Rachel Ropeik MA Dissertation by theartropeik

Rachel Smith Ropeik MA Dissertation

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Dr. Satish Padiyar

A Gentleman’s Agreement:

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Conventions of Dress and the Male‐Male Gaze in Haussmann’s Paris

10,486 words 11 June 2009

The French Second Empire (1852–1870) was the setting for many of the

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phenomena that are now considered part of the modernisation of Paris. Baron Haussmann’s sweeping urban renovation changed the face of the city, mass‐ marketing of ready‐to‐wear clothing gained popular appeal, and Parisians

developed a culture obsessed with appearance that was inherently linked to the spaces and the look of the modern city.

In the world of fashion, menswear took a backseat to flashier women’s

clothing, but where much writing about male fashion has focused on the loss of spectacle that was the three‐piece suit, I will use this dissertation to argue that

the expectations of male sartorial display did not, in fact, lessen. I will examine a combination of high art images and fashion periodical print illustrations in

conjunction with excerpts from etiquette guides of the mid‐nineteenth century to

show that dressing well was, for men, a rigorously challenging endeavour.

I aim to show that, despite the stated claims of Second Empire and early

Third Republic French society, which insisted masculinity be defined purely in opposition to the feminine, the look between men and the homosocial sphere of

which it was part, was just as essential a part of the creation of modern male subjectivity. This semi‐licit inter‐male looking revolved largely around clothing (as the most easily visible outward sign of men’s social status), and I will examine the ways such looking was both a necessary part of modern urban life, and a

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simultaneous potential threat to the strict, narrow definition of acceptable masculinity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Somehow, the process of writing, no matter how solitary it may seem,

ends up becoming a collective project. The ideas for this dissertation came out of

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an academic year’s worth of scholarly discussion and debate (for which I thank

the rest of my Special Option), repeated conversations—sometimes scholarly … and sometimes not—around the Strand Continental kitchen table and fourth floor corridor (for which I give a smiling nod to the Strandies, especially my

‘eminent’ Floor Four compatriots), and a long history of my friends sharing and indulging my fascination with the web of connections between clothing,

masculinity, and homoeroticism (for which I thank those folks back home who have literally spent years talking with me about all of this, in particular Amy Gordon, for her contribution of the title for this dissertation).

And, though I am sure he would prefer me to thank him with a sentence

that doesn’t start with a conjunction, I extend my gratitude and appreciation to

Satish Padiyar: for first of all offering this course that was so exactly what I wanted to study, for organising it and supervising it with skill, humour, and aplomb, and for the thorough and attentive encouragement he offered throughout the year, especially during the writing of this dissertation. It’s been a treat to indulge myself in a year of intellectual pursuits for their

own sake, and so, finally, to all those friends and family at the Courtauld and on both sides of the Pond who have helped make that happen, I thank you for the vast amounts of love and amusement and help and support—intellectual,

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emotional, financial, gastronomical—without which this year might still have become a reality, but would surely have been a much less enjoyable one.

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Dress in everyday life is always more than a shell, it is an intimate aspect of the experience and presentation of the self and is so closely linked to the identity that these three—dress, the body and the self—are not perceived separately but simultaneously, as a totality. Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory

When you’re a boy, You can wear a uniform. When you’re a boy, Other boys check you out.

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David Bowie, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................2 THE SUIT AND MODERN MASCULINITY .................................................................. 5 OBSERVING THE APPEARANCE OF MANLINESS ...................................................... 12 THE HOMOSARTORIAL GAZE

IN PRINT............................................................................................................ 21 ON CANVAS ...................................................................................................... 29

HOMOSARTORIAL TO HOMOEROTIC: A NEBULOUS DANGER .............................. 35

CONCLUSION ......................................................................................... 44 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................... 48

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ............................................................................53

ILLUSTRATIONS ..................................................................................................... 55

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For many, I expect, the image of nineteenth‐century Frenchmen is the

black‐suited, black‐hatted, black‐tied fellows in Edouard Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera (Fig. 1, 1873). They are so identically dressed that the scene is almost

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comical in its insistence on the black and white formality of the eveningwear

uniform. However, ‘the nineteenth‐century commentator would have defined

clearer distinctions between the visual identity of classes.’1 While it is unarguable that the elaborate glamour once associated with men’s clothing largely

disappeared with the rise of the three‐piece suit, the new details of subdued male costume became a visual language unto themselves, one in which the men of the day, particularly in Paris—bright light of the fashion world—were expected to be fluent.

This silent language was full of intricacies in a culture where male and

female were seen as oppositional and the public discourse held that the gaze was to be firmly fixed on the latter.2 Regardless, men were just as responsible as

women for an awareness of their place in the increasingly stratified spectrum of social classes. I will argue that a second imperative ran alongside the primary one telling men not to look at each other, and that this second directive told men that

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they did, in fact, need to be eying their peers to find an identity in the Parisian sartorial world that was becoming inextricably linked to the societal one.

According to Philippe Perrot, it was the Second Empire that solidified

Paris’s dominance over the world of fashion. He refers to it as a ‘crucial period of 1

C. Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 26.

‘What does a man look like next to his wife? He in a simple black suit, dull, smelling of his cigar; she pink, elegant, brilliant, exuding the ambergris scent of her face powder.’ N. Roqueplan, Parisine (Paris, 1869), p. 43, as quoted in P. Perrot, trans. Richard Bienvenu, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, New Jersey, 1994), p. 34.

technical, industrial, and commercial innovation’ and to Paris as ‘a fashion manufacturing and marketing center’ where the product being made and disseminated was not simply clothing itself, but the codes and systems of an

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entire culture of the cloth.3 While Perrot’s Fashioning the Bourgeoisie is a compelling, valuable tool for the nineteenth‐century dress historian, he spends

less time—when it comes to gendered clothing—on menswear than women’s,

which does, after all, represent the flash and dazzle for which Paris was known.

We cannot ignore, though, the truth that the flashy, dazzling women

parading through the Bois de Boulogne, where ‘[o]ne had to be seen or die’,4

shared the public promenade with men. Suited, gloved men with hats, walking

sticks, and pocket watches that all contributed to a masculine fashion statement perhaps less showy than its feminine counterpart, but no less observable or

constitutive of its modern moment.

The menswear of mid‐nineteenth‐century Paris has been largely

overlooked in critical literature. While women’s fashion was based in Paris, well‐ dressed men began looking to London for their models of masculinity. I will look more deeply at the reasons why in the first section of this essay, but the new

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French focus on a Britannic ideal of manhood is what has prompted me to draw not only from the fashion advice of French etiquette guides and tailoring journals, but also from the suggestions of their English counterparts. Though French writings occasionally take umbrage at the insinuation of English superiority,5 on

P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, p. 4.

4 5

Amédée Achard, Paris‐Guide (Paris, 1863), p. 1242, as quoted in P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, p. 173.

‘It is indeed indisputable that the majority of our fashions today, at least for menswear, come from England; but they acquire, in passing the straits, what they are generally missing with our neighbours: good taste.’ (‘Il est en effet incontestable que la plupart de nos modes actuelles, au moins pour le costume de

the whole, they agree that ‘[t]he cutting edge nuances that once distinguished the dress of the two peoples, are disappearing today; it will, in the near future, be difficult to distinguish at first glance someone newly disembarked from Albion

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from a regular of the boulevards.’6 The style literature of the time, particularly the fashion trade journals, has

typically been used only to provide illustrative quotes and images in secondary material like Perrot’s, and, though he does discuss them in some detail, the

abundance of mid‐century French etiquette manuals have not yet received the same analysis that their English counterparts have in the work of Christopher Breward and Brent Shannon.7 I intend to examine both these resources in

greater detail in an exploration of a relatively unstudied moment in the history of male dress: France in the Second Empire and early Third Republic8 when Baron

Haussmann was turning Paris into a modern metropolis whose presence was felt—and, more importantly, seen—in its citizens just as much as in its

structures.9

l’homme, viennent d’Angleterre; seulement elles acquièrent, en passant le détroit, ce qui leur manque généralement chez nos voisins : le bon goût.’) E. Kerckhoff, Le Costume à la cour et à la ville: Étiquette tenue officielle et de fantaisie (Paris, 1865), pp. 125–26. 6

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‘Les nuances tranchantes qui distinguaient la tenue des deux peuples, disparaissent du reste aujourd’hui ; il sera, sous peu, difficile de distinguer au premier coup d’œil un nouveau débarqué d’Albion d’un habitué des boulevards.’ (E. Kerckhoff, Le Costume, p. 126.)

Perrot’s discussion of the etiquette manuals can be found in P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, chapter 7. 8

French men’s fashions of the turn of the nineteenth century have received their due, notably in L. Hunt, Polititcs, Culture, and class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, California, 1984); R. Wrigley, The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France (Oxford and New York, 2002); A Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (London, 1986); and A. Ribeiro, Fashion and the French Revolution (New York, 1988). Fin‐de‐ siècle and Belle Époque apparel is examined in C. Breward, Hidden Consumer and B. Shannon, The Cut of His Coat. English menswear of the middle nineteenth century is also explored in those two books, as well as in D. Kuchta, The Three‐Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 2002). In all of this, however, and more fashion writing besides, there is remarkably little apart from Philippe Perrot’s work that focuses on mid‐nineteenth century French men’s attire. 9

My examination focuses specifically on Paris as the centre of the French fashion world, for sartorial trends began there and spread out to the rest of the country. As one contemporary put it, ‘[i]t is natural that a man of the world, in Paris, be better put together, more elegant in form and manners, that he will even have greater brilliance and success, with equal means, than another man who lives in the provinces.’ (‘Il est

THE SUIT AND MODERN MASCULINITY ‘Usually … these costumes only look like uniforms to outsiders; peers will be aware of significant differences. The London businessman’s tie will tell his associates where he went to school; the cut and fabric of his suit will allow them to guess at his income.’10

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John Carl Flügel’s phrase, The Great Masculine Renunciation,11 is often

used to refer to the late‐eighteenth and early‐nineteenth century period in which the peacock ostentation of men’s dress in Western Europe gave way to the

sombre sobriety of the three‐piece suit. Men’s clothing both simplified in line and darkened in palette, and that simplification and darkening held dominion over

Western menswear with few disruptions from then on. I would like to begin with an examination of some of the reasons behind the emergence of this ‘century‐ long dominance of undertakers’ clothes’.12

How did it come to be that, though some slight variety continued to come

and go with the tides of fashion (see Fig. 2 for some examples from 1870), black

unequivocally took the reins of sartorial dominance for male urbanites? White cravats, which held out until the late 1830s, gave way to black ones. Waistcoats, long the most acceptable garment with which to display a splash of colour, took

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the same turn by the mid‐point of the century.13 What cast such a comprehensive shadow over men’s fashion?

