Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine?: Revisiting J.C. Flügel’s Psychology of Clothes

Abstract

In this article, I revisit J.C. Flügel’s conception of the “Great Masculine Renunciation” and its lasting effect on fashion scholarship. Coined in Flügel’s 1930 book The Psychology of Clothes, the term was quickly adopted by early dress historians, though it has often been used in extraction from its original context. Flügel’s framework of psychology both illuminated and limited his analysis of men’s clothing: I compare his early 20th-century psychological analysis to the real historical style changes between the 18th and 19th centuries, and the profound, lasting impact they had not just on men, but on broader understandings of gender, class, and nationality. I challenge Flügel’s definition of the changes in fashions that did occur at the end of the 18th century as essentially about masculinity—by far the more profound impact has been the associated assigning of women’s dress to the character of “fashion,” a role which had previously been held by both genders of the upper class. While it is not invalid to consider this esthetic shift in terms of a loss for men, it also allowed for women’s fashion to be marked as fashion, and for women and nonwhite, non-western, or non-heteronormative men to be marked as “other.”

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