| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860. By Michael Zakim. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. x, 296 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-226-97793-5.)

A study of the mass production of clothing for men, Michael Zakim's Ready-Made Democracy explores "how capitalist revolution came to America under the guise of traditional notions of industry, modesty, economy, and independence" (p. 2) and transformed fashion into a "paradigm of liberal governance" (p. 3). In seven chapters, Zakim follows the development of the market for ready-made clothes from innovations in business and manufacturing through the emergence of an urban retail culture serving "white-collar" clerks to the conditions of seamstresses and, finally, to the standardization of a sartorial icon for bourgeois individualism—the broadcloth suit. He thus offers an impressively nuanced social history of a modern commodity, one that describes in remarkable detail production and retail practices that often remain invisible in studies of the nineteenth-century city. We learn, for instance, about the adoption of inch tape measures and the refinement of drafting technologies that made standard sizes possible, as well as about the merchandising and single pricing of "marble palaces" that turned shopping into "an unmistakable industrial experience" (p. 102). Interspersing diaries and personal accounts with newspaper and periodical commentary and a painstaking, often ingenious parsing of etiquette manuals and trade illustrations, Zakim renders the typically monolithic concept of the market revolution as a complex history of lived experience.

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