Reviews

“Prepare to appreciate the founding fathers as fashion icons. From American city streets to the courts of Europe, from the work of tailoring to the business of politics, Suitable brilliantly explores the relationship between sartorial and political revolutions through the now-ubiquitous form of power dressing, the dark suit. With a designer’s eye for detail and a scholar’s sensibility to the nuanced intersections of social status, gender, and race, Chloe Chapin makes an invisible uniform of masculine authority visible and legible. Suitable exposes nothing less than the role of fashion in the rise of modern democracies. You’ll never look at a suit the same way again.” — Kate Haulman, American University

“Suitable throws new light on the significance of men’s suits. A scholar of American history, who also knows how to make clothes, Chloe Chapin explores the 250-year history of white men wearing plain, dark, uniform suits, a ‘brotherhood of men in black’ that has often symbolized patriarchal power and white nationalism, even today. Meanwhile, the dark suit remains closely associated with masculinity and modernity. Although its historic association with democracy has become more tenuous, the idea of equality has been replaced by power and status. This book is good for thinking.” — Valerie Steele, The Museum at FIT

“In Suitable, Chloe Chapin explores the democratizing effect of black suits as white men gained suffrage and access to the halls of political power, while the whims of fashion were discarded as the superficial domain of women. Chapin’s colorful prose and eye for detail will forever change how we see the pantsuit and its role in politics.” — Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Author of Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic

“Much more than a historical or chronological accounting of an age of fashion, the book offers a close and lively examination of these and other trends that led to a ‘sartorial revolution.’ An entertaining debut that uncovers notions of identity in men’s fashion.” — Kirkus

“This book is right up there with what I consider classics of the scholarship by academics like Allison Lurie and Valerie Steele.” — Rachel Pollock, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill