#19th c menswear is ideal

[fixaidea]

Me staring at my frilly shirts: it's not feminine, it's the fashion of an 18th century GENTLEMAN.

[focsle]

A SPREAD OF WILDLY DIFFERENT REQUESTS BUT I WILL TAKE THEM. Perhaps with the exception of yours, @notactuallyherenotreally​, not out of distaste but out of the note that Period Appropriate Underthings would be HM, potentially nonexistent. Tho I could just draw him in a sleazy Shirt to honor both those requests in one go... BUT NOW I will clutch at this opportunity to go on about historical underwear (My Passion), and (at the risk of sounding like someone Destined for the Guillotine) about how Victorians and an emerging middle class ruined menswear.

In that, if we’re looking at 1818, underwear wasn’t necessarily a Must for men. The shirt was still the common Underthing. That’s why the shirttails were so damn long. One would just tuck them between the legs and call it a day. Though, this was also a sort of transitional period for menswear, and early 19th c. drawers DID exist a la:

But look at them. They’re cumbersome, and if you’re being Fashionable they could ruin the line of your REAL FUCKIN TIGHT PANTS.

When we look at the silhouette of early 19th c western menswear it was tied to an elite masculine ideal of basically being like. Landed Gentry. The ideal man was one who was rich and idle and looked pretty. So you get a cut like this:

Triangle. And it’s all about the leg. All about a well-turned calf. Ankles aren’t scandalous, it’s more like, HELLO LOOK AT MY ENTIRE LEG I MIGHT AS WELL NOT BE WEARING PANTS AT ALL BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE TO WORK. 

But then, mid 19th century the masculine ideal starts to shift away from increasingly unpopular notions of aristocracy and inherited wealth and more to the idea of a man who has achieved Success through his own means...or at least visually appears to have done so. A man for whom Tight Pants and Exaggerated Waists was impractical, unmanly. Your job is no longer to be Pretty but to be an Individualist Industrialist, and those look like rectangles:

This was just a long unsolicited way for me to say Early 19th C fashion is Ankles All The Way.