Advertising Menswear: masculinities and fashion in the British media since 1945

This original monograph will be published by Bloomsbury in autumn/winter 2013 and will launch the series ‘Dress and Fashion Research’, edited by Professor Joanne Eicher. As such, it deals with menswear advertising and masculine identities in the second half of the twentieth century and forms the companion volume to my book, Man Appeal: menswear advertising and modernism (Berg, 2005). Other authors have dealt with certain aspects of men’s fashion in the 1950s and 1960s (Breward, 2002; Cohn, 1971; O’Neill, 2000), style culture and new man in the 1980s (Mort, 1996; Nixon, 1996), and the advertising profession in the 1960s (Nixon, 2003). But, based on four years of archival research in the British Libary and History of Advertising Trust, this project is the first to analyse print, cinema and television publicity for men’s clothing in Britain after 1945 as a potent cultural, social and economic phenomenon. Hence, it mobilises primary source material from trade literature such as Advertiser’s Weekly, Campaign, Man and his clothes and Men’s Wear; advertising agency documents from the History of Advertising Trust and the Advertising Association; television advertisements and publicity in Picture Post, Radio Times, The Sphere, Reveille, Weekend, Man About Town/Town, Men in Vogue, The Face, Arena, GQ, Daily Mirror, Daily Express and the Times. Its US and UK peer reviewers regarded the study as both an 'excellent piece of scholarship ... much more rigorous than much of the work presently available in the field for its nuanced understanding of the construction of masculinities' and an 'outstanding and truly original study ... essential reading for undergraduates and graduates studying fashion and communications, and media professionals alike'.