Suits (Clothing)--Austria--Vienna--History
Jewish men--Clothing--Austria--Vienna--History
Clothing and dress--Psychological aspects
"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."-- Provided by publisher.
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.