Male Beauty: The Male Dress Reform Party in Interwar Britain

In 1929, the Men’s Dress Reform Party was established in response to what its founders regarded as the heinous modern age. One of them, John Carl Flugel (a psychologist from University College London), contended that, since the end of the eighteenth-century men had been progressively ignoring brighter, more elaborate, and more varied forms of masculine ornamentation by ‘making their own tailoring the more austere and ascetic of the arts’. He called this event ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation’, or the occasion when men ‘abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful’ and ‘henceforth aimed at being only useful’. In the face of inter-war feminism and the denigration of masculinity, the professionals who joined the Men’s Dress Reform Party regarded it as their duty to lobby for the aesthetic liberation of men. This blog examines male dress reform between the wars.

The experience of warfare between 1914 and 1918 was crucial in focusing attention on the bodies of men. Dress reform was necessary not only for the sake of enhancing masculine beauty, but also to prevent the further degeneration of the ‘British race’. Health and hygiene were high on the agenda of male dress reformers. Although they failed to achieve their more grandiose hopes, they were representative of a broader movement towards freeing men from constraints imposed by the state, employers, and the tailoring trade.

The Men’s Dress Reform Party (MDRP) had grown out of a clothing subcommittee of the New Health Society, a creation of the health radical, Sir Arbuthnot Lane. In 1929, this subcommittee consisted of a group of academics, doctors, theologians, and authors, including the Very Revd William Ralph Inge, Alfred C. Jordan, Guy Kendall, Caleb Williams Saleeby, Richard Sickert, Ernest Thesiger, and Leonard Williams. It was Lane’s pupils (Jordan and Saleeby) who wrote the report that eventually led to the establishment of the MDRP. In their report, sartorial alternatives were set out. Instead of the starched collar, they promoted the Byron collar with a tie loosely knotted. Blouses were preferred shirts, and coats should only be worn in the cold. Conventional trousers were condemned outright. Although they approved of the kilt, they decreed that modern industrial conditions made shorts the most practical type of clothing. Underclothing should be loose. Hats should only be worn as protection against the rain or sun, and sandals should replace shoes. Most importantly, they called for the exercise of greater individuality in men’s clothing.

Although the First World War cannot be said to have directly led to the establishment of the MDRP, the popularity of dress reform for men was an outcome of tensions harboured between 1914 and 1918. The MDRP was responding to four things, three of which they linked to men’s experiences of warfare.

Firstly, they argued, middle-class men were oppressed by the disciplines imposed by capitalist labour. Every night, men returned from work feeling ‘hot, uncomfortable, tired, and bad-tempered’: the ‘rather sad colours’ they were forced to wear had a depressing effect. The tailoring profession, in particular, was responsible for men’s chronic unhappiness which resulted from being forbidden any creative role in fashioning their own bodies through the use of clothing.

Secondly, men were fettered by military-style uniformity in dress. Military uniforms were everywhere: in the street, theatre, church, railway station. Men were actually proud, rather than mortified, to find other men wearing identical clothes. Furthermore, during the war, military uniforms had obliterated differences in class between the majority of men who remained in the lower ranks of the armed forces: as Michael MacDonagh recorded in his diary for 31 December 1914, when you met soldiers in the streets you could not tell from their appearances ‘whether they have come from country houses and parsonages, or from labourers’ cottages and artisan dwellings’. This wartime equality needed to be eradicated in the reconstructed new world after the war.

Thirdly, war-induced shortages and the need for the state to consult with working-class men during the military crisis were regarded as having resulted in the rise of the working classes: and this was oppressive to professional men. When the Dean of St Pauls, William Ralph Inge, sourly observed that it was the democratic forces of the French Revolution which had brought to an end the picturesqueness of men’s attire (because gentlemen ‘hoped to escape the guillotine by looking as bourgeois as possible’), he was really alluding to his fear that the time was coming when ‘the unfortunate capitalist, reduced to bury his bond notes instead of investing, may find it expedient to try to pass for a trade unionist’.