The short answer is England.

naturel qu’un homme du monde, à Paris, soit mieux mis, soit plus elegant de forme et de manières, qu’il ait même plus d’éclat et de success, à moyens égaux, qu’un autre homme qui habiterait la province.’) B. de Mortemart‐Boisse, La Vie élégante à Paris (Paris, 1858), p. 43. 10

A. Lurie, The Language of Clothes (London, 1981), p. 17.

J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London, 1930), pp. 110‐11.

B. Rudofsky, The Unfashionable Human Body (New York, 1971), p. 163.

J. Harvey, Men in Black (London, 1995), p. 23.

Englishmen had increasingly dressed themselves in black beginning in the

seventeenth century with the so‐called Glorious Revolution of 1688. This rejection of the perceived effeminacy, inadequacy, and aristocratic foppery of

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James II’s Catholic courtly ways changed the perception of what it was to be masculine and ushered in an era in which ‘English aristocratic men felt they could maintain their political power by donning an everyday image of manly modesty and noble simplicity.’14 Instead of the luxuriously embellished outfits that had

been de rigueur during the English Restoration, men adopted austere ensembles inspired in equal parts by aristocratic country riding wear and the uniform

blackness of the Protestants whose advocacy of an unpretentious, productivity‐ oriented lifestyle ascended to prominence when William and Mary took the throne.15

Throughout nearly the entire eighteenth century, France was held up as

the foil to this respectable, dark‐toned English sobriety. The French court was

seen by the English as a haven for all things luxuriant, excessive, and effeminate; a colourful, brazen antithesis to England’s newly subtilized, refined sense of taste.16 After all, when Charles II assumed the English throne in 1661 (and ushered

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in the final dominant period of post‐Cromwellian decadent menswear in England), it was from his exile in France that he brought back his sumptuous velvets and ribbons.17

D. Kuchta, Three‐Piece Suit, p. 94. Kuchta discusses this period and its sartorial, economic, and governmental changes at length.

J. Harvey, Men in Black, pp. 27 and 122.

16 17

D. Kuchta, Three‐Piece Suit, p. 100.

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 121.

Almost exactly one hundred years after Englishmen’s revolution‐induced

rejection of the ostentatious men’s dress they had appropriated from the French, the French themselves underwent an analogous transition. The French

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Revolution served as a similar refutation of a corrupt courtly lifestyle in favour of one more democratically equalising.18 I contend it is no coincidence that when

the French chose to forcibly affirm and violently instate democratic ideals over absolutist monarchy, the ensuing tendency toward men’s black dress took

inspiration from the parallel trend seen in England a century earlier. The English

country gentleman’s simple trousers and serviceable coats worked their way into French menswear, and while France remained the definitive centre of women’s

fashion, it was to England’s talented tailors that French men increasingly turned for the smartest styles.19

What these tailors had to offer, in addition to a greater facility with cutting

and shaping the sturdy wools in vogue for their perceived masculine stolidity,20

was black. Black is a colour long associated with respectability and seriousness of purpose; with categories of people known for their gravitas and abstention from frivolity. Religious believers wear black. Lawyers and judges wear black.

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Servants, businessmen, and mourners wear black. It is the colour of death and service and the non‐visible. John Harvey brings these aspects of black to light, pun fully intended. ‘It is a colour without colour that speaks loudly because it is conspicuous, even if it says “Don’t see me! I efface myself.”’21

D. Kuchta, Three‐Piece Suit, p. 171. See also R. Wrigley, Politics of Appearances, particularly chapters 2 (pp. 60–96), 4 (pp. 187–227) and the coda (pp. 259–73); as well as L. Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class.

A. Hollander, Sex and Suits (New York, 1994), p. 83.

20 21

J. Laver, Taste and Fashion From the French Revolution to the Present Day (London, 1931), p. 24.

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 13.

Self‐effacement became a major goal toward which men strove in Paris in

the latter half of the nineteenth century. They built off the Victorian influence, where, particularly in the wake of Prince Albert’s 1861 death, mourning clothes

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were adopted en masse and with great systematisation by a people following their Queen’s example.22 The French etiquette guides of the 1850s and 60s are

full of suggestions about the advisability of wearing the same grave attire as the English. Edmond Texier, in his Tableau de Paris, describes how, after the

Revolution (the start of which saw the men of the Third Estate dressed in head‐

to‐toe black at the 1789 Assemblée Nationale23), ‘the noblemen, out of curiosity over the foreign novelty [of English black], began to transform their clothes, which had to have benefited the commoners’.24 He then goes on to further

associate black with universality and bereavement, saying, ‘The black suit, which

is today the nec plus ultra of our formalwear, was the common dress … of all those in general who refused to follow the whims of fashion. It … was at the

same time, the dress of mourning.’25

The Victorian vogue for widowhood, where ‘formality and … grief [wore]

nearly identical clothes’,26 and the black‐wearing precedents set by both the

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Revolutionary plebeian French and, in the 1820s and 30s, by the Romantics, who revelled in the funereal, weighty tone set by so much gloom, offered French men in the latter nineteenth century a range of serious, sombre sartorial models to

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 174.

E. Texier, Tableau de Paris (Paris, 1852), p. 309.

‘Les marquis, par curiosité de nouveauté étrangère, commençaient alors la transformation du costume, qui devait s’achever au profit du tiers état’. E. Texier, Tableau, p. 308.

‘L’habit noir, qui est aujourd’hui le nec plus ultra de notre grande tenue, était alors le partage … de tous ceux en général qui se dispensaient de suivre les modes. Il … était en même temps l’habit de deuil.’ E. Texier, Tableau, p. 309.

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 200.

follow. By the 1860s, the etiquette guides were proclaiming it in no uncertain terms. ‘The black suit is to modern man what the toga was to the Roman citizen. It is the ultimate in civilian dress. Everyone can and wants to wear it.’27 Hand in hand with the emphasis on a muted colour palette came a

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simplicity of line that inhered in men’s clothing and never really departed again. In contrast to the fluid lines and rococo effusion of earlier men’s wardrobes, clothes during the ‘Great Masculine Renunciation’ took as a model the body‐

consciousness of Greek Classical sculpture, which was much concerned with exhibiting the human form.28

The spare grace generally associated with Classicism is not immediately

apparent in the menswear of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Fashion grandstanders like the Incroyables (a group so named for the

exaggerated style of the tight trousers, fitted coats, and enormous starched collars they wore in an extremely liberal interpretation of English country attire

[see Fig. 3])29 would seem to be far removed from the elegance of ancient Greek sculpture, but the form‐fitting, nude‐toned trousers and neatly‐tailored coats that abounded during the early nineteenth century worked to emphasise the musculature of men’s legs, the narrowness of their waists, and the width of their

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shoulders.30 While no one single ideal was held up as the template for post‐

Revolutionary French masculinity, the Neoclassical heroic nude was one paragon of maleness whose influence over matters sartorial was strong enough to inspire 27

‘L’habit noir est à l’homme moderne ce que la toge était au citoyen romain. C’est la tenue civile par excellence. Chacun peut et veut la porter.’ E. Kerckhoff, Le Costume, p. 130. 28 29

A. Hollander, Sex and Suits, p. 86. A. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, p. 113.

A. Hollander, Sex and Suits, pp. 86–87.

both the extremes of the Incroyables’ style and the more muted looks of Beau Brummell and his followers, who dressed in restrained colour palettes, communicating their style instead through impeccably‐contoured, trim suits.31

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Ingres’s portrait of the third Baron Grantham (Fig. 4, 1816), clearly illustrates the body consciousness of early‐nineteenth‐century menswear.

The head‐to‐toe constricting fit of men’s fashion did not last as the mid‐

century rise of the bourgeoisie and ready‐to‐wear clothing shifted the emphasis

away from second‐skin tailoring to clothing intended to flatter a broader array of bodily shapes.32 Instead of showcasing men’s bodies as the cultural ideal,

bourgeois urban attire became about codifying the new societal values, which can be neatly summarised as follows:

patriotism (versus aristocratic cosmopolitanism), liberty (versus tyranny), country and city (versus Court), Parliament and Constitution (versus royal prerogative and corruption), virtue (versus libertinism), enterprise (versus gambling, frivolity and dissipation), and manliness (versus a fribbling, degenerate exotic effeminacy).33

High art depictions of costume show this change in the conception of masculine dress, as demonstrated by Eugène Delacroix’s portrait of Romantic artist Louis‐ Auguste Schwiter (Fig. 5, 1826‐27) and Manet’s of haut‐bourgeois connoisseur Théodore Duret (Fig. 6, 1868).

Comparing the two images from a purely visual standpoint, it is clear that

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the last vestiges of skin‐tight garments disappeared from men’s dress by the middle of the nineteenth century. Schwiter’s lean, Byronic pallor gives way to Duret’s relaxed solidity. The clearly‐delineated lines of Schwiter’s calves and 31

J. Laver, Taste and Fashion, p. 17; D. Kuchta, Three‐Piece Suit, p. 175; B. Shannon, Cut of His Coat, p. 130.

P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, chapter 5.

V. Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (New York and Oxford, 1988), p. 32.

waist and the sharp geometric jut of his shoulders in their structured frock coat make way for Duret’s shapeless trousers and the sack‐like slouch of his lounge suit jacket. These portraits illustrate period fashions and also invest their sitters’

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clothing with the implied characteristics of the sitters themselves. Fashion plates offer one set of information about the era’s clothing, but most were intended to show idealised versions of contemporary apparel that represented a high style

not actually worn by most of the bourgeoisie.34 By looking at images like these portraits, we can observe the clothing that was chosen by sitter and artist, and

infer from it what attire would have been deemed respectable and impressive for a man like Schwiter or Duret. My approach will include both high art and mass‐ produced fashion plates as visual records of sartorially‐produced masculinity.

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L. Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester and New York, 2002), p. 136.

