The Lookbook · Era 01 of 10
The 1920s
The age of the visible rule
On the record
Harlem's Black middle class was photographed exactly like this, in these clothes, in this decade. Van Der Zee shot it for thirty years.
What the room read
As photographed
- AHe is not hurrying. The room reads that before the suit
- BWatch chain. He can tell you the time without asking
- CHands still. Nothing is being fidgeted with
How it was built
As drawn
- 1Lapel sits high. The chest reads short and square
- 2Waistcoat closed. A three-piece was work clothing
- 3Natural waist. The trouser starts where the body does
- 4Straight leg, small turn-up. Boots, not shoes
What the decade expected
Six statements
What the room wanted
You to look like you had been there before
How men addressed each other
Mr. and sir. First names were arrived at
What effort looked like
Invisible. The work was done before you left
What got you excluded
Class, colour, and the wrong hat
What the clothes were doing
Announcing which rooms you were allowed in
Cost of getting it wrong
Visible. Refused at the door
What it looked like
Era 01 of 10
Suits, all day, everywhere, by every man who could afford one and most who couldn't. The three-piece was the working default, not an occasion. Trousers sat at the natural waist and stayed there for another forty years. The lounge suit finished displacing the frock coat, and by the end of the decade the shoulder had begun to soften.
Hats were not optional outdoors. Homburg and fedora in town, boater in summer, flat cap for working men. A man leaving the house bareheaded was a man who had forgotten something.
Collars started the decade stiff and detachable and ended it softer and attached, which is a small thing that tells you everything about the direction of the next hundred years.
Evening wear was codified to the letter. White tie was formal. The dinner jacket existed and was still faintly fast.
What it sounded like
Era 01 of 10
Formal address by default. Mr. and sir between men who were not intimates, and intimacy was not assumed on short acquaintance. First names were arrived at, not started with.
Radio arrived and taught a generation of men what a public voice was supposed to sound like, which flattened regional speech upward toward a received standard.
And jazz arrived, which mattered more than the music. It was informal, it was improvised, it was played in rooms where the codes were suspended on purpose. The first mass argument about decorum in the modern era was an argument about jazz.
What it felt like
Era 01 of 10
The rules were public and they were enforced in ways you could see. A man could be refused a table, refused entry, quietly cut. Everyone knew the code because the cost of breaking it was visible in the room.
That cuts both ways and it's worth being honest about. A code that visible was also a code used to keep people out, by class and by colour, and plenty of the enforcement was ugly. The part worth keeping is not the exclusion. It's the fact that the expectations were stated out loud.
What we kept
The idea that how you dress for a room is a form of respect for the people already in it.
What we lost
The hat. And, more importantly, the assumption that everybody had been told the rules.
On the pictures
Read this before you cite anything
Every photograph in the Lookbook is generated. None of it is archival. Where a plate states something as fact, the claim points at the historical record, which is checkable, and never at the picture above it.