Finally, the female sex had risen supreme during the war. Although historians dispute its significance, many men at the time would have agreed with the suffragists that the war had revolutionized women’s lives. Between 1914 and 1918, an estimated two million women replaced men in employment. Although the largest increase was in transport industries, middle-class men were also threatened as the employment of women in commerce, government, and teaching increased from 0.7 million to 1.4 million. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 admitted women to many professions, including the Bar. These changes in employment were minor in comparison to what was perceived as women’s rapid rise in the political and social spheres. No longer could men claim exclusive rights to the dignities of statesmanship: in 1918 some of their womenfolk received the vote alongside them, and by 1928 all other women joined. Women entered universities and began competing successfully with the rising generation of professional men in all areas.

Women’s fashion also underwent dramatic changes. Short hair and short skirts represented women’s freedom in a new way. Stockings were produced in a wide range of colours. Some women even took to wearing trousers. Although the ‘flapper’ earned herself many admirers, she won as many enemies.

Men were decidedly threatened. Just as men feared that they had become mere accessories to women, so, too, men’s clothing was said to have become simply a foil to women’s clothing. Men needed to become ‘as beautiful as women’. Male liberation was their catchcry: it was time to do away with all symbols of masculine frustration’.

Ironically, they argued, to regain masculine power, men needed to take inspiration from feminism. As the ‘Lad o’ London’ noted in 1928, dress reform for men ‘is long overdue and the chances are small, unless we start with the boys and inspire them, as the girls have been inspired in the past few years, with a fondness for light, loose clothing which gives access to the air and freedom to the limbs’. Men’s dress expressed imprisonment; women’s expressed emancipation. Only by recovering male artistry could men regain power and find happiness. It required men actively to protest against their clothing and stand defiantly against the horror and anger of women. All symbols of men’s inferiority to women were to be tackled. For instance, hats needed to be thrown away (or remodelled) so as not to cause baldness. The physical deformity caused by over-tight clothing had to be eradicated. Middle-aged men should never again faint because of over-tight belts, stays, and laces. The practice of strangling young boys with collars-causing them to talk ‘like an adenoid’ and look ‘like a tabloid’, must be done away with. In this way, a new generation of men would rise from the ashes of war: elitist, rather than democratic; masculine, without any taint of femininity; beautiful, not deformed.

Although their primary purpose was the aesthetics of middle age, there was an additional reason men needed to reform their dress: men’s clothing was causing their health to degenerate. In this, the post-war dress reformers agreed with their predecessors, but they were divided over what promoted physical well-being. Sartorially, pre-war commentators had emphasized the relationship between warmth and health. Like animals, men had to be completely covered. Wool was favoured because was the slowest conductor of heat and therefore was best at keeping the temperature of the body constant. A well-dressed man should wear a flannel vest and drawers next to his skin, an upper shirt, as well as a complete suit of clothes. Thus, for male dress reformers in the 189os, the chief flaws in men’s dress included the fact that the waistcoat opened to show the shirt (‘exposes the chest and throat unduly’) and the way the coat opened behind (‘permits the loin, when we sit, to be entirely without protection from the coat, which may explain the frequent occurrence of lumbago amongst men’).

From the turn of the century, the emphasis began changing. These reformers complained that were literally smothered in clothes: ‘we swathe our bodies in unhygienic woollens so that the pores of the skin shall be clogged with minute fibres and thus rendered incapable of performing their proper duties as vomitories of impurities.’ The curative function of air and sunlight was considered axiomatic.

The impetus for this ideology had been developing from the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Smoke abatement committees had been established from the early i88os, but achieved their greatest success in 1926 with the passing of the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Act. Two years previously, the Sunlight League had been founded with the famous eugenist and leading male dress reformer, Caleb Williams Saleeby, as chairman. The invisible was important: it stained ‘the surfaces and the depths’ of men. Public health authorities were exhorted to provide clinics for artificial sunlight treatment and local authorities were urged to build schools and houses that faced the sun. Open air swimming pools and sunbathing centres were established. It was the role of reformers to ‘restore the sun’s rays to town populations’ by removing smoke, fumes, and grit which emanated from house, mill, and factory chimneys, as well as from locomotives. In the words of the alderman, David Adams, in 1932: ‘Today ... we are returning to that most ancient of faiths, the worship of the Sun, in the ceremonial interblending his vital rays with our receptive bodily framework.’ Or, as the dress reformer and nudist Harold Vincent blasphemed, ‘God and the sun are identical’.

