Spinning the Ephemeral PDF - SMU Fashion Media

288 Fiona Anderson
Figure 3
Party at Drumochter Shooting
Lodge. Scotland. 1882.
Courtesy of the Trustees of
National Museums of Scotland,
a variety of urban contexts, and that the image we have today of tweeds
as cloths that were primarily worn in the country and not in the town,
up until the early twentieth century is erroneous. For example, an advert
of January 2 1869 in the Tailor and Cutter trade journal, for the Londonbased
woolen merchants James Platt and Co., promotes tweeds "made
expressly for us by Scotch manufacturers" that "For riding trousers, ot
as a gentlemanly trouser for ordinary wear, or for suits, they surpass any
other goods made." The Tailor and Cutter of October 2 of the same year,
in an article on "Materials for Winter 1869-70,'" further stated that "for
Suits, Check and Mixed Tweeds have been tnuch worn this summer and
we think there will be the same tendency through the autumn."
A previous study carried out on tbe sales records of the leading Savile
Row tailor Fienry Poole and Co. suggests that in 1900, just over half of
the orders sampled for some form of lounge suit or lounge jacket consisted
of tweed. At that elite level of the international menswear market, tweed
was primarily worn as informal morning wear in town, as pea coats,
capes, and overcoats, and also as country or sporting wear (Anderson
1998; Breward 1999: 49-61}. For example in Figure 4. Brooke Boothby,
who held the typically upper-middle-class position of Second Secretary
at the British Embassy in Vienna in 1889 may be seen wearing a tweed
suit as urban, informal morning wear.
It is likely that tweed would have been equally if not more prominent
within the less occasion-specific wardrobes of middle-middle-class and
lower-middle-class consumers of the closing decades of the nineteenth
century (Figure 5). This is owing to the increasing dominance of the lounge
suit as respectable work attire, the hard-wearing properties of the cloth