OBSERVING THE APPEARANCE OF MANLINESS ‘Dress is the nearest of man’s externals. It is where his influence begins. It is the closest and most constant proclaimer of himself.’35

Alison Lurie suggests that ‘[t]he more significant any social role is for an

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individual, the more likely he or she is to dress for it’,36 and the numerous

etiquette guides published in the nineteenth century agree with her. The very existence of such a genre indicates that ‘self‐help’ reading was desirable to a

mass audience. After all, the nineteenth was the century that saw the rise of the

bourgeoisie and mass consumer culture, and more people than ever were striving for and attaining personal wealth and social respectability. Clothing was an

inextricable part of that, as the etiquette manuals themselves state quite clearly. ‘To be “dressed,”’ said one, ‘since by dress we show our respect for society at

large, or the persons with whom we are to mingle, is to be clothed in the garments which the said society pronounces as suitable to particular occasions.’37 As one might correctly assume from the above quotation, the nuances of

sartorialism were elaborately coded and received an enormous amount of attention and scrutiny, particularly from the 1860s onward, in the wake of Haussmann’s sweeping reconstruction of Paris.38 ‘Clothes bec[a]me organized as

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significative differences within a code and as status symbols within a hierarchy’,39 a truth made only more apt in Second Empire France with the rise of mass consumer marketing to many different social classes. Clothes were and are a

Fashion, July 1898, as quoted in B. Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain 1860–1914 (Athens, Ohio, 2006), p. 101.

36 37

A. Lurie, Language of Clothes, p. 16.

Anon., The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook of Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (London, 1859), p. 155.

38 39

P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, p. 9. P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, p. 9.

mark of the identity each person opts to display. ‘The individual and 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

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desirable also’,40 and in Haussmannian Paris, where the social world became ever more rigidly categorised, getting dressed for one’s chosen identity was all about nuance.

Two illustrations from the trade periodical Journal des Tailleurs (Figs. 7 and

8, 1860 and 1861, respectively) demonstrate the reduced colour and style palette

available to well dressed men by the middle of the century. Differences between these ensembles are subtle, and require an onlooker to examine the images

closely for details of cut, pattern, and the small hints of colour provided mainly by gloves and cravats. As male fashion continued to develop into the 1870s, even

fewer deviations were permitted from what became, in effect, the uniform of the modern man, embodied by the figure in Gustave Caillebotte’s portrait of Paul

Hugot (Fig. 9, 1878).

Hugot is the perfect model of the wealthy French bourgeois as he came to

be seen on the streets of Paris after France’s humiliating defeat at the end of the

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Franco‐Prussian war of 1870‐71. It was a low‐point of national pride, and there was an underlying belief—perhaps enhanced by France’s centuries‐long reputation for effeminacy and frivolity—that it was something inherently weak or lacking in French masculinity that allowed a Prussian victory.41 Kaja Silverman describes the process by which a society attempts to cope with an instance of ‘historical trauma’ by forcibly (though not always successfully) endeavouring to 40 41

J. Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, 2000), p. 7.

A. Ehrenberg, Le Corps militaire (Paris, 1983), pp. 89‐118.

reinscribe what she calls the dominant fiction: the perceived utopian state that is the realisation of that society’s norms.42 For France, the post‐traumatic effort to re‐establish social roles resulted in—among other things—a solidification of

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gender along a strict male/female binary in which men were expected to embody all that was strong, stalwart, and dignified, while women, by necessity of serving as men’s polar opposites, were assigned the role of frivolous fashionistas. It

became their prerogative to care about dress, ‘indeed a readiness to talk of dress

and nothing else, comes to be seen, in nineteenth‐century superstition, almost as constituting the feminine.’43

As the spectacle of women’s fashion took hold, the natural opposition

between male and female reinforced the leeching of colour from men’s attire,

which brings us once more to Flügel’s ‘Great Masculine Renunciation’. However,

Flügel relies too heavily, to my mind, on the premise that men were renouncing not only ostentation, but access to the very genre of fashion itself.44 Instead, I

suggest Shannon comes closer to the heart of the matter when he says that ‘the performative nature of identity meant that one could not opt out of dressing for effect. Renouncing ostentation subjugated men to equally detailed, complex

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rules of dress.’45

The prevailing thought from both fashion and cultural historians seems to

be that as the spheres of society became increasingly polarised—as private divided more sharply from public, men’s roles from women’s, acceptable behaviour from that meriting ostracism—attention to costume was given fully

K. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York, 1992), chapters 1–2.

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 197.

44 45

J. C. Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, p. 111.

B. Shannon, Cut of His Coat, p. 38.

and exclusively into the hands of women.46 I argue, rather, that in addition to this discouraging of men’s attention to dress, a simultaneous dialogue existed to encourage such awareness. Much of the fashion writing of the period supports such a conclusion. The

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mid‐to‐late‐century etiquette manuals touch on this topic frequently. For every

caution against attention‐seeking self‐display like Charles Blanc’s that ‘[i]t would

be a false idea to try to reveal the shape of the body by means of the dress which covers it, for we do not dress to display the nude figure, but to … conceal it from

view’,47 there is another that advocates diligent care down to the smallest details. Take, for example, the following passage from Week‐Day Living:

Dress is a passport through society. It is the first thing that makes an impression on outsiders … A young man is looked over and appraised before he can open his lips. If his shirt button is not sewn on … or if his hat is unbrushed, or if he be out at elbows in more senses than one, he may have some immense ability, but he does not get credit for the fact. Why should a man spoil his chances in life for want of a little care?48 As with Harvey’s imagined vocalisations of the colour black, one might easily

imagine men’s dress from the 1860s onward to say both, ‘Don’t see me, and, see me.’49

The issue of seeing is kept front and centre by the fact that many etiquette

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and dress manuals are written in the anonymous voices of omniscient urban onlookers. The narrator of The Habits of Good Society is identified only as ‘the

On the issue of the divided spaces of modern life, see T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York and London, 1984). For a feminist reading of the male/female and public/private spheres, see G. Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London, 1989), chapter 3. The corresponding view of fashion as becoming solely the purview of women is discussed in much of the related literature, notably and at length throughout P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie and C. Breward, Hidden Consumer. 47

C. Blanc, Art and Ornament in Dress (London, 1877), p. 119.

48 49

S. Pearson, Week‐Day Living–A Book for Young Men and Women (London, 1882), pp. 138, 140.

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 16.

Man in the Club‐Window’. We are not told anything about the club or the man’s life outside his observational role, except that he is a wealthy bachelor, and therefore without external claims on his time.50 Instead, the conscious choice is

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to make of this metropolitan chronicler a universally relatable character. What I see, indeed, is what any one may see in the streets of London, but I see it all calmly; and having nothing else to do, I observe in these ordinary outlines details which would escape many others. Indeed, I have arrived at that perfection of observation, that at one glance I can fix the class to which a passer‐by belongs, and at a second can tell you whether he or she is an ornament or a disgrace to it.51 Readers are encouraged to identify with this man, no matter their own social

standing. They, too, would be able to offer the same observations, if only they

had the time and inclination to do so. Furthermore, the implication is made that, just as the narrator can, anyone observing the urban streets should be able to

instantly distinguish ‘the class to which a passer‐by belongs’ from nothing more than a perfected glance.

The Man at the Club‐Window is in place to serve as London’s lens onto city

life, but his detached examination might just as easily be located in Paris, and his clinical views of the passing crowds would fit just as well in the eyes of the French flâneur.52 He watches without being watched and is therefore able to provide

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seemingly unbiased, nuanced readings of those around him.

A perfect artistic parallel to this aloof perspective appears in a pair of 1880

paintings by Caillebotte: Traffic Island on the Boulevard Haussmann (Fig. 10) and

50 51

Anon., Habits of Good Society, p. 11.

Anon., Habits of Good Society, pp. 13–14.

Baudelaire’s famous essay, The Painter of Modern Life (Paris, 1863) is largely responsible for promulgating and romanticising the idea of the flâneur. For an informative collection of essays that take up various aspects of the flâneur and flânerie, see K. Tester, ed., The Flâneur (London and New York, 1994). The idea of gender identity and flânerie is addressed in E. Wilson, ‘The Invisible Flâneur’, New Left Review, no. 191 (January–February 1992), pp. 90–110.

Boulevard Seen from Above (Fig. 11). These images show us a viewpoint onto the boulevard Haussmann that is likely the one Caillebotte enjoyed from the balcony of his own apartment on that street. We can read in them the same kind of

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surveying regard offered by the etiquette manuals mentioned earlier. Here, the scene presented is one that could only take place in the Paris of the Third

Republic. Not only does the very name of the boulevard tell us that Haussmann’s work had been completed by the time these paintings were made, but the

costumes of the figures place the scenes squarely in the era of the top‐hatted, frock‐coated gentleman stroller. The thoroughfare is shown as an exclusively male space; a homosocial masculine environment entirely in keeping with the

theory that public space was the rightful domain of men and that women should remain in the private confines of the home.

The homosociality of these Caillebotte images is further advanced by

consideration of the system of looking at work here. In both (though especially

Boulevard Seen from Above, which puts the sidewalk almost literally at our feet and those of the artist), Caillebotte has placed himself and the viewer into the prized role of unseen onlooker. We are allowed to bear witness without being

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witnessed in return, which would have been an unusual opportunity at a time when ‘the boulevard became the place to be seen, where celebrities were manufactured, where fashion’s knights jousted, where dandies shone.’53

There is a sense of leisurely looking in these two paintings that is very

much not in keeping with the way the male‐male gaze operated in most

boulevard‐bound interactions of the post‐Haussmann era. On the surface, the 53

F. Chenoune, trans. Deke Dusinberre, A History of Men’s Fashion (Paris, 1993), p. 58.

world of sartorial display seemed to follow a cock‐eyed parallel of Isaac Newton’s theory; for every exaggerated feminine frill, there was an equal and opposite masculine revocation of spectacle. Not only was la mode seen as something

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properly confined to womenswear, but so was the very act of looking at clothing. Women’s clothes were to be paraded and dissected in minute detail. Men’s, on the other hand, were to be as unobtrusive as possible. An 1854 etiquette guide advises men thus: ‘Do not affect singularity in dress, by wearing out‐of‐the‐way

hats, or gaudy waistcoats, &c. and so become contemptibly conspicuous; nothing is more easy than to attract attention in such a manner, since it requires neither sense nor taste.’54

Though I have argued that all was not so simple as this binary split

(women: to be looked at, men: not to be), this was doubtless the official

discourse, as is made abundantly clear by the excessive emphasis throughout contemporaneous advice guides on men’s duty to symbolically efface their own

presence from the sphere of surveillance.55 Here, too, then, we can apply Harvey’s ideas about black as a negation of identity,56 for by darkening their colour palette and incorporating so much black into the male wardrobe,

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bourgeois men made the visual connection between themselves and the many black‐wearing roles that are linked with an ‘absence of self’. Servants’ and stagehands’ black uniforms signal observers to let them perform their functions 54 55

C. W. Day, Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society with A Glance at Bad Habits (London, 1854), p. 56.

