Chloe Chapin

In early nineteenth-century America, masculine formal eveningwear evolved into a uniform ensemble of a black tailcoat and trousers and a white shirt, waistcoat, and bowtie: a style that has changed little since. In my dissertation, I investigate the origins of this style of dress in order to consider broader relationships between masculinity and power.

Focusing on the process of sartorial standardization between 1820 and 1850, I examine the origins of the male evening suit in two ways: as an assemblage of material goods that adorned masculine American bodies, and as a symbol of power that emerged out of a particular historical moment. The rise of American cities, urban life, and industrial capitalism led to enormous prosperity and new ideas of equality and democracy among white men, but also to an increased instability of the masculine self, particularly as political authority and American citizenship were being redefined. I interrogate the critical shift in attitudes toward masculine adornment in the early nineteenth century, and the resultant ways in which men in early America chose to model themselves after (or in notable contrast to) their French and British counterparts as they reconceived attitudes about aristocracy, authority, and masculinity.

Antebellum American formality was a performance of class that was often disguised as the embodiment of morality and was part of a greater transition from public acts of piety to more secular performances of social status. When white American men marked themselves as critically different from both their European forebears and their Native and African American neighbors, they created newly American interpretations of both formality and civility. In this way, masculine evening suits articulated white racial formation through material choices in everyday life.

Building on scholarship linking gender studies with American social, political, and material history, I use the exterior body of the formal suit to examine interior relationships between independence, responsibility, and supremacy, focusing on themes of precarity, conformity, and exclusion. Through the examination of masculine evening suits, I consider how these connections are still being continually, materially reinscribed today.