The Economic, Political, and Cultural History of Menswear

Menswear expert Derek Guy talks to Jacobin about where Western men’s clothing traditions came from, how they have evolved, and how they're being continually reinterpreted.

Perhaps no other industry is as central to the development of Marxist economic thought as the textile industry, which was a major driver of the Industrial Revolution. When Friedrich Engels looked into the conditions of the working class in England, it was on Manchester, “Cottonopolis,” that he chose to focus. And when Karl Marx took readers into the “hidden abode of production,” he inquired first into the textile mills. The history of capitalism has, in a sense, always been the history of clothes.

Derek Guy is perhaps the most prominent contemporary commentator on traditional men’s clothing — where it came from, what i