The word ‘conspicuous’ appears repeatedly throughout the advice literature of the time as though it is the ultimate offense against men’s dignity. Caution is given to avoid both following and rebelling against that which is deemed overly fashionable; to do what it takes to remain unobserved. ‘[T]he man who rebels against fashion, is even more open to the imputation of vanity than he who obeys it, because he makes himself conspicuous, and practically announces that he is wiser than his kind.’ Anon., Habits of Good Society, p. 129. ‘[T]he man of true taste will limit his compliance with the caprices of fashion to not appearing equally conspicuous for its utter neglect.’ C. W. Day, Hints on Etiquette, pp. 53‐54. 56

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 197.

without drawing focus. Mourners’ black showcases the dimming of their own vitality in the absence of a loved one. Religious figures’ black robes suggest a renunciation of earthly life; a subsuming of their individual selves into the higher

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power they serve. The ever‐ascendant black‐clad bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century

linked with these self‐denying uses of the colour. Their black told a viewer to look elsewhere; that a man’s negated and inconspicuous self‐identity was meant to be

taken in at first glance, understood, and quickly passed over in favour of the more obvious status display presented by the women of modern Paris. As Joanne

Entwistle puts it, ‘[i]n such an environment “strangers” meet with no more than fleeting moments to make an impression on each other. Thus increasing

anonymity led to greater emphasis on appearance as the means by which to

“read” the other.’57

This reliance on quick scrutiny to read one’s fellow man is subverted in

Caillebotte’s two views of the boulevard Haussmann, where the (presumably male) viewer is freed to stare at the strollers on the street as long as he likes. Without a traditional composition or a focus on any particular figure, it is the very

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act of looking at the modern city that is central to these images, and without a single feminine presence, that looking is carried out from one man to another. Though the dictates of society might have attempted to tell men it was not their place to be objects of each other’s penetrative stares, Caillebotte has given his

J. Entwistle, Fashioned Body, p. 116.

viewer free rein to watch and has left it entirely up to the web of inter‐male looking to define the space of the bourgeois metropolis.58

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For information on the various aspects of Caillebotte’s approach to painting and to the modern life around him, see particularly K. Varnedoe, Gustave Caillebotte (New Haven and London, 1987) and the essays in N. Broude, ed., Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris (Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2002). Griselda Pollock offers a grid that illustrates the way respectable women in paintings were kept off the streets and placed almost exclusively in interior spaces by many male artists, Caillebotte included. G. Pollock, Vision and Difference, p. 80.

THE HOMOSARTORIAL GAZE ‘Anything is authoritative that is a new invention in women’s fashions, but nothing is authentic in men’s fashions until it has been SEEN…’59

IN PRINT I return to the Man in the Club‐Window’s claim ‘that at one glance [he] can

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fix the class to which a passer‐by belongs’. Despite the proscriptions against men looking at one another, the desirability of such instant perception cannot be

ignored. In the increasingly stratified class system of Second Empire and Third

Republic Paris, appropriate behaviour depended upon knowing at all times where one fit in the social hierarchy.60 Entwistle asserts that ‘[c]lothes and other bodily adornments are part of the vocabulary with which humans invent themselves,

come to understand others and enter into meaningful relationships with them’,61

and those relationships, in turn, become part of what defines human subjectivity.

In The Painting of Modern Life, T. J. Clark discusses the breakdown of

readily‐legible class distinctions in Impressionist‐era Paris.62 He argues that

Haussmann’s Parisian modernisation created an uncertainty in the social order that stemmed from the simultaneous increase in the variety of social classes and the ease with which one could move between them. In petit bourgeois urban

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spaces such as the café‐concert, Clark references a ‘nightly pretence and playacting’ that served at once to present an expected range of class roles and to

The London Tailor, 2 September 1899, as quoted in C. Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, fashion and city life 1860–1914 (Manchester and New York, 1999), p. 26. 60

Nearly all of the etiquette manuals include extensive guidelines on the appropriate behaviour when encountering others from various walks of life. The complicated arrangements of how to meet, greet, and eat with people from an array of social classes was clearly a preoccupation of the bourgeoisie as a whole. 61

J. Entwistle, Fashioned Body, p. 182.

T. J. Clark, Painting of Modern Life, chapter 4.

deny those present any firm solidarity with one class or another.63 In a moment of such uncertain cultural identity, it is hardly surprising that easy methods of social categorisation became so appealing. Since, in Flügel’s words, ‘[i]t is from

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their clothes that we form a first impression of our fellow‐creatures’,64 it is no leap to conclude that those same clothes should have acted as the most

immediate visual cue to a Haussmann‐era Frenchman anxious to ascertain his social standing in relation to those around him.

Judith Butler’s theory of performative identity is directly relevant here.

She argues that there is no pre‐existing gendered state of being, but rather, that we create gender through repeated acts and gestures undertaken to express an aspirational ideal self.65 We have already seen Shannon incorporate Butler’s keyword (‘performative’) into an analysis of nineteenth century costume‐as‐

identity. The application suits. Perrot explains that in the Second Empire moment of increasing class division,

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[A] quick look no longer took in the full meaning of dress. Now the social game would be played on the terrain of nuance and detail, a terrain where secondary signs—the only ones that mattered now— proliferated … Tracking down signs that betrayed social positions that were either usurped or recently acquired, mercilessly flushing out, unmasking, and excluding the ignorant person who violated the new sumptuary laws of ‘proper comportment,’ became a compulsive preoccupation of the dominant classes.66

Recognising and categorising the secondary signs to which Perrot refers

would have required an increasingly expert gaze as male dress allowed for less and less significant variation. The ‘terrain of nuance and detail’ would have

T. J. Clark, Painting of Modern Life, p. 238.

64 65

J. C. Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, p. 15.

J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990), p. 136.

P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, pp. 81‐82.

included status symbols such as pocket watches and signet rings, which were worn subtly but noticeably and received their own treatment from sartorial advice writers.67 Gloves and neckties became especially revealing, as one could

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tell how up‐to‐date a man’s fashion sense was by whether he wore that season’s lavender or yellow gloves, or a colourful neck cloth if current style called for only

white or black.68 In short, to return once again to Butler’s idea (this time through David Kuchta’s work), ‘[m]odest masculinity was no less performative, and no more authentic, than luxury and effeminacy’.69

However, a performance carries weight only as far as an audience is there

to see it. So, once again, we circle back to the issue of sight. In this case it is clear that, though men as objects were nominally removed from the economy of

looking, they were in fact still expected to present a particular façade to the

world. And though they were also nominally prohibited from turning their evaluative gaze on each other, there was nevertheless an expectation that men

form a key part of the ‘audience’ for their peers in addition to performing themselves.

Industry magazines such as the Journal des Tailleurs made this aspect of

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men’s roles clear with images like one from May 1879 (Fig. 12), in which a group of men models the latest fashions in a setting likely intended to evoke the summer

Moira Donald discusses the inherently gendered role of the pocket watch in M. Donald, ‘“The greatest necessity for every rank of Men”: Gender, Clocks and Watches’, in Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective, eds. M. Donald and L. Hurcombe (London, 2000), pp. 54–75. Advice on the wearing and classifications of men’s jewellery can be found in Anon., Habits of Good Society, p. 142, where men are reminded to limit themselves to one simple signet ring, scarf pin, or watch guard and that these should be of good quality and devoid of ostentatious details. 68

These changes are consistently highlighted in both the writing and illustrations throughout the run of periodicals such as Le Journal des Tailleurs and The Tailor and Cutter (both of which were aimed at tailoring professionals), as well as in the dress manuals of the time. See, for example, Anon., Habits of Good Society, p. 156, C. Blanc, Art and Ornament, p. 131, and C. W. Day, Hints on Etiquette, p. 58. 69

D. Kuchta, Three‐Piece Suit, p. 176.

races at Longchamp (the annual zenith of fashion spectacle for Parisian high society).70 Of particular note is the second man from the left, who raises a pair of binoculars to his face, perhaps focused on a race, but curiously looking in an

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entirely different direction from the crowd of heads visible in the background. As Longchamp was just as much, if not more, a display vehicle for Parisians as for

their horses, the dapper gentleman in his fitted grey suit and stylish beige gloves could just as likely be watching a human exhibition as an equine. While

presumably the background group is taking in some unifying, engaging spectacle, the gazes of almost all the individually distinguishable figures are aligned instead with that of the man in grey. He is even echoed by a female onlooker in the

middleground, who raises her own binoculars to her face, at once standing out

from the crowd (being an anomalously active female watcher) and reminding the

viewer of women’s part in the web of society looking. Whatever spectacle has the background crowd absorbed is marginalised in comparison to the one

engaging the middle‐ and foreground viewers.

As we did earlier with the two Caillebotte views of the boulevard

Haussmann, we can consider who would be seeing this scene and through what

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sort of lens. The Journal des Tailleurs was produced chiefly for tailoring professionals, an audience itself primarily composed of men. Like the Caillebotte paintings before it, this image, then, is both of men and for men, a potentially

disquieting state of affairs in a time when the rules of binarised gender ostensibly insisted that ‘[m]en could no longer display themselves for if they did they might 70

Each year, the June issues of Journal des Tailleurs were dominated by details of clothing for this event. The 1 June, 1873 issue includes an anecdote related by male writer to male reader that makes reference to two women at the Longchamp races ‘who were speaking of fashion, the main subject of conversation these days’ (‘qui causaient de la mode, principal sujet de conversation ces jours‐là’) (unnumbered page).

find each other desirable spectacles.’71 The male figures modelling the latest fashions are there to be taken in by male journal subscribers, and I suggest that the way none of them look directly out at the viewer is in an effort to mitigate

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anxiety around male‐male looking.

The presentation and perception of men’s identity through media like

tailoring magazines and etiquette manuals was a phenomenon that peaked in the middle of the nineteenth century,72 so the interplay between advice guides and style journals from the 1850s–70s offers a unique insight into this particular

moment of identity performance and inscription. The Journal des Tailleurs was

the most influential among French trade publications, and the widest‐reaching, as evidenced by the inclusion (from the early 1870s onward) of a London publishing address in addition to the Parisian headquarters, and several multilingual

translations of the month’s predictive fashion report. A major element of the Journal’s success may well have been the detailed double‐page colour fashion

plate in each issue. These images generally posed men (and the occasional woman) in the settings of modern life. In Fig. 12, the men are at the races. In Fig. 2, one imagines they are in a park. In Fig. 7, they chat in a fashionable interior.

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The figures are almost always grouped, either in sets of roughly six (as in Figs. 2, 7, 8, and 12), or in clusters of three (Fig. 13, 1861), and they interact with each other within these scenes in a way not seen in the equivalent English publications.

Take, for example, an illustration from the October 1861 issue (Fig. 13).

