Spinning the Ephemeral with the Sublime: Modernity and Landscape in Men’s Fashion

Textiles 1860-1900 by Fiona Anderson

Fashion History and Culture Tuesday 4 September 2012

Interdisciplinary Methodology

We are concerned with the connections between the producers of the textiles and the consumers who use them – especially in light of Cultural Geography Empire Studies Gender Studies, 284.

Tweed presaged the California-Casual Lounge/Leisure Suit

“However, by the 1860s the utilitarian shooting-jacket style had developed into the almost identical lounge jacket, which was often worn with matching trousers, thus forming the modern lounge or business suit,” Anderson 2000 in Anderson 2005, 287.

London imitation was the greatest form of flattery for tweed.

“This imitation was so rife that ‘by 1906 it was estimated that about three-quarters of the ‘Scotch Tweeds’ produced in Britain were made in England’” Gulvin 1973 in Anderson 2005, 289.

London held the key fashion intermediaries, 290.

Tweed was easy to sell as fashion: “Locke saw that the quality of the Scottish tweel

and the novelty of design offered unlimited opportunity, for novelties could meet every desire for a change of fashion. He had genius as a salesman and it may be that he was the first great salesman of Scottish woolens,” Allan 1960 in Anderson 2005, 291.

Scottish pastoral landscape powered the tweed fashion.

“Many of the colourings in Scotch Tweeds have found their origin from blending colours of the heather bloom, brackens, grasses, mosses and rocks seen on the Scottish hills and moorlands, there are mixtures of the browns, reds and gold which remind me of the moors during the autumn months when Nature runs riot with colours. Manufacturers and designers of Scotch Tweeds have received much inspiration from Nature’s colourings,” Christie n.d. in Anderson 2005, 291.

Kevin’s Global Points #1 & #2

#1 Tweed as a ‘sign’ in semiotic terms, had in fact ambiguous meaning underneath it. Whatever connotations it had to rural Scotland resided firmly within a marketing myth imagined, fantasized and constructed in London by sales-minded tailors, merchants and other fashion industry intermediaries.

#2 This also means that the production of, the construction of and the consumption of is not exclusively urban, but can take place in both and one can accrue aspirational legitimacy from the other.

Aspirational Landscape = Aspirational Lifestyle

Aspirational Landscape = Aspirational Lifestyle

“In the 1890s variations on estate tweeds like the Glenurquart and the Coigach were particularly popular, thus indicating an interest amongst urban male consumers in designs with rural links,” Gulvin 1973 in Anderson 2005, 293.

Tweed accruing the mystique and allure of the rugged Scottish highlands and concomitant sport hunting pursuits is similar to the California climate, warm-hued landscape and casual beach-side/pool-side leisure lifestyle that squarely positioned “California Causal” as highly aspirational to American men nationwide.

Highland Clearances: Dynamic Landscapes

“Landscape is a dynamic medium, in which we ‘live and move and have our being,’ but also a medium that is itself in motion from one place or time to another,” Mitchell 1994 in Anderson 2005, 295.

Kevin’s Global Point #3: The notion that landscape is moving and changing (and not static, historical) has radical implications for the environmental movement. Ecofeminism relies on this idea as bedrock for its radical liberation philosophy of the Earth via women from “inevitable” industrial patriarchy and a capitalist reductionist paradigm.

Consuming the Highlands, Consummating the Empire….

“Hunting represented the most perfect expression of global dominance in the late nineteenth century. Hunting required all of the most virile attributes of the imperial male – courage, endurance, individualism (adaptable to national ends), sportsmanship . . . resourcefulness, a mastery of environmental signs and a knowledge of natural history,” Mackenzie 1998 in Anderson 2005, 296.

Empires move outward in space as a way of moving forward in time . . .

“The discourse of imperialism, which conceives itself precisely (and simultaneously) as an expansion of landscape understood as an inevitable, progressive development in history . . . Empires move outward in space as a way of moving forward in time . . . And this movement is not confined to the external, foreign fields toward which empire directs itself; it is typically accompanied by a renewed interest in the re-presentation of the home landscape, the “nature” of the imperial center,” Mitchell 1994 in Anderson 2005.

Now to fashion:

“This latter tendency to oscillate between an unchanging historical past and an ephemeral present, has much in common with the dual role of fashion within modernity as encapsulating the transitory and the eternal or sublime,” Anderson 2005, 299.

“The apparent opposition between the eternal and the ephemeral is rendered obsolete by the leap that needs the past to continue with the contemporary,” Lehmann 2000 in Anderson 2005, 300.