Reviews for Ready-made Democracy A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860

The average rating for Ready-made Democracy A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-01-21 00:00:00 Shannon Edwards The title of this book claims this is "A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic," until 1860, 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 the 1830s to 1860. 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 over 100 years (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 the 18th 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 middle-class white males dressed the same in the mid-19th century. I guess I would mind this less if the book was actually readable instead of drowning in the academese spoken by the author.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-03-14 00:00:00 Christopher Godfrey Clothing 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 ready-mades. Ready-made 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 ready-made clothes with starched paper collars driven not by the 18th century evil of luxury, but the 19th century enemy of virtue, desire. Mass consumption and mass production fed one another, the sewing machine was not invented until 1852, until then the seamstress was the machine, put-out, working 18 hours 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.