“Suitable For All Parts”: The Transformation of Menswear in the Early American Republic, 1780-1830

Abstract

In the period between the end of the Revolution and the Jacksonian upheaval of the 1830s, American society transformed. This transformation was visible in the way Americans dressed. The evolution of elite dress is well known. Less appreciated is the role of dress in shaping the political and cultural identities of those adjacent to the fashion mainstream. In both the urban mid-Atlantic and in rural New England, ordinary men redefined the style and significance of democratic dress in the new American Republic. The story of early American men’s fashion is incomplete so long as it ignores the man in the street. The first chapter of this thesis examines the stylistic transformations in plebeian menswear from the end of the Revolution through the first decade of the nineteenth century using data from over 2,700 Philadelphian runaway advertisements. The second chapter examines the dissemination of men’s fashion into the American countryside based on three rural tailors’ account books and extant menswear in New England archives. Collectively, developments in rural and urban menswear point towards a more diverse and unruly democratization of dress in the early Republic than historic fashion narratives focused on elite dress usually permit. Historians typically tell the story of men's fashion during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries from the perspective of the “better” sort. This study challenges such class-based assumptions. It uncovers an expansive market for fashionable clothes amongst both rural farmers and urban laborers. It illustrates how these men deployed clothing in culturally-specific ways, as a marker of regional or class identity. Lastly, it reframes the role of clothing as a vector for political allegiance by exposing the multiple and sometimes contradictory meanings that men conveyed through dress.