The three models turn their heads toward each other and gesture in ways that 71

J. Stratton, The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption (Urbana, Illinois, 1996), p. 138.

C. Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 42 and P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, p. 88.

both show off the details of their dress (note the left‐hand figure’s prominently‐ displayed watch chain, the lining of the central figure’s flipped‐back paletot shown as his left arm projects from beneath it, and the sleeve shape displayed by

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the right‐hand figure’s forward reach) and make it clear that there is an interplay between them. By contrast, a three‐figure illustration from The Tailor and

Cutter—the Journal des Tailleurs’ London equivalent—(Fig. 14, 1880), shows three men who might as well be on three individual pages for how little they interact. There is a clear acceptance—even encouragement—of male sociability in the

French images that suggests that English stoicism of character did not translate across the Channel quite as thoroughly as stoicism of dress.

A closer chronological parallel can be found by examining Figs. 12 and 14.

The English figures appear completely self‐possessed and quite removed from

each other’s awareness, while the French have direct physical contact. Particularly intertwined is the central grouping of the man with binoculars, the

top‐hatted man who takes his arm, and the boy who completes this trio that looks like a strange re‐envisioning of the husband‐wife‐child family unit. While I do not suggest this illustration should be read as a commentary on alternative

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family structures, I do contend that the physical links between figures in this and other Journal des Tailleurs images (many of which include men linking arms—for

more examples, from 1860 and 1873, respectively, see Figs. 15 and 16) are indicative of a privileging of homosocial bonding and inter‐male contact in France that England seems not to have shared.73

Breward’s connection between the homosocial spectrum and English menswear is a fairly minor element of his studies and focuses more on the late‐nineteenth‐century Aesthetic style of Oscar Wilde and his

Another Tailor and Cutter image (Fig. 17, 1880) can be read as a textbook

illustration of the homosocial dynamic on which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick sheds light, whereby two male rivals for a female’s affection form attachments to each

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other that are just as emotionally invested as either’s attachment to the woman.74 As she suggests, ‘in any male‐dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial … desire and the structures for

maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power’.75 In Fig. 17, even as they

maintain the aloof distance of the English illustrative style, the two male figures lock eyes with each other, rather than with the female between them. There is

no particular reason to read this triad as playing out the erotic triangle dynamic on which Sedgwick focuses, but the most direct interpersonal transaction is in the mutual regard of men.

Though European men in the middle nineteenth century were being told

to look away from each other for the sake of binarised gender, the images

intended to signify fashionably modern manliness seem to encode a different story altogether, one in which men readily serve for each other many of the functions that constitute modern masculinity, seemingly without much reliance

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on the ostensibly necessary opposing roles of women. This importance of making a place for oneself in the homosocial hierarchy is an observable current throughout the fashion plate illustrations, and is mirrored in a close reading of the etiquette guides.

followers, rather than the mid‐century period on which I focus here. Kuchta, also, makes only brief mention of male homosociality, and does so only in regard to the eighteenth century. 74

E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), pp. 21–28.

E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 25.

Though the modern tendency has often been to view mid‐nineteenth‐

century menswear as simply becoming increasingly formulaic and uniform,76 the period writing and imagery suggest the opposite: that men should, in fact, take

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care to avoid looking the same as their fellows. Admittedly, there were fewer options for pavonine display than in earlier centuries, but despite the limitations,

men were exhorted to avoid complete conformity. In 1854, Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society made clear that ‘[a] man possessed of the delicate and proper feelings of a gentleman would deem himself degraded by copying

another, even to the curling of a whisker, or the tie of a cravat’.77 The Tailor and Cutter, in 1868, advised, ‘adopt those forms of dress which are in common use, but our own judgment should be exercised in adapting these forms to our

individual proportions, complexions, ages, and stations in society.’78 An 1873

issue of the Journal des Tailleurs referenced the careful introduction of details like gold buttons and silk lapels that would ‘suit a good number of young men of

distinction who can dare to stand out from the general uniformity’.79

The advice and fashion literature of the period set out a narrow path for

men to navigate. Neither too much individuality, nor too little was permitted.

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The dictates in place left room for ‘the man of sense and modesty only to follow

Anne Hollander calls ‘[t]he envelope of smoothly tailored coat and trousers … a levelling uniform like an animal’s hide, the definitive outer skin of the Western human male of every genus.’ A. Hollander, Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting (London, 2002), p. 129. James Laver says ‘the mid‐nineteenth century succeeded in making it bad form to distinguish yourself from other gentlemen … a gentleman was allowed no more distinction in dress than any good tailor could give him.’ J. Laver, Taste and Fashion, p. 40. 77

C. W. Day, Hints on Etiquette, p. 53.

78 79

The Tailor and Cutter, 31 October, 1868, unnumbered page.

‘convenir surtout à bon nombre de jeunes gens de distinction qui peuvent oser faire contraste avec l’uniformité générale’. Journal des Tailleurs, 1‐2 December 1873, unnumbered page. Those sorts of details were given a great deal of attention in the fashion illustrations, which sometimes included accents of metallic gold paint to highlight buttons or pocket watches.

fashion so far as to not make himself peculiar by opposing it.’80 Somewhere between slavish copying of every last style detail and an individualism that was severely frowned upon was a ‘proper’ definition of masculinity to be discovered

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and, once discovered, displayed. Men of different social classes, professions, and economic standings would have depended on costume to signify their identities, and from the visual and textual sartorial discourses available, it seems clear that those significations were often created, not in simple opposition to womenswear, but in complex, nuanced relation to men’s.

ON CANVAS

We can also read the fine art of the period for clues about masculine

identity and what I am referring to as the homosartorial gaze (that is, the

evaluation of male selfhood through same‐sex, clothing‐oriented scrutiny). Manet’s Music in the Tuileries Gardens (1862, Fig. 18) offers particular insight into

the sartorially‐focused male‐male looking inherently present—though ostensibly absent—in Parisian societal regulations of the time.

Much like Masked Ball at the Opera (Fig. 1), the initial impression of the

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male role in Music in the Tuileries Gardens is one of uniform stolidity. The scattered punctuation of white collars, the sea of silken top hats receding into the distance, and above all, the insistently repeated impenetrable black of coats, vests, and ties lay out a clear model of the expected summer dress for 1860s haut bourgeoisie.81 Though few examples of male costume are depicted full‐length, it

80 81

Anon., Habits of Good Society, p. 129.

Nils Gösta Sandblad’s detailed analysis of this image situates it firmly in the sphere of the Second Empire’s upper middle class, who made up the primary audience of the twice weekly concerts in the Tuileries Gardens

is not difficult to extrapolate from those that are visible and to assume that these clothes are part of, as Nils Gösta Sandblad puts it, ‘a realistic chronicle of the times, stamped with the personality of the artist’.82 Both elements of that statement deserve attention. Not only can we view

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this image as a true testament to what men of a certain social class would have worn in 1862 (a statement that cannot be made of the fashion plates, which

showed ideals, rather than realities, of fashion83), but as one stemming from the viewpoint of Manet’s own standing as one of the haut bourgeois painted here.

These men—many of them portraits of Manet’s own circle of well‐to‐do friends

and intellectual peers, and one of them (the bearded figure at the extreme left of the canvas), the artist’s self‐portrait84—embody Perrot’s assertion that

‘[c]lothing oneself is not a matter of freely assembling elements drawn from a

wide range of possibilities but rather one of arranging components chosen from a limited pool according to certain rules.’85 The rules they follow; the identity they

perform; the identity Manet has chosen for them, is the gentlemanly ideal of the haut monde.

In an even stronger manner than the Journal des Tailleurs’ depictions of

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aristocratic gents, Manet’s Tuileries scene brings the economy of the gaze to the fore. While the periodical images involve their figures in shared glances and occasional touching, they do not face the reader with direct, head‐on stares that

and of which Manet himself was a member. However, there is no discussion of the clothing or the economy of the gaze beyond passing mention that these are fashionable, summer‐clad Parisians who are highly aware of their own projected images. N. G. Sandblad, trans. Walter Nash, Manet: Three Studies in Artistic Conception (Lund, Sweden, 1954), pp. 17–68. 82

N. G. Sandblad, Manet, p. 32.

L. Taylor, Dress History, p. 139.

Adolphe Tabarant catalogues the recognisable figures in A. Tabarant, Manet et ses œuvres (Paris, 1947), though several of his suggested identifications have been altered by later Manet scholars.

P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, p. 6.

break out of the composition. The prohibitions declared against male‐male looking would not have been undermined by the non‐confrontational figures in the fashion journals, whose bland faces blend seamlessly into one other. In Music

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in the Tuileries Gardens, however, the palpable regards ricochet around the canvas. Individual faces may be rendered in a flat, sketchy style, but individual

they are, and wherever a man appears in the bold black that sets him apart from the muted scene around him, Manet has given him a purposeful, directed line of sight.

The most compelling of these sightlines exist where men look at each

other or out at the viewer, also presumably a man. Charles Monginot (a fellow

painter) doffs his top hat at the right of the crowd, but his straight‐ahead staring does not seem to correspond to any of the colourful, blurrily‐painted ladies

around him. Manet’s brother, Eugène, steps toward the centre of the composition, hands in his pockets, gaze fixed ahead of him without any obvious

object. It is not to them, but to the cluster of men at the left side of the canvas that the viewer’s eye is repeatedly drawn (Fig. 19). They form a weighty knot of looks amongst each other and toward the viewer that pushes the importance of

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the homosocial dynamic even farther than the Journal des Tailleurs Longchamp scene (Fig. 12). These men are caught up in looking at and interacting with each other, not with the women around them, despite the fact that in a public social situation such as these open air concerts, the gaze of the Parisian upper‐class male should by all accounts have been fixed on the feminine spectacle offered by women like the two seated in the left foreground.

The power of the homosocial enclave that is the left‐most section of

Manet’s painting is reinforced by the heavy brushstrokes used to delineate the male figures and to emphasise the dense impermeability of their black attire.

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Harvey’s words on the subject are, again, quite apt. ‘[B]lack is a good colour to wear if you are sure you should be taken a great deal more seriously than any

mere prosperous peacock’,86 and so here are Manet and his compatriots, black‐ clad, displaying the strength and seriousness of their purpose.

But what is that purpose? To look. To see (as was the flâneur’s explicit

role) and be seen (as was his tacit one). I suggest it is the monocled figure of

Albert de Balleroy, an aristocratic painter with whom Manet shared a studio, that serves as the lynchpin of the matter. He looks directly out of the frame toward the viewer with a deadpan seriousness that challenges. His stare seems to

brazenly invite one in return. And in case that exchange of looks were not sufficiently accentuated, Manet has given his depiction of de Balleroy both the

most detailed facial rendering of any figure (on no others, for example, can we see the whites of their eyes), and a monocle, a tool whose sole purpose was to enhance looking.87 The primary female figures in the foreground are painted with

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a fair amount of attentive detail, but their faces do not engage with the viewer, and they remain isolated from the looking taking place around them. Manet has shifted all the potency of the gaze to the men in relation to each other.

