Jews in Suits: Men's Dress in Vienna, 1890-1938 (Dress Cultures)

Surviving photographs of Jewish Viennese men during the fin-de-siècle and interwar periods – both the renowned cultural luminaries and their many anonymous coreligionists – all share a striking sartorial detail: the tailored suit. Yet, until now, the adoption of the tailored suit and its function in the formation of modern Jewish identities remains under researched. Jews in Suits uses a rich range of written and visual sources, including literary fiction and satire, ‘ego-documents’, photography, trade catalogues, invoices, and department store culture, to propose a new narrative of men, fashion and their Jewish identities. It reveals that dressing in a modern manner was not simply a matter of assimilation, but rather a way of developing new models of Jewish subjectivity beyond the externally prescribed notion of ‘the Jew’. Drawing upon fashionable dress, folk costume, religious dress, avant-garde, oppositional dress, typologies which are often considered separate from one another, it proposes a new way of reading men and clothing cultures within an iconic cultural milieu, offering insights into the relationship of clothing and grooming to the understanding of the self. Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments A Note on Place Names Introduction Chapter 1: Europe’s Third Most Jewish City Chapter 2: Fashioning the Self, Dressing Society: Dress and Identity in Europe’s Third Jewish Capital Chapter 3: Refashioning the Self: Acculturation, Assimilation, and Clothing Chapter 4: Strangers in the City: “Rootless” Jews and Urbanity in Vienna Chapter 5: Der kleine Cohn: Dress and the Function of Mocking through Caricature Chapter 6: The Man in the Suit: Jewish Writers and Their Clothing Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index