Selling Style
Subtitle: Clothing and Social Change at the Turn of the Century
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: May 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9780812237283
Subjects: American history; Economic history; Sociology, Social Studies; United States; History; Corporate & Business History - General; Social Science; Business / Economics / Finance; Social change; History: American; USA; Industries - Fashion & Textile Industry; Industries - Textile Industry; United States - 19th Century/Turn of the Century; Business & Economics / Retailing; Clothing trade; General; 19th century; Fashion merchandising
First sentence: In 1895, when the editorial committee for a proposed encyclopedia of American industry needed someone to write a history of clothing manufacture, they turned to the head of a company that claimed to be "the largest manufacturers and retailers of fine clothing, ready to wear, in the United States."
Description: "In Selling Style, Rob Schorman documents the fascinating and important relationship among clothing, gender roles, and cultural expectations at a significant moment in American history." "Men were the first to adopt ready-made clothing en masse, and during this period most wore factory-made suits that were produced in large quantities. In contrast, the acceptance of ready-made apparel in women's fashion lagged far behind, and much clothing for women continued to be custom-made for the individual. Changes in production techniques and consumer markets in part shaped this development in the clothing industry, but according to Schorman the root cause of the schism between men's and women's apparel was culturally driven. By examining changing styles and attitudes toward fashion as expressed in advertisements, popular magazines, mail-order catalogs, and etiquette books, Selling Style reveals that wider social dynamics and gender roles had a much more significant influence on the clothing industry than historians have found. The book also depicts the advance of consumerism as more piecemeal and conflicted than previous histories imply, with cultural values continually made and remade through everyday acts of consumption, and in the process providing the groundwork for twentieth-century approaches to gender, selfhood, and national identity."--Jacket.