Menswear

A preview of my book Menswear Revolution published in May 2018 https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/menswear-revolution-9781474289016/.

In recent years, menswear has moved decisively center stage. Menswear Revolution investigates the transformation of men's fashion through the lens of shifting masculinities, examining how its increasing diversity has created new ways for men to explore and express their identities. Harnessing sustained market growth and creative dynamism on the runway, ground-breaking designers from Raf Simons and Hedi Slimane to Craig Green and Grace Wales Bonner have revolutionized the discipline with their bold re-imaginings of the male wardrobe.

Analysing the role of the media in shaping attitudes to men's fashion, Menswear Revolution studies how competing narratives of masculinity are reflected in popular discourse. Taking us from the mod and peacock revolutions of the 1960s to the new wave aesthetics of the 1980s, the book explores historical precedents for today's menswear scene – and looks at the evolution of the 'ideal' male body, from the muscular to the lean and boyish.

Combining interviews with fashion professionals with close analyses of garments and advertising, Menswear Revolution provides an authoritative account of menswear design today. Highlighting its relationship to changing concepts of gender, the book provides a much-needed update to scholarship on masculinity, fashion and the body.

This article analyses the role of designer Hedi Slimane in shaping the development of menswear in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Slimane's collections for Dior Homme in the early 2000s caught the imagination of the fashion press with their combination of a radically slim silhouette, precise tailoring and androgynous flourishes. Along with the commercial success he brought to Dior, Slimane catalyzed a renewed interest in menswear, the aesthetic he proposed acting as a prototype for men's fashion throughout the decade. By contrasting Slimane's slender, ambiguous and self-consciously elegant look with the sporty muscularity of the 1990s catwalk, the article explores the shifting nature of male identity in the new millennium as fashionable men found new ways of consuming their masculinity.

In 2013, the Metropolitan Museum hosted an exhibition of punk-inspired fashion entitled Punk: Chaos to Couture. The exhibition emphasized the 'spectacular' elements of the subculture, reflecting a narrative that dominates accounts of punk dress, whereby it is presented as a site of art school creativity and disjuncture with the past. This is an important aspect of punk dress, but photos of bands and audiences reveal that there was much more to British punk style in the 1970s than what was being sold on London's King's Road. Heeding calls to trouble the boundary between the spectacular and the ordinary in subculture studies, this article looks at the ordinariness of 1970s British punk dress, arguing that we should understand punk dress in terms of mass-market commodities, not just customization and designer fashion. Many of these commodities were worn by the skinheads who preceded punk, and this article explores this subcultural continuity by focusing on the role of the Dr. Marten boot and the Harrington jacket in first-and second-wave British punk dress. It does so through discussion of the Cockney Rejects, the 1979 BBC television dramatization of the Sham 69 album That's Life and the Undertones.

Initially, clothing was mostly a way to cover the human body. Although it began as a practical solution to a set of physical and symbolical needs, it rapidly become clear to some that it was possible to profit from that simultaneously individual and collective necessity, making that work for others, so that they wouldn't need to do it themselves. When these people started charging for those goods and services, tailors were born. " The knowledge and the art of tailoring, cutting and sowing the fabric – the two basic features when building a clothing pattern – developed gradually over Europe between the 12 th and the 14 th Centuries. " (BOYER, 1996) This research aims to explore, question and analyse the differences between handmade and industrial tailoring. The growing worry with the fact that handmade tailoring may be disappearing was the motivation to research the evolution of menswear, since it developed side by side with both handmade and industrial tailoring through times and to our days. It can be conclude that there is a market for both of these clothing options, each with their own specific characteristics, allowing them to coexist without harming each other.

Members of online menswear communities spend their leisure time engaged in extensive textual discussions of menswear. This article presents some of the findings from a study of these online menswear communities. It is based on an online ethnography of six online menswear forums and 51 in-depth interviews with men from Britain, Canada and the United States who use them. It details how the research participants , despite their passion for clothing, produced a rhetorical distance between style and fashion. Fashion was rejected in favour of what was described as 'classic menswear', 'style', 'timeless style' or simply 'clothes'. This was a productive critique of fashion's temporality, with online menswear communities offering a more democratic , inclusive and participatory alternative to men's fashion. However, this rejection of fashion also reflected the persistent gendering of fashion. As spaces for the discussion of clothing, as opposed to fashion, online menswear communities allowed men to enjoy clothes and consumption without their masculinity being tainted by fashion's associations with femininity.

