Accidental remainders: working men's fashion c.1730–1880 in National Museums Scotland

In 1999 Christopher Breward introduced The Hidden Consumer Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860-1914 with a critique of separate spheres gendering in historical fashion studies and the unquestioning absorption by menswear scholars of psychologist J. C. Flügel's 'The Great Masculine Renunciation'. 1 This theory, that men repressed fashionable engagement in the nineteenth century, persists as a convenient way to frame male sartorial timelines. Flügel wrote his theory almost a century ago; a child of the nineteenth century he was undoubtedly influenced by received narratives. Yet while his reductive and sexist assertions about women have been ignored, his positioning of male uniformity has been mythologized. Flügel's narrative has been perpetuated by value systems that have been created, in Breward's words, 'limited histories, hemmed in by a misinterpretation of the validity of the surviving evidence and a too eager acceptance of the uniform effectiveness of symbolic codes'.2

The following chapter will use the collections and collecting practices of National Museums Scotland (NMS) to reflect on how narrative systems such as Flügel's. have influenced not only how fashion historians engaged with dress collections, but the wider identity performances constructing our cultural heritage. Twenty years after Breward's call for revision, scholarship of men's fashion is still focused on sartorial high, marginal and urban design, while studies of masculinity are disconnected from the clothes that men wore.3 The everyday fashion of average working men still lies dormant, its contributions to our cultural understanding subdued by received narratives