a kind of... off-beige Armani-ish sort of tone not a lot of strong, vivid, contrasted colour. So I think it will still be true to say, maybe Jay would not agree, but very broadly, I still think of men as being mainly chiaroscuro, while women, as it were, make the rainbow.

And the clothes Jay mentioned are extremely innovative. And yet there are still a lot of straight lines where women's clothes are more curved. The cloths they use have more curves in their designs. And that's not because women's bodies are more curved, really.

Curves suggest movement. Women move their bodies more freely, both in life and in fashion shots. Women move their limbs more. They stretch their arms, they push their hair back, they put the weight on one leg and stand with the slants. And I think men have still... Quite a long way to go, actually, innovative as the fashions may be, to really achieve that kind of freedom. Jay, what do you want to say to that? I mean, I think it's... John's right, but it's a process of contestation and...

and flux and change. And this change hasn't happened everywhere evenly. I think it's also true that styles associated with kind of 20th century masculinity connote power. So if you look at the way that Angela Merkel dresses... or Theresa May dresses, whereas men who are trying to connote something or express something about dynamism and youth and beauty and energy dress in a different kind of way. So it's about the kind of identity claims that...

that one's making. OK, well, we're going to have to stop. Remember, John and Jay, thank you for the moment. I don't need a reason why. They come running just as fast as they can. Every girl's crazy about a sharp-breast man. Brad Paisley with Sharp Dressed Man. And, of course, by man is, well, pretty definitely meant young man. I mean, that's something we take for granted. Fashion is about youth. Being old is, well, it's almost by definition, unfashionable. ... ... ... ...

School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kenton. Julia now shifted her focus. Her soon-to-be-published paper is entitled Dress, Gender and the Embodiment of Age, Men.

and masculinities and julia's now with me in the studio now your latest study you're looking at the responses of older men to clothes and their relationship to age i think you interviewed a whole range of men aged 58 to 85 from a plurality of backgrounds, and you found the men's attitude to clothes was characterised by what you called...

Low engagement, I like the phrase. Yes, I think the norm of low engagement covers both middle years and later years, and it's the sort of slightly guarded sense that I think mainstream men have, that being interested... in fashion is something you couldn't you better not be show an interest in as it were and it goes back to some of the points being made earlier I mean it's partly I think because fashion or it's that hegemonic masculinity is in many ways defined

in contradiction to both women and to gay men. And both of those, women and gay men, are associated with fashion. So fashion's a zone of uncertainty and slight sort of danger. So when I started doing interviews with older men... and said I wanted to talk about clothes. Incidentally, they all avoid completely the word fashion. That's just anathema. But clothes were all right, as it were. Initially, there was a sort of response of, well, I don't know if I've got much to tell you sort of thing.

But then quite soon, of course, they warm to the subject because men are interested in clothes. Clothes are part of our presentation of our bodies in everyday social life and, of course, they're of interest to everyone, really. But there's this kind of suppressed, guarded quality. And what I was... It was a striking continuity because I was sort of asking around the office today and I remember...

almost that my father, I always think that he wore exactly the same clothes. It always seemed as though he had the same sports coat, the same trousers on. I mean, they don't really have this changing room moment, which, you know, would be described in your research. Expand on that a little.

for me. Across time, they do value conformity. Yes, I mean, I think the changing moment for women is really a very common experience that kicks in for women, I don't know, from their 30s onwards, where you go into the changing You look at yourself in the mirror and you think, no.

I can't wear that anymore. Ruffled décolletage in pink, it doesn't work. And that was really expressed by a lot of women in my study. Now, none of the men had had that experience at all, so they didn't really... questions addressed through the lens.

By and large, very strongly at all. That's not to say they weren't interested in questions of age. They didn't really speak, your subjects, about clothes being too young for them, or at least the category of too young had a different meaning for them. Yes, too young for women meant... I can't wear that anymore. Too young for men meant too silly and absurd and I wouldn't want to wear them. And clothes like jeans, certain sorts of caps, rips in their jeans, certain clothes like that, very tight.

The women you spoke to had a very strong sense of the idea that clothes... could be too old for them. They must be careful not to wear anything that was too old for them. But the notion of... Too old, again, was a phrase that hardly resonated with your men. No, for women, too old is quite a clear category. It's too frumpy, it's ageing, it's the kind of thing you want to keep away from. They used to define it in terms of a crimpling dress.

or a pleated skirt, but such, of course, is the changing nature of fashion that both of those items are rather fashionable at the moment. But for men, too old didn't really exist. Old-fashioned clothes, but some of the men thought that was quite something they liked. Old-fashioned clothes, old-fashioned values, you know. Decent clothes, clothes of quality, clothes that showed themselves.

their position in society. So, I mean, you might sort of have a classic old suit, a 70s suit or shoes or something which came back from that period. But there weren't a group of men in your sample who you called creative. They'd worked or still did in areas such as media.

design they had a different slightly different attitude yes they they were engaged not through the word fashion but through the word style so they were interested in wearing sharp stylish clothes and to continue wearing those i had a man in his 80s who had worked as

a photographer in the design world and he went in the interview he's wearing black jeans and a silver coloured jersey and his silver hair was sort of slicked back he looked very elegant but he'd always looked like that that was a continuity

for him, really. It wasn't, I think, an anti-aging strategy. You were talking about the way in which men didn't want to look gay, didn't want to look, as it were, like adorned or to be feminine, but you did also interview some gay men for this study. What about their...

Older gay men, I mean, what was their attitude to clothes? How did that differ? That was interesting. I think in all cases you could say there was some intersection between their sexuality and their attitude to clothes. So there was an involvement. But the important thing, I think, was there was no unitary response. There wasn't, as it were, a gay response to age. So I had one man who wore...

what you might think quite high camp clothes, sort of brightly coloured. He took me into his bedroom, which was all decorated in Moroccan style with Tom of Finland pictures and walk-in cupboards full of clothes. So he conformed to that kind of image. But I had other gay men who were relatively conventional, wore ordinary jeans, T-shirts. I had a former diplomat who wore really very mainstream clothes.

About the role of women in this, I mean, the women in partners, I mean, did the women have some effect upon these men? Did the men talk about being groomed by a fair of women folk? Well, there was some evidence of what other people have called men as insecure consumers.

in which their wives operate to negotiate their appearance. So there was a little bit of that. But to some degree it was also about, in retirement and later years, shopping was a leisure activity they did together. But some of the men... retained really very considerable total control over their clothes. The creatives, the style-oriented ones, their wives were...

only marginally involved. And I did have a small group of men who I called taken-in-hand men, whose wives had, as it were, taken-in-hand. Jay, a quick comment on this, on older men and girls. I just had an observation about Laurie and denying... of fashionability because it just strikes me that you're someone who puts yourself together very carefully and actually who is interested in visual aesthetics because you look you look really good you've got

these rings that you're wearing, you know, the way that the colours that you've... I can only thank goodness it's radio that we have now. It's radio now. Look, we have to wrap up. I'm afraid the time is out. And I have to once again apologise.

for the fact the line went down from Athens. So thank you for your patience over there, John. I'm sorry we didn't get to hear everything that you have to say today. But meanwhile, let me thank very much here in the studio. Let me thank Julia and Jay. Thank you all. Very much. Thank you.