Nothing reveals an individual’s gender quite like their wardrobe, and yet a first glance at the drab blackness of men’s fashion in the nineteenth century seems to say so little about anything at all. However, the apparent simplicity of the ubiquitous black suit belies the complexity and inherent contradictions between sartorial style and the performance of masculinity in the second half of the century. In this paper Professor Collin McKinney will address the old adage that “the clothes make the man” as he examines men’s fashion in late nineteenth-century Spain.
