Masculine Renunciation or Rejection of the Feminine

Revisiting J.C. Flügel’s Psychology of Clothes

Bibliographic Data

ID12587748
AuthorsChloe Chapin (0000-0001-8238-2150, Moscow State University of Technologies and Management named after K.G. Razumovskiy, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume26
Issue7
Pages983-1008
Publication date2021-10-11
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFashion Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1362-704X • E-ISSN: 1751-7419
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/1362704x.2021.1952919
OpenAlexW3206624198
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited22

In this article, I revisit J.C. Flügel’s conception of the “Great Masculine Renunciation” and its lasting effect on fashion scholarship. Coined in Flügel’s 1930 book The Psychology of Clothes, the term was quickly adopted by early dress historians, though it has often been used in extraction from its original context. Flügel’s framework of psychology both illuminated and limited his analysis of men’s clothing: I compare his early 20th-century psychological analysis to the real historical style changes between the 18th and 19th centuries, and the profound, lasting impact they had not just on men, but on broader understandings of gender, class, and nationality. I challenge Flügel’s definition of the changes in fashions that did occur at the end of the 18th century as essentially about masculinity—by far the more profound impact has been the associated assigning of women’s dress to the character of “fashion,” a role which had previously been held by both genders of the upper class. While it is not invalid to consider this esthetic shift in terms of a loss for men, it also allowed for women’s fashion to be marked as fashion, and for women and nonwhite, non-western, or non-heteronormative men to be marked as “other.”

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Character (mathematics · Clothing · Context (archaeology · Literature · Masculinity · Renunciation · Scholarship · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Theology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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