Sex and Suits [Hardcover]

"Sex and Suits" traces the evolution of dress, in men and women, from the abandonment of traditional dress and the adoption of "fashion" in Western Europe of the late Middle Ages until just a decade ago. Author Anne Hollander is an art historian who chooses to view dress as art, not as specifically symbolic of socio-political circumstances. I found this a welcome limitation. Although the creation of fashion 600 years ago was, indeed, the result of an extraordinary change in the self-images of Western humans, there is more than enough fascinating and revealing material to be covered in discussing fashion in its own right. Hollander asserts that male fashion has always been the avant-garde, with women's fashion only recently having caught up. And she focuses particularly on the evolution of the tailored suit, that neo-classic staple of truly modern dress that appeared in its current form about 2 centuries ago.

"Sex and Suits" observes that fashion came to be in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when men and women began to express their sex by dressing differently, although still making use of the same basic forms and ornamentation. The author then notes the divergence, if not actually schism, that occurred during the 17th century with the formation of the first professional dressmakers guild. Then, for the first time, women designed and constructed women's clothes and male tailors made men's, creating a difference in the way clothes were conceived and made that would take 150 years to change and whose effects last into our own time. As the 19th century approaches, the book temporarily abandons discussion of female fashion to concentrate on the genesis of the modern male suit, the quintessence of Modern Fashion. The suit is described and lauded from its neo-classicist roots to its only slightly altered contemporary form. Eventually, we pick up the progression of women's fashion again, from the first male "fashion designers" for women in mid-19th century Paris, to the late-19th and early-20th century, when women's fashion finally became modern, on to the throwback years of the 1950s, with its conformity and frivolity. The second half of the 20th century sees men's and women's fashion become thoroughly modern, converging and borrowing from one another, including the universal adoption of jeans and t-shirts that were previously men's work clothes and undergarments.

The last section of "Sex and Suits" offers an interesting essay on how and why contemporary people choose to dress as they do. Anne Hollander sees fashion, itself, as a good thing with great personal and social implications, but never calls any particular fashion either good or bad. She explains what the fashion was and why . Her prose is literate and packed with detail. "Sex and Suits" shows us just how much has been and continues to be communicated through dress, and banishes the thought that clothes are unimportant.

Marvelous cultural/intellectual history of fashion and dress, with a provocative and persuasive thesis that men's basic fashion of the last several hundred years - the suit - has actually driven Western clothing aesthetics, including with respect to the general direction of women's clothing. And that for a reason that I, at least, found intriguingly counterintutive but persuasive: the suit is an aesthetically superior form of clothing. Men's dress is the long term driver of Western clothing, not women's dress and even less what Hollander calls women's "Fashion." Anne Hollander is a singular intellectual and a wonderful essayist.

Forget the titillating implication of the title, this is a serious
and well-written history of how we came to wear the clothes
we do. Undoubtedly loaded with the author's biases, it still
gives some perspective on the styles, especially in men's suits,
that we rarely think about. Not a "Gee, Whiz" type of book but worth reading.