86 87

J. Harvey, Men in Black, p. 156.

Arden Reed mentions this monocle in passing in Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries (Cambridge, 2003), making note of the fact that monocles were the height of fashion for haut bourgeois men in 1860s Paris. Mme Alfred Heymann addresses the status implications inherent in men’s use of monocles and pince‐nez, which implied the upper‐class ability to walk leisurely and look at the same time as opposed to hurrying to reach one’s destination. Mme A. Heymann, Lunettes et lorgnettes de jadis (Paris, 1911), p. 24.

Comparing Music in the Tuileries Gardens to the fashion plates discussed in

the previous section allows us to see that Manet’s painted image confronts the viewer with the significance of the homosartorial look in a similar (albeit more

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direct) manner to the printed periodical images. Though they remain passively unthreatening to the magazine’s readers, the journal figures, through their

interaction—whether via touch (Figs. 12 and 16), gaze (Figs. 7, 8, and 13), or both (Fig. 15)—emphasise the importance of male identity as defined by homosocial contact around clothing and comportment. In Music in the Tuileries Gardens,

Manet has done the same, only more so, as his rendering of de Balleroy stares

down the viewer and invites the eye back into the thicket of well dressed inter‐ male conversation and scrutiny behind him.

In this crowded flock of frock coats, no man interacts with any woman,

despite the presence of a bonneted female figure in the middle of the group. Flâneur Aurélien Scholl (in top hat and dark moustache) stands near but does not

engage with her. Henri Fantin‐Latour, artist of several portraits of Manet and their contemporaries, stands behind the lone woman with his top hat rakishly tilted and echoes de Balleroy’s direct look out at the viewer. The elite culture

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triumvirate of artistic patron Baron Taylor, leading art critic Théophile Gautier, and flânerie‐focused author par excellence, Charles Baudelaire, forms a network of looks from one to another that shuts out the possibility of any woman interrupting.88 In a literal sense, they have eyes for no one but each other. None of these men pays the slightest attention to the woman in their midst, and, much

This is the trio gathered at the right side of the detail image (Fig. 19). Baron Taylor faces left with his walking stick tucked under his arm, Gautier is the bearded middle figure, and Baudelaire faces right with his chin jutting forward.

like the middleground female figure in the Journal des Tailleurs Longchamp scene, she seems to exist not as the focus of the intent masculine stares around her, but in isolation, as a token nod to the feminine element of looking culture that is not,

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despite what popular discourse might command, the only—or even the most

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essential—dynamic by which masculinity was manufactured.

HOMOSARTORIAL TO HOMOEROTIC: A NEBULOUS DANGER ‘Scandal and ostracism were presented as the punishments awaiting any man who, by engaging in homosexual sex, endangered the boundaries of public and private, and thus called into question the organization of society as a whole.’89

If we take as given the presence in Manet’s painting of a homosocial

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dynamic that would have been potentially disruptive to the stated male/female

dimorphism in mid‐nineteenth‐century France, I suggest that the lack of critical or public acclaim accorded this picture when it was first shown in 1863 reflects an

unconscious discomfort with Manet’s repeated insistence on men as both look‐ ers and looked‐at.90 As I have already addressed, the distinction between men and women was paramount in a society structured around extensive, rigid

guidelines for what was considered appropriate and inappropriate conduct.91 The

costume chapters I have referenced are only one small part of what was offered by the etiquette guides, which set out comprehensive codes of acceptable behaviour that, in Butlerian terms, reinforced and reinscribed the cultural and

gender norms of the day, devoting extensive‐but‐separate sections to male and female propriety. As David Greenberg puts it, ‘[t]he preservation of male domination … depended on men possessing qualities that clearly differentiated

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them from women. It consequently became necessary to police men who lacked those qualities.’92

V. Thompson, ‘Creating Boundaries: Homosexuality and the Changing Social Order in France, 1830–1870’, in Homosexuality in Modern France, eds. J. Merrick and B. Ragan, Jr. (Oxford, 1996), p. 117.

Sandblad lays out a summary of the piece’s reception in N. G. Sandblad, Manet, p. 31. Émile Zola’s review of the Galerie Martinet show of Manet’s work included the following quote: ‘An exasperated visitor went as far as threatening to be driven to assault if Music in the Tuileries Gardens remained in the room any longer.’ (‘Un amateur exaspéré alla jusqu’à menacer de se porter à des voies de fait si on laissait plus longtemps dans la salle la Musique aux Tuileries.’) E. Zola, Edouard Manet, Étude biographique et critique (Paris, 1867), p. 354. 91

Again, see G. Pollock, Vision and Difference for discussion of the male/female societal split.

D. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago and London, 1988), pp. 387‐88.

The anxiety produced by those who did not fit the narrow,

heteronormative gender roles I have been discussing meant that, among other things, the Second Empire and the early Third Republic were particularly

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repressive regimes toward homosexuality.93 Social disorder was the ultimate horror, and ‘[t]he homosexual, as someone who threatened the gender balance that was at the basis of all other social distinctions, became a symbol of

disorder.’94 The threatening connection between male sartorial display,

effeminacy (that damning word that blurred gender lines), and deviant sexuality

was a part of the English condemnation of pre‐Revolutionary French foppery.95 It was the motivating force behind much of the lampooning of the Incroyables.96 And it was there, underlying the mid‐nineteenth‐century cautions against ‘eccentricity’ and embellishment in dress.97

The Parisian homosexual subculture of the nineteenth century is little

documented, apart from judicial—and, later, medical—records, as male‐male

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D. Greenberg, Homosexuality, p. 353 and N. Broude, ‘Outing Impressionism: Homosexuality and Homosocial Bonding in the Work of Caillebotte and Bazille’, in Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris, ed. N. Broude (Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2002), p. 161. I use the term ‘homosexuality’ anachronistically here, as the word ‘homosexual’ was not officially coined until 1869 (by a Swiss doctor, Karoly Maria Benkert), and was not commonly used in France until the 1890s. (A. McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries 1870–1930 [Chicago and London, 1997], p. 177.) The labels used to describe sexual activity between men during the mid‐nineteenth century period on which I am focused were most often ‘sodomy’ and ‘pederasty’, but in the name of modern familiarity, I am using those terms more or less interchangeably with ‘homosexuality’. 94 95

V. Thompson, ‘Creating Boundaries’, p. 122.

D. Kuchta, Three‐Piece Suit, p. 94 and A. Hollander, Sex and Suits, p. 69.

A. Ribeiro, Dress and Morality, pp. 110–11. Edmond Texier’s Tableau de Paris describes the Incroyables as lispingly putting on ‘effeminate airs’ (‘airs efféminés’) and ‘publicly displaying their pretentious airs and eccentric get‐up’ (‘ils affichent publiquement leurs airs prétentieux et leur mise excentrique’). E. Texier, Tableau, p. 316. 97

‘Generally, too much eccentricity in one’s dress denotes a lack of taste and manners.’ (‘Généralement, des excentricités trop grandes dans le costume dénotent un manque de goût et de savoir‐vivre’.) E. Kerckhoff, Le Costume, p. 158. ‘Never will a man of good sense make himself noteworthy by the eccentricity of his costume.’ (‘Jamais un homme de bon sens ne se fait remarquer par l’excentricité de son costume.’) L. Verardi, Manuel du bon ton et de la politesse française (Paris, 1853), p. 95. ‘Jewels are an ornament to women, but a blemish to men. They bespeak either effeminacy or a love of display.’ Anon., Habits of Good Society, p. 141.

sexual relations were seen first as criminal and then pathological deviancies.98 Once it fell under the shadow of legal regulation, however, the sodomitical subculture was sorted into constituent groups of men. A rivette was an older

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man seeking a young companion. A perilleuse was an effeminate youth. A travailleuse was a working‐class man offering his services.99 Here is the same

categorising action that was applied at roughly the same time to the stratifying

social classes of Parisian society: the world of the haut, grand, and petit bourgeois, of the ouvrier, the aristocrate, the demimondaine, and the cocodès. The logical

corollary to such insistent compartmentalising—unease surrounding those who did not fit neatly into one category100—can surely be read in mid‐nineteenth‐

century Paris, where, to take one especially pertinent example, the induction of men into the traditionally female world of shopping and material consumption

was seen as a potential threat to masculinity.101

Male‐oriented marketing rose steadily as part of the overall growth of the

ready‐to‐wear trade,102 but men who shopped were constantly in danger of transgressing the boundary between typically male and typically female spheres. I return again to Sedgwick’s theory of the homosocial bonding that can occur

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when men relate to each other around a woman, only here, we have not two men 98

L. Canler, Mémoires de Canler (Paris, 1862); Archives de la Préfecture de la Police, Pédérasts et divers (Paris, 1873–1879); V. Magnan, Des Anomalies, des aberrations et des perversions (Paris, 1885); F. Carlier, Études de pathologie sociale: les deux prostitutions (Paris, 1887).

A. Copley, Sexual Moralities in France, 1780–1980: New ideas on family, divorce, and homosexuality (New York and London, 1989), p. 103. Note the abundance of feminine endings in this field of vocabulary, as though the very words used to identify these men could not be masculine, in order to hold fast to a definition of what constituted acceptable manly behaviour.

100

‘Conventions of dress attempt to transform flesh into something recognizable and meaningful to a culture; a body that does not conform, that transgresses such cultural codes, is likely to cause offence and outrage and be met with scorn or incredulity.’ J. Entwistle, Fashioned Body, p. 8. 101

B. Shannon, Cut of His Coat, p. 31.

102

B. Shannon, Cut of His Coat, chapter 2; C. Breward, Hidden Consumer, chapter 4; P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, chapter 5.

vying for one woman’s romantic affections, but many men connecting with each other through the supposedly female domain of fashion. The feminine same‐sex looking that was an intrinsic part of the sartorial sphere (whereby women looked

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at women to observe and establish fashion trends103) could not have been acceptably translated to men, by dint of the fact that male and female roles were so stringently held to be separate in all ways. Consequently, wherever

suggestions of male‐male looking did appear, the threat of emasculation and

sodomy (as an oft‐invoked act supposedly perpetrated by those of insufficient manliness104) could not be far away.

