BA1 CLASS READING - INTRODUCTION TO FASHION THEORY - CONSUMER CULTURE (BEAU BRUMMELL) GROUP SEMINAR PRESENTATION (THE PERSONAL ONE) - this reading is extracts (...) from the set text. 

FASHION THEORY - CONSUMER CULTURE

Consumer culture

A culture permeated by consumerism in which people take their identity from the value of the goods they purchase as much as from social values. (Craik, 2009, p.323).


... the fashion machine sped up in Europe with the coming of industrialisation and urbanisation ...  Once there were means of producing and distributing goods that could be purchased by other people, the trade in goods created an economy of value alongside consumer markets. People could buy a cultural identity and thus social credentials. Mass production accelerated the process, and with mass-produced goods came mass markets for clothing and fashion. At this point, fashion became as much a consumer culture as it was a culture of identity, status, and role.(Craik, 2009, p.67).

BEAU BRUMMELL

Beau Brummell has a reputation based on leadership in fashion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However his fastidious attention to clothes was only part of the story. He was devoted to the management of impressions, and his behaviour was a device for evoking and controlling the effects he had on others ...

Beau Brummell was born George Brummell in 1778 in London. His grandfather was a valet, and his father, Billy Brummell, was secretary and right-hand man to Lord North. Billy Brummell, as one of the rising civil servants, had grown prosperous and managed to send his sons to Eton ...

After the death of both his parents by 1794, George, at fifteen, went to Oxford University. He only stayed a few months. He managed to convince the chief executor of his father's will to allow him to use his inheritance to buy an army commission. At seventeen, he took up the rank of cornet in the glamorous 10th Light Dragoons, the Prince of Wales's own regiment.

In the army, Brummell not only met the heir to the throne, Prince George, who was in his early thirties, but, as a member of the military, began to circulate within the same aristocratic social circle. The English aristocracy was a tight elite, and their numbers were small, consisting of no more than 1,200 ultrafashionable people, who closely controlled their image and access to their social circle.

Brummell was required to purchase the alarmingly expensive uniform of the 10th Light Dragoons uniform ... This was Brummell's passport to the elite class.

Full-length trousers, or pantaloons, as they were called, had been adopted by the highly fashionable Dragoons. Long pants were a new concept to both the middle and upper classes ... European gentlemen had, prior to the French Revolution, indicated their class by wearing knee-length breeches. The revolution had seen the adoption of the pants of workers, the sans culottes. The full-length trouser was exported back to Britain and absorbed into the military uniform as pantaloons ...

The 10th Light Dragoons were a cavalry regiment and horses were a part of that uniform. As dress is also a technology, the relationship between the horse and the rider came into play. The British style of riding had developed into a riding system of controlling the horse with one's legs. These pants, knitted on stocking frames, enabled close contact between the horse and the rider, and the absence of underwear increased the rider's sensitivity (Kelly 2006: 126).

These close-fit pants also reflected the neoclassical fashions of the day. The white or cream pants showed every fold and bump of the genitals, like the classical white marble statues that were being brought to England from Greece and Italy. The fashion for women at the time was sheer white muslin tunics that revealed the anatomy beneath.

Brummell continued to wear this style of trousers after leaving the 10th Dragoons in 1799. Leather stirrups ensured that Brummell's pants stretched from braces to feet. He employed tailors experienced in military dress, who willingly complied with his exacting demands. He wore plain, lightly starched shirts with the collar high enough almost to touch his ears. This was followed by a triangle of fine Irish muslin neck cloth that was perfectly tied and became the trademark of the dandies who followed his lead. His sombre-coloured jackets were padded between the lining and the outer fabric, sculpting the appearance of a muscular body beneath.

Brummell's body beneath his clothes was subjected to constant attention to weight and a strict regime of cleanliness. He performed a daily levee (a ritual of dressing before an audience) for his coterie to observe how he dressed, to learn the exactitude of the wardrobe, to care for the body, and to display the understood chic that became his hallmark. Even the Prince of Wales attended these morning routines, which is curious, as a levee was considered a practice of the monarchy that was viewed by his subjects ...

Dressed as such, he set his sights on continuing to mix in the same tight social world of the Prince of Wales, under whom Brummell had served. After resigning his commission, he entered full-time into London society, where he was in growing demand. Here he acquired the nickname 'Beau' Brummell.

He used his inheritance to establish a modest London address, from which he sortied out every day into society. He had no occupation. He relied on situations, scenes, and encounters. His daily routine consisted of his famous entrances and exits at exclusive clubs, private balls and entertainments, soirees, fashionable promenades, racetracks, private gambling clubs, and elegant salons ... He perceived that the ceremony of style was what separated the aristocracy from the other classes ...

... Brummell was on show at all times. Uniforms contributed to a regime of discipline and masculinity that was well defined in the eighteenth century. Continuing this practice, it was not only the meticulous self-surveillance he learned in the military, but also his awareness of having an audience. His conspicuousness was a source of continuous fascination in gossip, reportage, and anecdotes by diarists, chroniclers, and biographers.

When entertaining, Brummell positioned himself to be seen. At one of his exclusive clubs, Whites, Brummell would arrange his place to be in the bow of the windows at the front, where he would spend hours in conversation with his circle of acquaintances ...

His extravagant lifestyle and gambling debts mounted to such as extent that he was forced to leave England for France in 1816. he slipped away quietly, as he could no longer maintain the position he had constructed for himself in London society. He lived in Calais, where he did not require a passport ...

Unfortunately, Brummell contracted syphilis. There is no record of when this occurred. He has been described as asexual and never formed a conventional sexual relationship ... It was his management of impressions, the perfection of every aspect of his behaviour and dress, and his manipulation of social settings with ultimate subtlety for which he is remembered. Rising up to a life of high aestheticism and decadence from the upper middle class, he created the concept or cult of the dandy, which continues today. (Peoples in Craik, 2009, pp.93-5).

KEY TERMS

sans culottes
neoclassicsm
levee
dandy/dandyism

KEY POINTS FOR DISCUSSION

1. The importance of the aristocracy and the army in the early 19th C as a part of elite society ...

2. The development of men's trousers from the French Revolution and new military uniform ...

3. Neoclassicism's display of the body and how this was adopted by Beau Brummell ...

4. Beau Brummell's sense of 'performance' for his audience ... 


5. Contemporary dandyism ...

REFERENCE

Craik, J. (2009) Fashion - the key concepts. Oxford: Berg.