Esmari Writes

Like millions of others, I recently went to see the Barbie movie. Unlike most of the audience, it would seem, I was fully aware of Greta Gerwig’s previous work and was looking forward to the feminist manifesto we were all about to witness. I was not disappointed, and neither were those who went simply to have a great time watching Barbie be everything and Ken be just Ken.

In the weeks since the film premiered, I’ve followed the cultural conversation around it with interest. From coworkers calling it a love-letter to mothers, to Ben Shapiro having his little bonfire Barbie-roast meltdown. From some of my favorite podcasters dissecting Barbie’s influence on body image v. her original intention of modeling career options for women, to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s astute analysis of girls growing up with Barbie v. boys growing up with G. I. Joe. From Mattel’s willingness to take jabs at its own spotty track record championing women leaders, to the absolute security Ryan Gosling must feel in his own masculinity to take direction from a woman in a movie that isn’t about his character. The aspect that has really gotten my attention, though, is men wearing pink in social media posts.

It’s not like color in menswear is new, or that no man ever wore pink before. I know plenty of men who wear pink regularly and have done so for years. It’s perfectly acceptable among certain crowds, while others might attack their own and shun them in a heartbeat for wearing such a “daring” color. But this is more than wearing pink. It’s wearing pink while paying to see a feminist manifesto. It’s wearing pink as a statement. It’s wearing pink because they want to show up for the women and girls in their lives.

In a world where showing up as one’s true self is often seen as a political statement, especially when it means crossing gender norms, it takes more bravery than most of us would like to admit.

But how did we get here? How did we start with founding fathers who wore lace, makeup, and high heels only to end up with a drab sea of cookie-cutter suits as the de facto men’s uniform for two centuries?

The answer lies in the industrial revolution, capitalism, and—of course—patriarchy.

The first and largest impact on men’s fashion was the industrial revolution, which simultaneously made fine fabrics and laces easier to make and less expensive to purchase—therefore less of a status symbol—while polluting the air with coal soot. It’s no accident that white and light fabrics were eventually reserved for the beach and the country while hardier, darker fabrics were more common in the cities. Anyone who’s ever read Bleak House or other Dickens novels might realize why blacks and greys became the preferred color for outerwear, at a minimum: “Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”

If the sky were quite literally raining ash, I’d wear a gothic novel level of black, too. Cities and industrial centers were awash in sooty grime. People even took to wearing gloves year-round because the world was messy and handwashing wasn’t common. After all, clean water was hard to come by and modern germ theory was in its infancy. Moreover, even clothes weren’t washed as regularly as we consider normal today, when they could be washed at all. Properly prepared wool clothes can be washed, but only if they’re not tailored like men’s jackets increasingly were. Cleaning a tailored jacket meant giving it a good beating to shake loose any dirt, doing a little spot cleaning, then airing it out.

By the 1810’s, dark solid colors were fairly well-established as the standard for jackets, even though lighter colors were still used for trousers because they were easier to clean and were usually protected by tall boots and coats with skirts or tails. That’s when capitalism came into play, especially the London and New York Stock Exchanges. Both had begun enforcing strict dress codes that required formal jackets and top hats, which quickly made them the standard for business wear in general. Even landed gentry and other people of independent means often gave up their laces and brocades in favor of the capitalist industrial age’s new status symbols: dark, nicely tailored jackets, dove grey trousers, and shiny top hats.

Last, but certainly not least, patriarchy put the final nail in the colorful menswear coffin. As long as marriage was primarily a religious institution, a man needed to be presentable in church in order to marry. That usually meant a jacket and hat, at the very least. The quality of said jacket and hat offered a glimpse into his ability to provide for his betrothed and any children they might have. Therefore, even men who had no business dealings outside of occasionally asking the local bank for a loan—farmers, teachers, doctors, et al—adopted the same look as business men partly to give the appearance of being “husband material.” Even today, more than half-a-century after we began shaking up the menswear world with loud, bellbottomed plaids and logo-heavy athleisure, women’s magazines write articles decrying the lack of a tailored suit in a man’s wardrobe as a relationship red flag.

Given this context, it makes perfect sense that western culture has spent the last fifty-plus years reinventing menswear and questioning the gender norms inherent in our assumptions along with our changing attitudes towards women’s equality, gay rights, and myriad other western traditions. This conversation started long before the Barbie movie and involves so much more than I’ve touched on here, but I think the movie may have pushed the dialogue forward in a way nothing else has—or could have—done.