The inter‐male looking of the fashion world and that of the homosexual

underground ran startlingly parallel. The literature about homosexuality in this period contains a number of references to a culture of vision. Régis Revenin,

discussing the medical categorisation of pederasts, says that ‘doctors like[d] to classify all homosexuals into the category of “effeminate”, firstly because

effeminacy—as an inversion of gender—[was] what shock[ed] the most; and then, because that [was] more visible, more able to be spotted’.105 Antony Copley notes that ‘homosexuals seemingly recognized one another at a glance,

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even though from very different walks of life’.106 Perhaps most tellingly, the period writings of Ambroise Tardieu (a Parisian professor of legal medicine) detail 103

P. Perrot, Fashioning the Bourgeoisie, pp. 168–74.

104

An early twentieth century French slang dictionary includes the term homme femme (literally, ‘man woman’) as a synonym for a homosexual man. L. Hayard, Dictionnaire d’argot‐français (Paris, 1907), p. 27. The terms efféminé and feminin‐e are also used throughout the police records of the late nineteenth century when discussing sodomites. R. Revenin, Homosexualité et prostitution masculines à Paris 1870–1918 (Paris, 2005), p. 193. 105

‘Aussi les médecins aiment à classer tous les homosexuels dans la catégorie des « efféminés », d’abord parce que l’efféminement—en tant qu’inversion du genre—est ce qui choque le plus; ensuite, elle est plus « voyante », plus repérable‘. R. Revenin, Homosexualité, p. 196.

106

A. Copley, Sexual Moralities, p. 104.

the attributes of the sodomite—all stereotypically feminine, all visual—as ‘curled hair, powdered skin, exposed neck and throat, clothing cut to accentuate the form of the body, a taste for jewelry and perfume, the habit of carrying in the

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hand a handkerchief, flowers, or some needlework.’107

The image conjured by Tardieu’s list looks a good deal like a ‘What Not To

Do’ illustration that might have been created for the apparel chapter of any of the etiquette manuals referenced earlier. The supposed characteristics of the

Parisian pederast parallel those distastefully showy, elaborately confected modes of presenting oneself that were recorded as anathema to the fashionable—and heterosexual—bourgeois man. Breward neatly encapsulates the conflation of gendered looking, dress, and homosexuality in a statement about ‘normative

male characteristics, which stressed an aversion to surface, to decoration and to

looking. In short, the assumption of a masculine heterosexual subjectivity was seen to have required a renewed repudiation of the constituents of fashionability

as the domain of “inverts” and women.’108

Though fashionability may have been most vocally proclaimed as

unacceptable in men, we have already seen that a certain amount was permitted,

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and moreover, expected, of them, even as the threatening label ‘effeminate’ hovered just offstage. I have also discussed how the rise in male consumer culture jeopardised established gender roles, as, increasingly, ‘[n]ot only were men allowed access into formally exclusively female spaces and activities, but

107

A. Tardieu, Étude médico‐légale sur les attentats aux mœurs (Paris, 1857), pp. 137–38.

108

C. Breward, Hidden Consumer, p. 246.

they were also encouraged to have a visual, physical, erotic self to be appraised by the public.’109

Here, once more, is the key issue of the public aspect of looking, in

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combination with the sexualised. Much like male/female opposition, the separation of public from private was supposed to be inviolate, and anything that threatened the boundary was cause for anxiety.110 Similarly, much as fear of male effeminacy (and, by coeval association, homosexuality) was linked to a gender

divide breakdown,111 concern over men looking appraisingly at each other during

a stroll along the boulevards was linked to both a disruption of the public/private split and also, again, to homosexuality.112

While it may begin to seem as though all roads lead to sodomy, in this

particular case, there is a very concrete reason for the association. In Revenin’s

words, mid‐ and late‐nineteenth‐century ‘[m]ale homosexuality is clearly to be found in public space, particularly in bourgeois space.’113 According to the arrest

records, it was in some of the most typically modern, typically Haussmannian spaces of Paris that the majority of sodomitical encounters took place.114

109 110

B. Shannon, Cut of His Coat, p. 54.

This divide between public and private, and its connection to gender and identity, is summarised in G. Pollock, Vision and Difference, pp. 67–71.

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111

D. Greenberg, Homosexuality, p. 390.

112

V. Rosario, ‘Pointy Penises, Fashion Crimes, and Hysterical Mollies: The Pederasts’ Inversions’, in Homosexuality in Modern France, eds. J. Merrick and B. Ragan, Jr. (Oxford, 1996), p. 151.

113

‘l’homosexualité masculine se trouve clairement dans l’espace public, et plus particulièrement dans l’espace bourgeois’. R. Revenin, Homosexualité, p. 45. 114

An outline of the use of modern public spaces for sodomitical solicitation is given in R. Revenin, Homosexualité, pp. 29–46. He references parks, boulevards, shopping arcades, quays, and, in particular, the newly‐installed public urinals introduced by Baron Haussmann in an attempt to sanitise the streets. Given the rampant homophobia and gender anxiety of the Second Empire and Third Republic, one can imagine the dismay the Baron might have felt when the urinoirs were quickly adopted as some of the most popular locations for sodomitical encounters. The semi‐privacy and convenient city‐centre locales of public toilets in places like the Bourse and the Champs‐Élysées (which, together, were the sites of twenty‐three percent of all 1870s pederasty arrests) made them ideal for men who were understandably nervous to publicly seek homosexual encounters, but who nevertheless had to leave their private homes to pursue genital contact with other men. Revenin’s focus on the pissoir can be found on pp. 36–41. See also W. Peniston, ‘Love and

Fashionable urban areas like the boulevard Haussmann onto which Caillebotte’s paintings (Figs. 10 and 11) look are recorded as having been regular sites of ‘morality police’ patrols,115 the chic Champs‐Élysées neighbourhood saw twenty‐

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five percent of all homosexual arrests between 1873 and 1879,116 and the Bois de Boulogne became known as ‘a homosexual hotspot, as well as a promenade for Parisian high society.’117

The legal records make it very clear that, no matter what the overt

conventions of homosartorial looking were, there was also a covert parallel

system that relied upon the same spaces of modern life and similar techniques of observation and display to obtain an end result (sodomy) that was classified as a great social evil. The fear of the sodomitical, a dangerous double threat to the

sanctity of both the male/female and public/private divisions, added another level

of charged investment to the already‐fraught field of the inter‐male glance. A man aiming a sexually solicitous look at his fellow fellow might easily have used

the same language of visual details to find a receptive partner as a man trying to determine the social class of an approaching stranger.118

The images I have discussed, unsurprisingly, take steps to distance

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themselves from intimations of a homoerotic gaze. In Manet’s Masked Ball at the Opera, there is an exaggerated insistence on male‐to‐female looking, and for all

Death in Gay Paris: Homosexuality and Criminality in the 1870s’, in Homosexuality in Modern France, eds. J. Merrick and B. Ragan, Jr. (Oxford, 1996), pp. 131–32. 115

R. Revenin, Homosexualité, p. 41.

116 117

R. Revenin, Homosexualité, p. 32.

‘un haut‐lieu homosexuel, en même temps qu’une promenade pour la haute société parisienne.’ R. Revenin, Homosexualité, p. 34. 118

Revenin reports that young men who were linked with sexual availability were often clean‐shaven at a time when standards of masculinity required some form of facial hair (see the Journal des Tailleurs illustrations for examples of fashionable beards, sideburns, and moustaches), and that they were known to affect a sway‐hipped saunter quite apart from the stiff comportment expected of gentlemen. R. Revenin, Homosexualité, p. 31.

that the scene is full of men, they interact remarkably little with each other. In Music in the Tuileries Gardens, the men look at each other and/or away from the women around them in affirmation of the important identity‐building nature of

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homosociality, but for the most part they do so without facial detail or clear purpose. There is an avoidance of the sort of detailed examination that might be concluded to be at all homosexual. The uneasy ambiguity of the image stems

from its privileging of the homosocial gaze over the more acceptable heterosocial and its simultaneous refusal to inscribe that homosociality in overt terms, for fear of tipping the scales into the homoerotic.

Caillebotte’s street views take this refusal further, letting male viewers

look at a painting (one degree of removal) in which they are invited to situate

themselves at a second remove by observing the street from a balcony. Both the

gallery‐visiting viewer’s perspective and the painted one he is offered allow for a ‘safe’ male‐male gaze that would have permitted the scrutiny of (painted)

Parisian men in public while maintaining multiple layers of distance and thereby avoiding the street‐level confrontation of an ambiguous, possibly‐sexual glance that could threaten the breakdown of acceptable masculinity. The same act of removal is accomplished in the Journal des Tailleurs

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illustrations. The enforced blank interchangeability of their figures marks them as ‘safe’ objects of inter‐male looking that men could scrutinise without anxiety over the fact that they were covetously looking at images of other men (the coveting being of a sartorial, rather than a sexual nature, but present nonetheless). They let men have the minute scrutiny that was so essential for identifying their place in society and, at the same time, avoid the fact that that very same look,

performed in a public arena, held the potential to mark them with suspicion of homosexual interest.

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With all the fraught significance of inter‐male looking in mid‐nineteenth‐

century Paris, the imperative to ‘wear clothes that made the wearing of clothes “invisible”’119 can perhaps been seen less as a paradox and more as a way of

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avoiding the messy breakdown of masculine identity. The etiquette manuals

repeat, over and over, what this French guide does: that ‘[y]ou will know you are elegant, Sirs, when, in the streets, you are passed without being noticed’.120 An English analogue echoes, ‘[a] gentleman should always be so well dressed that

his dress shall never be observed at all. Does this sound like an enigma? It is not

meant for one. It only implies that perfect simplicity is perfect elegance, and that the true test of dress in the toilet of a gentleman is its entire harmony,

unobtrusiveness and becomingness.’121 Of course, the enigma remains, as the

only way to achieve this apparently effortless chic is, in actual fact, to invest a great deal of effort.

After the early‐nineteenth‐century simplification of male fashion, men

were forced to take on the challenge of following advice as nebulously paradoxical as, ‘without becoming a slave to the fashions of the day and without rejecting them, you must follow them from afar, according to your station and

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your fortune, without affectation however, and in order to not appear ridiculous.’122 Wear some jewellery, but not too much. Make sure your suit is well

cut, but avoid flaunting that cut. Perhaps most crucial of all, make sure to look at 119

B. Shannon, Cut of His Coat, p. 28.

120

‘Vous saurez que vous êtes élégants, messieurs, lorsque, dans les rues, vous passerez sans être remarqués.’ E. Chapus, Manuel de l’homme et de la femme comme il faut (Paris, 1855), p. 52. 121

Anon., Routledge’s Etiquette for Gentlemen (London, 1864), p. 39.

