An account of the development of the suit, from the seventeenth century to the present day, from the mysteries of button placement to the influences of princes and kings as early trend setters.

An account of the development of the suit, from the seventeenth century to the present day, from the mysteries of button placement to the influences of princes and kings as early trend setters.

A beautifully tailored history of this fashion staple—at once a garment of tradition, power, and subversion. The Suit unpicks the story of this most familiar garment, from its emergence in western Europe at the end of the seventeenth century to today. Suit-wearing figures such as the Savile Row gentleman and the Wall Street businessman have long embodied ideas of tradition, masculinity, power, and respectability, but the suit has also been used to disrupt concepts of gender and conformity. Adopted and subverted by women, artists, musicians, and social revolutionaries through the decades—from dandies and Sapeurs to the Zoot Suit and Le Smoking—the suit is also a device for challenging the status quo. For all those interested in the history of menswear, this beautifully illustrated book offers new perspectives on this most mundane, and poetic, product of modern culture.

The Englishman’s Boy brilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West – the Cypress Hills Massacre. Vanderhaeghe’s rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its most extravagant era – with its visionaries, celebrities, and dreamers – provides vivid background for scenes of action, adventure, and intrigue. Richly textured, evocative of time and place, this is an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams that has at its centre the haunting story of a young drifter – “the Englishman’s boy” – whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one.

For all men, and indeed all women who are interested in men's clothes - here is an alphabetical guide to men's fashion written with wit and expert knowledge. From the etiquette of dressing to the meaning of technical terms, Hardy Amies' skilful eye guides you safely through style decisions on everything from blazers and brogues to skiing and sandals. No man can afford to be without this classic style bible, now published in a handsome cloth-bound special edition.

Late nineteenth-century France was a nation undergoing an identity crisis: the uncertain infancy of the Third Republic and shifting alliances in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War forced France to interrogate the fundamental values and characteristics at the heart of its own national identity. Music was central to this national self-scrutiny. It comes as little surprise to us that Oriental fears, desires, and anxieties should be a fundamental part of this, but what has been overlooked to date is that Britain, too, provided a thinking space in the French musical world; it was often – surprisingly and paradoxically – represented through many of the same racialist terms and musical tropes as the Orient. However, at the same time, its shared history with France and the explosions of colonial rivalry between the two nations introduced an ever-present tension into this musical relationship. This book sheds light on this forgotten musical sphere through a rich variety of contemporary sources. It visits the café-concert and its tradition of ‘Englishing up’ with fake hair, mocking accents, and unflattering dances; it explores the reactions, both musical and physical, to British evangelical bands as they arrived in the streets of France and the colonies; it considers the French reception of, and fascination with, folk music from Ireland and Scotland; and it confronts the culture shock felt by French visitors to Britain as they witnessed British music-making for the first time. Throughout, it examines the ways in which this music allowed French society to grapple with the uncertainty of late nineteenth-century life, providing ordinary French citizens with a means of understanding and interrogating both the Franco-British relationship and French identity itself.