This article analyzes the sartorial biographies of four Canadian men to explore how the suit is understood and embodied in everyday life. Each of these men varied in their subject positions-body shape, ethnicity, age, and gender identity-which allowed us to look at the influence of men's intersectional identities on their relationship with their suits. The men in our research all understood the suit according to its most common representation in popular culture: a symbol of hegemonic masculinity. While they wore the suit to embody hegemonic masculine configurations of practice-power, status, and rationality-most of these men were simultaneously marginalized by the gender hierarchy. We explain this disjuncture by using the concept of hybrid masculinity and illustrate that changes in the style of hege-monic masculinity leave its substance intact. Our findings expand thinking about hybrid masculinity by revealing the ways subordinated masculinities appropriate and reinforce hegemonic masculinity.

This paper critically examines the nature of participation amongst adolescent to young-adult, heterosexual males, approximately ages 15-25, in the sphere of fashion, and additionally explores the notion of sartorial presentation or "style" as a function of age. Framed with reference to historical men's dress practice, and the respective sociocultural institutions-most notably against midcentury postmodernity, as well as against the continually controversial meta-modernity-it is uncovered how agents such as masculinity, media, and aspiration to social norms work to manipulate youth males' perception of, and expression through fashion. Moreover, it is theorized how the sartorial stylistic discontents between traditional, and "new" masculinities can be ameliorated across generational lines.

The button-down shirt is an icon of at least two nationally-determined fashion traditions: The United States' ostensibly upper-class Ivy League style and Britain's ostensibly working-class subcultural street style. This article explores how the button-down shirt has been translated in these different national contexts. I will use Roland Barthes' notion of 'fashion narrative' to elucidate the close relationship between the button-down shirt and the 'national imaginaries' of the United States and Britain. I will first discuss the origins of these two fashion narratives and explore the links between them. To illustrate the lasting impact of these fashion narratives, I will then compare the modern-day publicity materials of two shirt companies closely associated with the button-down shirt in their respective national contexts. PHOTO 1 Caption: An original Troy Guild (a 1960s campus competitor of Gant, much sought-after by collectors of the Ivy Look)

As is the case with many other PhD projects, this has been a long journey. To explain where the journey ended, it might be important to mention, first, that the scholarly disciplines I have been engaged with in my thesis reflect, in many ways, the institutions that I have been affiliated with. Starting out with the humanities, in the form of a BA in musicology and an MA in Culture and Communication from Copenhagen University, I have been influenced by these disciplines in the way that I understand how socio-cultural structures are formed and developed. With this post--constructionist view in my backpack, there are certain issues that I continue to see from the vantage point of a humanistic and cultural studies perspective. Second, I have been affected in my work by the fact that after earning my MA degree,

This paper examines the Japanese crown prince and emperor Hirohito during the 1920s to think more critically about how fashion historians can analyze “western” dress in non-western contexts. In particular, this essay looks at Hirohito’s embrace of new forms of middle-class menswear —particularly sportswear and the lounge suit — to signal fundamental shifts in the relationship between monarch and subject. These innovations rested upon far more than simply imitating western centers of men’s fashion. Instead, this paper argues that to understand the meaning of “western” clothing styles in non-western contexts, fashion studies needs a more sophisticated paradigm than the term “western clothes.” While some garments carried strong resonances of their European antecedents, Japanese men like Hirohito adopted them primarily for what they could do in Japan, while also understanding their potential for integrating Japan into the broader world.

Gentry magazine (1951-1957) was a highly unique men’s lifestyle publication, which featured high-quality content and photographs which not only reflected North American upper/upper-middle class male culture of the time, but also influenced it.  Gentry featured content on men’s attire, food, literature, art, cars, and the outdoors, and was pioneering in its use of hand-pasted tipped-in pages and plates, high quality paper, and ephemeral inserts such as die cuts, fabric swatches, booklets, and fishing flies.  The ROM Library recently acquired a full run of Gentry via a donation, which compliments our already very good collection of historical research resources relating to menswear.

The Globalising Men’s Style Conference will now be taking place online from the 21st to the 23rd of July. https://globalisingmensstyle.wordpress.com/

Over the past two decades men’s style has become an increasingly dynamic field. At the same time, the dominance of Western fashion capitals has been challenged by innovative menswear, street style, and high-end design emanating out of new centres of creative practice.

This conference investigates men’s style in locales underrepresented in existing academic literature while exploring the connections between distant geographies (both today and in the past). Shifting notions of masculinity as expressed through clothing are also addressed.

In this essay I address a few advertisements that appear in the April 2015 issue of GQ magazine, and how the ads portray different male stereotypes and social paradigms, their cultural significance and the various ways that they are detrimental to society.