122

‘sans vous rendre esclave des modes du jour et sans trop les rejeter, vous devez les suivre de loin, selon votre état et votre fortune, sans recherche toutefois, et uniquement pour ne pas paraître ridicule.’ T. Bourgeau, Les Usages du monde (Paris, 1864), p. 284.

the other men around you, but be equally certain that your regard goes unobserved. The complexities and nuances of the homosartorial world seem quite daunting. However, in combination, the tremendous importance placed on the male

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homosocial sphere in the mid‐nineteenth century and the intense rigidity of

expected gender roles seem to indicate that maybe we should not be so fazed by the intricate network of pre‐ and proscriptions revolving around men and dress

and looking. It has, after all, always been true that ‘[t]o choose clothes, either in a store or at home, is to define and describe ourselves’,123 and self‐definition in

such visual fashion was a vital goal of the nineteenth‐century bourgeoisie as they worked to strengthen their position as the newly dominant social class.

Men’s and women’s clothing became more diametrically opposed as the

sexes were moulded into emphatically contrasting entities, and with that, I argue, came a privileging not just of the differentiated male/female dynamic, but also of

the homosocial environment as one in which identity could, and should, be formed. Men used each other to gauge how successfully they were conforming to expected gender norms. They wrote piles of etiquette guides and fashion

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periodicals for each other. They examined each other’s clothing with the optical equivalent of a fine‐toothed comb, which intense scrutiny must have been key to

masculine identity development, or else male fashion discourse would have stopped with a simple proscription against looking at each other. Instead, there is a subtle but unmistakeable undercurrent of encouraged same‐sex looking throughout the period costume writing. 123

A. Lurie, Language of Clothes, p. 5.

And not only the writing. The visual depictions of fashionably dressed

men from the mid‐nineteenth century also often incorporate the economy of the inter‐male gaze, be it fine art images like Caillebotte’s and Manet’s, or mass‐

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produced prints like those that illustrated the Journal des Tailleurs and other male‐ targeted fashion journals. The inescapable fact is that, though men were

supposed to be looking only at women, to do so would have left them lacking in

the cues to be gleaned from their compatriots’ clothes. Womenswear could not have shown men how to wear a three‐piece suit with aplomb, nor how to pass through the spaces of modernity balanced on the rail‐thin line between being

well dressed and garnering undue notoriety. ‘Today,’ says an 1873 issue of the

Journal des Tailleurs, ‘the greatest distinction consists of not drawing attention to oneself, and it is by simplicity and tasteful details that the products of our good

tailors are recognised. Also, to be appreciated, modern dress must be seen from up close: at the races, in the inner circle; at the theatre, in the orchestra seats.’124 There, plainly stated, are both parts of the equation. The close looking

that was required of men was linked to the spaces of modern urban society, the spaces we see in Caillebotte’s street views, Manet’s scenes of theatres and public

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gardens, and the race grounds of illustrations like Fig. 12. However, in the same statement, men are discouraged from inviting too close a look, lest they draw too much—or the wrong kind of—attention to themselves. The ‘wrong kind’ of attention that lurks just beyond the edges of statements like this one is, I believe, the male‐male gaze that was known to exist at the time, that was equally

124

‘Aujourd’hui, la grande distinction consiste à ne pas se faire remarquer, et c’est par la simplicité et le bon goût des détails que se manifestent les produits de nos bon faiseurs. Aussi, pour être apprécié, le costume moderne veut être vu de près: aux courses, dans l’enceinte réservée ; au théâtre, dans les fauteuils d’orchestre.’ Journal des Tailleurs, 1 June 1873, unnumbered page.

attached to the public places of the modern city, and that was sexually desirous rather than sartorially.

What is safer, then, to provide a place where same‐sex looking between

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men was allowed, than art? Two‐dimensional depictions of men offered a male viewer the chance for leisurely perusal in a non‐threatening context. He could look without being looked at and without troubling prescribed masculine

identity. He could study the details of menswear to his heart’s content. These

images served a key function in a society in which inter‐male looking constantly threatened to tumble carefully constructed bourgeois masculinity from its high‐ wire walk. They provided a vehicle for that necessary‐but‐alarming gaze, and

further, for French masculine identity itself, to flourish without disrupting the

status quo. To a culture willing to subscribe to extraordinarily complex schemes

of behaviour and appearance in the name of normativity, the importance of such a visual outlet and the service it provided cannot be underestimated or

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overlooked.

BIBLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY SOURCES • Anonymous, The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook of Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (London, 1859).

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• Anonymous, Routledge’s Etiquette for Gentlemen (London, 1864). • Baudelaire, Charles, The Painter of Modern Life (Paris, 1863). • Blanc, Charles, Art and Ornament in Dress (London, 1877). • Bourgeau, Th., Les Usages du monde (Paris, 1864).

• Bradi, La Comtesse de, Du Savoir‐vivre en France au dix‐neuvième siècle (Paris, 1858.

• Chapus, Eugène, Manuel de l’homme et de la femme comme il faut (Paris, 1855). • Dash, La Comtesse, Comment on fait son chemin dans le monde (Paris, 1868).

• Day, Charles William, Hints on Etiquette and the Usages of Society with A Glance at Bad Habits (London, 1854). • Frémy, Arnould, Les Mœurs de notre temps (Paris, 1861).

• Kerckhoff, Émile, Le Costume à la cour et à la ville: Étiquette tenue officielle et de fantaisie (Paris, 1865). • Le Blanc, H., The Art of Tying the Cravat, Demonstrated by Sixteen Lessons, With Explanatory Plates and a Portrait; Preceded by a History of the Cravat, from its Origin to the Present Time; With the latest Parisian Improvements, and Amplifications (London, 1829).

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• Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, Paris, 1860–1880. • Mortemart‐Boisse, Le Baron de, La Vie élégante à Paris (Paris, 1858).

• Pearson, Samuel, Week‐Day Living–A Book for Young Men and Women (London, 1882).

• Stone, Elizabeth, Chronicles of Fashion, from the time of Elizabeth to the early part of the nineteenth century, in Manners, amusements, banquets, costume, &c. (London, 1845).

• The Tailor and Cutter, London, 1866–1880.

• Tardieu, Ambroise, Étude médico‐légale sur les attentats aux mœurs (Paris, 1857). • Texier, Edmond, Tableau de Paris (Paris, 1852). • Verardi, Louis, Manuel du bon ton et de la politesse française (Paris, 1853).

SECONDARY SOURCES •

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• Zola, Émile, Edouard Manet, Étude biographique et critique (Paris, 1867).

Berhaut, Marie, Gustave Caillebotte: Catalogue Raisonné des Peintures et Pastels (Paris, 1994).

• Breward, Christopher, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, fashion and city life 1860–1914 (Manchester and New York, 1999).

• — ‘Renouncing Consumption: men, fashion and luxury 1870–1914’, in Defining Dress: Dress as Object, Meaning and Identity, eds. A. de la Haye and E. Wilson (Manchester and New York, 1999), pp. 48‐62.

• Broude, Norma, ed., Gustave Caillebotte and the Fashioning of Identity in Impressionist Paris (Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2002).

• Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990). • Chenoune, Farid, trans. Deke Dusinberre, A History of Men’s Fashion (Paris, 1993).

• Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (New York and London, 1984).

• Copley, Antony, Sexual Moralities in France 1780–1980: New ideas on family, divorce, and homosexuality (New York and London, 1989).

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1. Edouard Manet, Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873, oil on canvas, 59.1 x 72.5 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. (Photo: National Gallery of Art.)

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Fig. 2. Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, March 1870, lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 3. Anonymous (published by Bonvalet), Ha! Quel vent! C’est incroyable, ca. 1796, hand‐coloured etching, 19 x 29 cm. Sterling and Francine Clark Institute, Williamstown. (Photo: Sterling and Francine Clark Institute.)

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Fig. 4. Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Lord Grantham, 1816, graphite on paper, 40.5 x 28.3 cm. J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. (Photo: J. Paul Getty Museum.)

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Fig. 5. Eugène Delacroix, Portrait of Louis‐Auguste Schwiter, 1826–27, oil on canvas, 218 x 144 cm. The National Gallery, London. (Photo: The National Gallery.)

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Fig. 6. Edouard Manet, Portrait of Théodore Duret, 1868, oil on canvas, 43 x 35 cm. Musée du Petit Palais, Paris. (Photo: SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.)

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Fig. 7. Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, November 1860, lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 8. Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, June 1861, lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 9. Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait of Paul Hugot, 1878, oil on canvas, 204 x 92 cm. Private collection. (Photo: Wildenstein Institute.)

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Fig. 10. Gustave Caillebotte, Traffic Island on the Boulevard Haussmann, 1880, oil on canvas, 81 x 101 cm. Private collection. (Photo: The Image Gallery, University of California, San Diego.)

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Fig. 11. Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880, oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. Private collection. (Photo: The Image Gallery, University of California, San Diego.)

Fig. 12. Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, May 1879, lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 13. Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, October 1861, lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 14. Illustration from The Tailor and Cutter, Summer 1880, unknown medium. National Art Library, London. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 15. Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, September 1860, lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 16. Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, March 1873, lithograph. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 17. Illustration from The Tailor and Cutter, Summer 1880, unknown medium. National Art Library, London. (Photo: Author’s own.)

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Fig. 18. Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862, oil on canvas, 76.2 x 118.1 cm. The National Gallery, London. (Photo: The National Gallery.)

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Fig. 19. Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, (detail of Fig. 18).

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1: Edouard Manet, Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873

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Fig. 2: Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, March 1870

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Fig. 3: Anonymous (published by Bonvalet), Ha! Quel vent! C’est incroyable, ca. 1796

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Fig. 4: Jean‐Auguste‐Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Lord Grantham, 1816

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Fig. 5: Eugène Delacroix, Portrait of Louis‐ Auguste Schwiter, 1826‐27

Fig. 6: Edouard Manet, Portrait of Théodore Duret, 1868

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Fig. 7: Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, November 1860

Fig. 8: Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, June 1861

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Fig. 9: Gustave Caillebotte, Portrait of Paul Hugot, 1878

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Fig. 10: Gustave Caillebotte, Traffic Island on the Boulevard Haussmann, 1880

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Fig. 11: Gustave Caillebotte, Boulevard Seen from Above, 1880

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Fig. 12: Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, May 1879

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Fig. 13: Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, October 1861

Fig. 14: Illustration from The Tailor and Cutter, Summer 1880

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Fig. 15: Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, September 1860

Fig. 16: Illustration from Les Modes Françaises: Journal des Tailleurs, March 1873

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Fig. 17: Illustration from The Tailor and Cutter, Summer 1880

Fig. 18: Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862

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Fig. 19: Edouard Manet, Music in the Tuileries Gardens, 1862 (detail)