"How one defined consumption - especially the distinction between healthy consumption and unhealthy luxury - depended on one's status and views. Kuchta analyzes men's clothing consumption under three different political and cultural regimes: Tudor-Stuart court culture, eighteenth-century aristocratic society, and early Victorian middle-class culture.

With the adoption of the three-piece suit, elite masculinity rejected the idea of sumptuous display as the privilege of nobility and regarded fashion instead as the concern of debauched upstarts.

Anyone who did not subscribe to this ideology of renunciation could be presumed guilty of "luxury" and "effeminacy." There have, of course, been numerous exceptions, not to mention visible resistance, to the general trend toward simplicity, but the modest three-piece suit has remained the emblem of English manliness.".

"Kuchta shows not only how the ideology of modern English masculinity was a self-consciously political and public creation but also how such explicitly political decisions and values became internalized, personalized, and naturalized into everyday manners and habits. The three-piece suit, a fashion statement so successful that it ceased to be noticed, is now back in the spotlight."--BOOK JACKET.