Male Beauty: The Male Dress Reform Party in Interwar Britain

MDRP - (Wikipedia) The Men's Dress Reform Party (MDRP) was a reform movement in interwar Britain. While the party's main concerns were the impact of clothes on men's health and hygiene, their mission also aimed to increase the variety and choice in men's clothing

BY: JOANNA BOURKE

In 1929, the Men’s Dress Reform Party was established in response to what its founders regarded as the heinous modern age. One of them, John Carl Flugel (a psychologist from University College London), contended that, since the end of the eighteenth-century men had been progressively ignoring brighter, more elaborate, and more varied forms of masculine ornamentation by ‘making their own tailoring the more austere and ascetic of the arts’. He called this event ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation’, or the occasion when men ‘abandoned their claim to be considered beautiful’ and ‘henceforth aimed at being only useful’. In the face of inter-war feminism and the denigration of masculinity, the professionals who joined the Men’s Dress Reform Party regarded it as their duty to lobby for the aesthetic liberation of men. This blog examines male dress reform between the wars.

 

The experience of warfare between 1914 and 1918 was crucial in focusing attention on the bodies of men. Dress reform was necessary not only for the sake of enhancing masculine beauty, but also to prevent the further degeneration of the ‘British race’. Health and hygiene were high on the agenda of male dress reformers. Although they failed to achieve their more grandiose hopes, they were representative of a broader movement towards freeing men from constraints imposed by the state, employers, and the tailoring trade.

Or, as another writer had it, traditional men’s clothing was important in ‘keeping the social fabric together’. The slow evolution of changes in men’s dress ensured ‘safety’: sartorial conservatism checked social anarchy.

 

The Men’s Dress Reform Party (MDRP) had grown out of a clothing subcommittee of the New Health Society, a creation of the health radical, Sir Arbuthnot Lane. In 1929, this subcommittee consisted of a group of academics, doctors, theologians, and authors, including the Very Revd William Ralph Inge, Alfred C. Jordan, Guy Kendall, Caleb Williams Saleeby, Richard Sickert, Ernest Thesiger, and Leonard Williams. It was Lane’s pupils (Jordan and Saleeby) who wrote the report that eventually led to the establishment of the MDRP. In their report, sartorial alternatives were set out. Instead of the starched collar, they promoted the Byron collar with a tie loosely knotted. Blouses were preferred shirts, and coats should only be worn in the cold. Conventional trousers were condemned outright. Although they approved of the kilt, they decreed that modern industrial conditions made shorts the most practical type of clothing. Underclothing should be loose. Hats should only be worn as protection against the rain or sun, and sandals should replace shoes. Most importantly, they called for the exercise of greater individuality in men’s clothing.

 

Although the First World War cannot be said to have directly led to the establishment of the MDRP, the popularity of dress reform for men was an outcome of tensions harboured between 1914 and 1918. The MDRP was responding to four things, three of which they linked to men’s experiences of warfare.