Men’s dress reform was regarded as crucial for physical well-being. Although these arguments focused largely on the health and efficiency of middle-aged, middle-class, white men, the dress reformers bolstered their arguments with a rhetoric drawn from the well-established child welfare movement. Lack of sunlight and fresh air were held to be responsible for high levels of infant mortality. The reformers went further and argued that exposure to sunlight would cure a wide range of illnesses, particularly rickets and tuberculosis. If Britain was to compete with other nations, the problem of ‘sun-starved’ children needed to be overcome. Sunlight treatment would prevent slum children from ‘filling our hospitals and institutions’, enabling them to ‘play their part in the battle of life’.

The importance of fresh air for children was unquestioned. A similar argument was applied to adults. The chief interest of the dress reformers remained focused on middle-aged men. Lack of sunshine was alleged to be responsible for the sluggishness of sedentary workers. Commuters stuck in the tube were liable to suffer from ‘tube-airculosis’. Heavy winter clothing exacerbated ill health. Men’s bodies were tormented with rheumatism due to inefficient skin respiration through tight clothing. Collars restricted circulation of blood to the brain and stunted its development. Sunlight prevented disease by building up the body’s resistance and restoring the health of the weak. In the words of Saleeby, dress reform would offer ‘a larger surface of skin for the life-giving action of the ultra-violet rays of sunlight, the most precious medicinal and hygienic age in the world’. Since (they argued) darkness reduced work efficiency and increased the incidence of drunkenness, greater industrial efficiency lay in exposing the body to the healthful rays of the sun. The reformer, Herbert N. Casson, declared that men’s clothing was partially responsible for the high rates of illness amongst working men. He reminded readers that 90 million working days in Great Britain during 1927 were lost because of illness – that is, twelve times more working days were lost through illness than were lost through strikes. The inefficiency of Britain’s workers needed to be tackled if Britain were to compete with other nations. This racial discourse was central to the ideology of the MDRP. Thus, Casson went on to note:

semi-naked races have no knowledge of science nor hygiene. They live in the midst of smells. They drink foul water. They know nothing of germs. But they live fairly long and are amazingly strong and healthy. Why? Because they have a plus which we lack. They have the Ultra-Violet rays on the skin of the whole body ... The fact is that the bleached clothes-wrapped races are physically weaker than the natural-colour races. The dockers of London cannot compare, for strength and endurance, with coolies of China and the natives of Africa. The law of compensation has made us pay dearly for our comfort inventions.

The dress reformer and athlete F. A. Hornibrook made a similar argument. He posed for a photograph with a group of Fijians, reflecting in his book that their ‘splendid physiques’ were the result of their ‘natural’ clothing and outdoor life. He used such photographs to force home his point about the need for British men to reform their lives lest they be overtaken by such ‘primitives’. Dress reform would regenerate British men, thus enabling a revival of national and imperial power.

Despite these impassioned appeals to male strength and imperial vigour, radical attempts to

reform male states of dress failed to win widespread support. By 1937, the New Health Society (which had provided accommodation, secretarial support, and encouragement for the dress reformers) had been declared bankrupt, and nothing more was heard of the MDRP.

The reasons for their failure to gain mass support are not difficult to see. Members

were often regarded as part of the loony fringe. Few men would be persuaded by ‘H. S. L.’ in New Health (1927) when he advocated that all English boys should wear the kilt, the Highland bonnet, dirk, sporran, and bright hose on the grounds that it was the most hygienic and healthiest garment, in addition to being ‘easily the most becoming of all boys’ wear’.

For many, the clothes worn by the dress reformers displayed extraordinarily bad taste: costumes resembling those worn by Lord Fauntleroy or monks could not command wide appeal. In the words of a former president of the Association of London Master Tailors, the clothes worn by male dress reformers were ‘more suitable for Lotus-land than England’. Even the editor of New Health – a journal that supported male dress reform – warned that the proposed designs showed a ‘certain Puritanical austerity’ and suggested that dress reformers try to ‘coax rather than attempt to stampede’ men into better ways.

