Fashioning the Gentleman: A Study of Henry Poole and Co., Savile Row Tailors 1861–1900

Abstract

The visual language of nineteenth-century English aristocratic life, as typified by Savile Row tailoring, has retained a cultural potency and commercial appeal to the present day, despite an almost total collapse of the social, economic and cultural formation from which it arose. The lack of published historical information available to explain this scenario inspired this research, which is based on my case-study of “Henry Poole and Co., Savile Row Tailors 1861–1900” (1998) and on the company’s archive now housed at their premises at 15 Savile Row. This article explores the relationship between shifts in the composition and lifestyle of the late nineteenth-century wealth, social and power elite and the development of male fashion practices in that period. It argues that what the social historian David Cannadine refers to as the “glamour” of the English aristocracy held such an appeal as to survive the period of their decline (Cannadine 1996: 2). Elite lifestyles and the clothing associated with them were however reformulated by the turn of the century, owing to the broadening of “society,” the influence of wealthy newcomers and changes within the aristocracy itself. This examination will further enable an assessment of the links between class, national identity, masculinities and the broader development of male fashionable identities within an urban context.

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