Embodying the military: Uniforms (original) (raw)
Related papers
Decorated Men: Fashioning the French Soldier, 1852-1914
Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress Body & Culture 7.1: 3-37., 2003
This article reintroduces the French soldier into the fashionable landscape of the nineteenth century. Using the Second Empire cavalry officer as a case study, it takes issue with John Flugel's theory of the Great Masculine Renunciation by exploring the officer's sexualized image in caricatures, photographs and literature. It then addresses the constant dialogue between military uniforms and women's fashions. In the section “Fashioning Uniformity,” the uniform embodies the tension between standardizing nationalist projects and the struggle for individual identity. Finally, it explores how the French Army tried to use fashion to rehabilitate its public image after losing the Franco-Prussian War.
Uniform: Clothing and Discipline in the Modern World , 2019
In Hermann Broch's e Sleepwalkers (1932), the protagonist Joachim von Pasenow ponders the qualities of military uniform:. .. it is the uniform's true function to manifest and ordain order in the world, to arrest the confusion and fl ux of life, just as it conceals whatever in the human body is so and fl owing, covering up the soldier's underclothes and skin. .. Closed up in his hard casing, braced in with straps and belts, he begins to forget his own undergarments, and the uncertainty of life. .. 1
The Great Male Renunciation: Men's Dress Reform in Inter-war Britain
Journal of Design History, 1996
Modernity was a mixed blessing. In 1929, the Men's Dress Reform Party was established in response to what its founders regarded as the heinous modern age. One of them, John Carl Flugel (a psychologist from University College London), contended that since the end of the eighteenth century men had been progressively ignoring brighter, more elaborate, and more varied forms of masculine ornamentation by 'making their own tailoring the more austere and ascetic of the arts'. He called this event 'The Great Masculine Renunciation', or the occasion when men 'abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful' and 'henceforth aimed at being only useful'. 1 In the face of inter-war feminism and the denigration of masculinity, the professionals who joined the Men's Dress Reform Party regarded it as their duty to lobby for the aesthetic liberation of men. This article examines male dress reform between the wars. The experience of warfare between 1914 and 1918 was crucial in focusing attention on the bodies of men. Dress reform was necessary not only for the sake of enhancing masculine beauty, but also to prevent the further degeneration of the 'British race'. Health and hygiene were high on the agenda of male dress reformers. Although they failed to achieve their more grandiose hopes, they were representative of a broader movement towards freeing men from constraints imposed by the state, employers, and the tailoring trade.
The story of … the military jacket
2014
Fashion and war don’t seem an obvious pairing, but the military jacket is a fashion staple. It may take the form of a double-breasted dress uniform with brass buttons and epaulettes, trimmed in rock star braid, or it may be a khaki combat jacket, worn with Doc Martens and a scowl. Here I explore how these two forms of the military jacket were frogmarched into fashion...
On March 23, 1916, J.S. Handley noted in his diary that despite the drudgery, death, and destruction that surrounded him in the trenches, fighting in the war as a working-class man proved far more " exciting and rewarding than life in the factory. " Although he dearly missed his family, proving himself a man by risking his life for his country alleviated the " utter pain " he felt because he could not provide for his family without the help of his wife. He articulated his hope that once " everything was said and done, me and my family could become consumers rather than beggars…shed these powerful uniforms for my own clothing…and become a true man even as a working-man. " After the sacrifices he and his fellow working-class men made for Britain, he asserted that " under no circumstances can [Britain] return to the way [it was before]…Victorian England was dead. " 1 Indeed these sentiments intimate what would occur during the interwar period, and clothing consumption patterns conveyed shifting ideas about masculinity. When situated in a socio-cultural context where the public can see and assess them, clothes become imbued with significance and certain meanings. As Joanna Entwistle observes, " The individual and the very personal act of getting dressed is an act of preparing the body for the social world, making it appropriate, acceptable, indeed respectable and possibly even desirable. " 2 Male clothing choices in the decades prior to World War II became primarily influenced by the desire to belong to a particular socioeconomic class and to attain a 1 J.S. Handley, diary entry, Imperial War Museums Archives (Hereafter cited as IWMA), 53-55. 2 Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 7.
Modern Philology, 2005
Talking Garments CLOTHING WAS A SYMBOLIC MEDIUM for personal, lineal, social, and political messages in the courts of the Hundred Years War. Charles d'Orleans, as a young poet not yet in English captivity, had song lyrics embroidered along the two sleeves of a robe, with 568 pearls making up the musical notes to accompany the words "madame, je suis plus joueulx" [my lady, 1 am more happy]. 1 Charles and his contemporaries covered their clothing with mottos such as "Ie droit chemin:' "y me tarde:' and "syker as pe wodebynd:' Often the embroidered motto accompanied an appropriate visual sign: leafy branches for "the right road:' a slow-growing oak for "1 tarry here:' and twining vines for "tenacious as the honeysuckle:'2 Motto and sign together were called a badge, a devise in French, and on occasion these badges spoke to each other: Louis d'Orleans's belligerent "Je l'envie" [1 challenge him] with its knotty stick inspired his rival John the Fearless to reply with "lk houd" [1 hold firm] and a carpenter's plane. 3 Poets articulated symbolic associations for colors in clothing: black for austerity and mourning, blue for constancy, white for joy.4 Most stable of all, though still subject to innovations, were heraldic marks of identity. Knights wore their coats of arms for combat but also on ceremonial cloaks and robes, and women's robes impaled their husbands' arms with those of their families of birth. Arms themselves could talk (annes parlantes, canting arms): Roger de Trumpington bore trumpets, the Wingfield family bore wings, and the memorial brass of Robert de Setvans is designed to show seven winnowing baskets (sept vans) scattered across his shield and battle dress. 5 The very garments that make such assertions also convey enigmas. Who is "my lady:' what is the "right road:' where is it that "1 tarry?" Personal signs tend to articulate a bearer they simultaneously mystify. One could trace this doubleness to the function of dress itself, which both presents and conceals a body. One could trace it to the nature of language itself, which never quite closes the gap between words and meanings. This chapter passes over the problem of origins to argue more narrowly that, in the later Middle Ages, personal identity and secular ceremony make