These aesthetic considerations seriously hampered the dress reformers. Even their advocacy of shorts met with ambivalence, if not hostility. Exposing the masculine leg was a source of anxiety for many men. For instance, Thomas Macmillan ‘hankered’ after joining a Highland Regiment with his friends, but could not because of the kilt: ‘I had always enjoyed the manly game of football; but while it kept me fit, too large doses had left me with a pair of legs which, when honestly surveyed, limited my choice of regiment to one which did not wear the kilt. Being a true Highlander I resolved that since I could not grace the kilt I would not bring any disgrace upon it.’ Very few men could be said to ‘have a leg’. The average man (with their ‘bulbous, spindly, disproportionate, abnormal or imperfect legs’) preferred conventionally styled trousers. Equally, the chest and belly of men often did not merit display: they were ‘discoloured and definitely ugly’. For men without specially fashioned pectorals, baring parts of the body was to be avoided: even imagining men without collars and trousers was said to be ‘horrible’. Fleshly exposure was a breach of ‘good taste’: the sight of men sunbathing in Stratford-on-Avon was ‘a horrid thing, and offends the aesthetic instincts ... The human forms thus partially clothed were red, puce-purple, hairy, perspiring; they bulged in the wrong places, they were knock-kneed. They weren’t indecent at all – just ugly’. Only one man in ten was said to have a ‘really pleasing figure’. If the middle-aged man came in for criticism, elderly men did so even more. Conventional clothing was necessary to hide ‘defects’, and it reduced everyone ‘to a decent insignificance of physique’. Proper clothes were required to improve imaginings of the male body.

Aesthetics were not the only considerations. Opponents of dress reform drew a connection

between conventional male clothing and morality. For instance, in 1929, when dress reformers began attacking the uniforms of public schools (particularly of Eton), they were reminded of the ‘natural conclusion’ of their tinkering with tradition: ‘The iconoclast who shatters the laws and customs of a Public School will make it easier for those who aim at national disruption.’ Dress reform in the army threatened maintenance of discipline.

An extended discussion of this theme can be found in an article published in the Tailor and Cutter on Christmas Day 1931. The anonymous author contended that modern dress depended on ‘restraint, on such articles of discipline and control as buttons, studs, and braces’. Such restraints were not noxious: they were the foundation upon which civilization rested and they protected men from savagery and decadence. The writer continued: ‘A loosening of the bonds will gradually impel mankind to sag and droop bodily and spiritually. If laces are unfastened, ties loosened, and buttons banished, the whole structure of modern dress will come undone; it is not so wild as it sounds to say that society will also fall to pieces.’ Efficiency in business depended on the civilizing effect of repressive clothing. Or, as another writer had it, traditional men’s clothing was important in ‘keeping the social fabric together’. The slow evolution of changes in men’s dress ensured ‘safety’: sartorial conservatism checked social anarchy.

It was recognized that male dignity rested on the clothes covering his body. Proposals to adopt the open-neck collar for the service dress in the army were rejected as unsoldierly, potentially making British officers the ‘laughing stock of the French’. The editor of theTailor and Cutter reminded the dress reformers that ‘the majesty of office is upheld by suitable attire ... Take away or cut down trousers and some of the sobriety and importance of business men vanishes’. Truly, clothes were more than coverings or decorations: they were symbols. British men should be manly and not turned into boy scouts or schoolboys.

There was another accusation thrown at the male dress reformers: they were ‘effeminate’

or ‘perverted youths’ who were avoiding manly roles. Thus, on midsummer night in 1932,

D. Anthony Bradley spoke at a debate entitled ‘Shall Man be Redressed?’ His reply was unequivocal: ‘The man who, alone in the jungle, changes into his dinner jacket does so to convince himself that he is not a savage – soft sloppy clothes are symbolic of a soft and sloppy race ... It did not matter very much what health cranks, exhibitionists or men of misplaced sex wore’ but, in his view, ‘man-sturdy and virile man, capable of withstanding the rigours of a stiff shirt’ must maintain conservative standards of dress.

As these comments suggest, the dress reformers were competing with strong vested interests in the community, particularly the retail trade. Reformers attempted to allay their suspicions by pointing out that the lighter materials and brighter colours of the proposed new men’s clothing would necessitate more frequent changes of clothes. After all, they reasoned, a woman’s dress bill far exceeded a man’s.

