Untitled

Subversive Performances, Masculine Pleasures
Beyond an adherence to the structured organization of work and leisure, the
suburban male wardrobe also played a part in marking weekly and seasonal
evolutions, constituting a temporal fashion system as clearly differentiated as the
pivotal commercial transitions from spring to summer, autumn to winter, that
dictated change in women’s fashionable dress. In Sixty Nine Birnam Road Pett
Ridge’s 1908 tale of lower-middle-class life in a Clapham house, the link between
clothing and the passing of time was made explicit, with the fading of older
traditions adding a piquancy to his description of the development of a young male
suburban style that celebrated the sporty, leisured atmosphere of summer weekends.
On Sundays
as the morning advanced there came peals from a distance, reminding City men, who sat
out on the lawn and smoked a pipe, of youthful days . . . when one had a suit kept for
Sunday and one’s hair was pomatumed and curled, and a handkerchief scented with
lavender water . . . A considerable detachment of Birnam Road went to church . . . and
this was made up principally of the aged and the young, who . . . gave a glance that might
mean reproof or envy at young men and young women who started off for Epsom Downs
on cycles . . . Smoke, at this hour, began to go straight up from chimney pots and in the
roadway stood curls in the spring air . . . from cigarettes belonging to young blades who,
always, slightly in advance of the times, strolled up and down in white flannel suits,
appropriate to Henley and a few months later. 18
The ending of the working week on a Saturday lunchtime offered a less contentious
space for the pursuit of pleasure for
it was the afternoon of the week when Birnam Road welcomed the presence of its men.
Young fellows raced home and went out immediately afterwards, taking kicks at an
imaginary football; their fathers came with more deliberation, and changing silk hat for
Panama, entered upon the precise task of clipping hedges. 19
The distinctive differences thrown up by a youthful adherence to informality,
to light colors and textures, were influenced both by the ethics of sportsmanship
that underpinned nineteenth-century constructs of respectable manliness and more
directly by the importance lent to team sports and activities in the workings of
suburban society, as well as the proximity of suburban developments to the open
parks and fields necessary for the tennis, cricket, football, cycling, walking, and
boating that Pett Ridge saw as superseding church attendance. 20 Their sartorial
trappings marked young men out from the propriety of professional identities and
the individualism of metropolitan dandyism. The resulting style, however, was no
less commercial or mannered in its presentation. As summer turned to autumn in
Birnam Road, Pett Ridge noted that
261