About this episode

Chloe Chapin discusses her book on the sartorial revolution and its impact on modern men's fashion, using George Washington's inaugural attire as a focal point.

At his first inauguration, George Washington made a very carefully calibrated political statement: he wore a brown suit. It was tailored from a weave of superfine wool made in Hartford, Connecticut, and was so far from being the crude homespun which was for some an emblem of a proud American—or, for British cartoonists, of crude Brother Jonathan—that some newspapers criticized Washington for wearing a suit of imported fabric. The cloth seemed too good to have been made in America. Washington wore two suits that day. In the evening, at the inaugural ball, he wore a suit of imported purple silk. The choice of these two suits, argues my guest Chloe Chapin in her new book Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men , shows a dividing line between two eras: an eighteenth century of Washington’s youth and early middle age in which men wore a wide variety of textiles in a cornucopia of colors and textures; and a democratic age in which drab and severe signaled liberty and equality among men. Chloe Chapin holds a PhD in American Studies and has worked for more than two decades as a costume designer for Broadway productions, opera companies, and Shakespeare…

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