Despite these reassurances, opposition was fierce. For one thing, it was pointed out that reducing the amount of clothes worn would throw thousands of people out of employment. In 1929, the National Federation of Merchant Tailors at their annual conference deplored the way dress reformers touted outside tailors’ shops and they demanded that the police and local authorities stopped this practice. They also urged young ambitious men ‘to be particular and precise in the matter of suitable dress on all occasions’ and to take the advice of their tailors.

The general failure of the dress reform movement to loosen the rules applying to men’s clothing should not be exaggerated. In one area it was successful: rules concerning the clothing of the leisured man were relaxed. This relaxation had started well before the First World War. By the late 1890s, lounge suits and even sports jackets could be seen in the dress circle at the theatre. In 1900 for the first time men arrived at the Goodwood Races dressed in flannel suits, navy-blue blazers and white duck trousers with straw boaters. The wearing of stays (a form of male corset) to improve the male figure had been eradicated in the first decade of the twentieth century. Scouting organizations had legitimated shorts for boys aged up to twelve.

The wartime economy accelerated this process. The difficulty of obtaining starch during the war encouraged the move to soft-collared shirts for both boys and men. For professional and white-collar workers, donning the khaki or blue uniform meant doing away with the collar and tie. In some regions of the war, particularly Mesopotamia, adult men discovered the benefits of cutting their trousers down into shorts. Even in France, at least one division wore shorts. In war, shorts were advantageous in summer because they reduced louse breeding areas, despite being unpleasant during mustard gas attacks. As Jack Abraham complained: ‘scorched private parts can be very uncomfortable’. Many men took their sartorial experiences during wartime back home with them.

Furthermore, with increased family-oriented leisure, especially at the beach and other resorts, a greater differentiation was made between men’s casual and formal clothing. The popularization of beach resorts, coupled with the widening access to the seaside, increasingly legitimated semi-clothed sunbathing. The ‘frowsy drabness and nit-wit regulations of the English holiday resort’ were slowly being eradicated. A case was easily made for men’s dress reform in sport. After the war, men’s bathing costumes became shorter-stopping at the top of the thigh-and sleeveless with a round-shaped neck. By the 1930s, the MDRP had convinced thirty-eight seaside resorts to allow men to wear only a bathing slip for mixed bathing. The popularity of swimming increased as provision of swimming pools was actively promoted by the Board of Education, Ministry of Health, and Local Authorities.

Related to this was the way that the tanned body came into its own. In 1916, the senior medical officer for the Education Committee in the City of Nottingham marvelled at the effect of soldiers on leave from ‘Lord Kitchener’s Open-Air School’: one could ‘hardly recognise bronzed stalwart young fellows’. Men came back from the war proud of their bodies, tanned ‘as musty peas’. Indeed, the untanned body came to be regarded as the unnatural body. Sunbathing centres for children were opened on the grounds that the brown baby was the healthy baby. Areas of parks were allotted to sunbathing. No longer did the white body indicate leisurely status: instead, the tanned body did so. Holiday-makers anxiously attempted to obtain this ‘desirable insignia’. To help, the dress reformer and vice-president of the Sunlight League, Sir Leonard Hill, invented an apparatus to measure sunlight, and The Times published the results daily. The tanned man was scarcely ‘nude’.

By the late 1930S, the dress reformers had been marginalized within society and had turned their attention from the middle-aged man to children. Their only legacy lay in the clothes of familial leisure.

This blog has examined debates about the functions and aesthetics of the male body in various stages of dress and undress. Aesthetic criteria were only one incentive for reform: more important were fears of the threat of feminism, class conflict, and imperial weakness. Where the reformers differed from their critics was in their definition of ‘civilization’. For the reformers, creativity and self-expression were important in national progress; their detractors pointed out the dangers inherent in the relaxation of sartorial rules. Both groups regarded the male body as raw material requiring sculpturing within clothing. The dreams of the male dress reformers of reconstructing manliness shattered in the war, and of reasserting masculinity over femininity through sheet creative force, failed to make any significant impact upon a society moving towards another world war.