There has been a great deal of recent interest in masculine clothing, examining both its production and consumption, and the ways in which it was used to create individual identities and to build businesses, from 1850 onwards. Drawing upon a wide range of sources this book studies the interaction between producers and consumers at a key period in the development of the ready-made clothing industry. It also shows that many innovations in advertising clothing, usually considered to have been developed in America, had earlier British precedents. To counter the lack of documentary evidence that has hitherto hampered research into the dress practices of non-elite groups, this book utilises thousands of unpublished visual documents. These include hundreds of manufacturers' designs, which underline an unexpected degree of investment by manufacturers in boys' clothing, and which was matched by heavy investment in advertising, with thousands of images of boys' clothing for shop catalogues in the Stationers' Hall copyright archive. Another key source is the archives of Dr Barnardo's Homes. This extraordinary collection contains over 15,000 documented photographs of boys entering between 1875 and 1900, allowing us to look beyond official polarization of 'raggedness' and 'respectability' used by charities and social reformers of all stripes and to establish the clothing that was actually worn by a large sample of boys. A close analysis of 1,800 images reveals that even when families were impoverished, they strove to present their boys in ways that reflected their position in the family group and in society. By drawing on these visual sources, and linking the design and retailing of boys' clothing with social, cultural and economic issues, this book shows that an understanding of the production and consumption of the boys clothing is central to debates on the growth of the consumer society, the development of mass-market fashion, and concepts of childhood and masculinity.

Objects and commodities have frequently been studied to assess their position within consumer - or material - culture, but all too rarely have scholars examined the politics that lie behind that culture. This book fills the gap and explores the political and state structures that have shaped the consumer and the nature of his or her consumption. From medieval sumptuary laws to recent debates in governments about consumer protection, consumption has always been seen as a highly political act that must be regulated, directed or organized according to the political agendas of various groups. An internationally renowned group of experts looks at the emergence of the rational consuming individual in modern economic thought, the moral and ideological values consumers have attached to their relationships with commodities, and how the practices and theories of consumer citizenship have developed alongside and within the expanding state. How does consumer identity become available to people and how do they use it? How is consumption negotiated in a dictatorship? Are material politics about state politics, consumer politics, or the relationship between these and consumer practices?From the specifics of the politics of consumption in the French Revolution - what was the status of rum? How complicated did a vinegar recipe have to be before the resultant product qualified as 'luxury'? - to the highly contentious twentieth-century debates over American political economy, this original book traces the relationships among political cultures, consumers and citizenship from the eighteenth century to the present.