In his new book, The Cut of His Coat, Brent Shannon posits that consumerism was an essential component in the construction of middle-class masculinity, differentiating it from both upper-class ostentation and lower-class imitation. Middle-class fashionability, Shannon argues, was not a matter of social emulation whereby fashions and preferences trickled down from the higher to the lower orders as materials and styles become economically accessible. Rather, middle-class male fashion was the product of bourgeois values, tastes, and lifestyles. Less formal garments like the comfortable, more flexible, ready-to-wear lounge suit, for example, were the product of the real experiences of late nineteenth-century middle-class life.

Tying together literary texts, trade and lifestyle publications, advice manuals, advertising, and cartoons, Shannon identifies the forces influencing men's sartorial decisions that expressed gender and class identities. Shannon's main argument is not just that masculine consumption existed as a valued pursuit but instead that it was a fundamental aspect of middle-class masculine identities and values in the late nineteenth century. He argues that “new ideologies of manhood were constructed through new kinds of mass-produced clothes, through new kinds of sartorial markers, and through new kinds of consumer values” (11). Rather than being defined by their lack of fashion, middle-class men remained actively invested in exhibiting themselves, their class position, and their sexuality through the clothes they wore. Indeed, the so-called Great Masculine Renunciation of fashion in the nineteenth century was anything but. Even as advice literature warned men of the dangers of too great an immersion into the world of fashion, they also made clear the absolute necessity of paying close attention to one's appearance. While David Kuchta has shown how the dark suit had become the uniform of a middle class sartorially demonstrating its sobriety and superiority (The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity, England, 1550–1850 [Berkeley, 2002]), Shannon demonstrates that many men nonetheless continued to follow fashion, embrace color, and express themselves through their clothing.

Shannon positions his study against scholars who identify the interwar period as the first major expression of masculine consumerism. He argues instead that a rich culture of consumption existed among middle-class men from the nineteenth century. This position is most strongly argued in his chapter on the men's lifestyle periodical. Fashion (established 1898) included features on clothes, advice on style, notes on shops, and even articles on sports, fads, leisure, and humor decades before scholars identify similar publications in the 1920s and 1930s. These later magazines carefully disassociated male consumerism from women and femininity. In Fashion, however, Shannon argues provocatively that the desire for style and concern with self-presentation was largely ungendered.

Much of Shannon's study will feel familiar to scholars of masculinity and consumerism. Looking at the same period in The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion, and City Life, 1860–1914 (Manchester, 1999), Christopher Breward also identified the importance of fashion and consumerism to understanding masculinity and middle-class identities. While The Cut of His Coat reiterates Breward's concern that we not be misled by the power of “separate spheres” ideology in both contemporary accounts and historians’ studies to exclude men from worlds of fashionable consumption, Shannon goes further to interrogate the power of fashion in the construction of class and gender identities. With the nineteenth-century development of ready-to-wear options, expanding markets, and increased affluence, new sartorial choices available to the middle-class man provided a means by which his class and gender identities could be expressed.

This attention to the dynamics of class is one of the strongest features of Shannon's book. The chapter on competing masculinities and class positions develops this point most successfully through discussion of the dandy, masher, swell, and gent. Middle-class male consumers, Shannon points out, were left relatively unharmed by the negative connotations of these identity positions. Many of the characteristics of the dandy—attention to personal display and knowledge of fashion—were ultimately incorporated into a comfortable middle-class style. Associations with effeminacy after the Oscar Wilde trials were then projected away from the middle class and onto the seemingly dissolute upper orders. And the masher, identified by the middle class as working- or lower-middle class, was defined by his failed attempts at fashionability and lack of style knowledge. In the end, the masher's ignorance (and class position) would inevitably be displayed in his appearance. This projection of negative connotations onto the upper and lower classes left the middle-class male's interest in and knowledge of fashion insulated from accusations of deviance, femininity, or class pretensions.

The opportunity afforded by acceptable fashionability among middle-class men gave them the space to rebel against the social hegemony of the upper orders. By embracing styles and fashions that were more practical, comfortable, and casual, middle-class men defined themselves as more masculine than the upper-class gentleman. Shannon asserts that instead of a constant need to keep up with their social “betters” through emulation and conspicuous consumption, middle-class men instead used the markers of fashion to create and define their own social identity as valuable, valid, and superior. Here Shannon finds the power of middle-class styles and identities that would continue through the twentieth century.

The popular and media forces that guide and influence today's men (including the so-called metrosexual) have a great deal in common with those that acted on the dandy or masher. Shannon has demonstrated that widespread male interest in appearance, fashion, and consumption is not merely a twentieth-century phenomenon, and its origins are not in the interwar period. Rather, it is in the late nineteenth-century middle-class ascendancy when men's affluence and sartorial opportunities expanded that we can see male consumerism emerging. While some of the overall arguments will feel familiar, the individual chapters of this book illuminate an underdeveloped field of study and bring together important discussions of fashion, media, and class from a formative period for modern gender identities.