David Center for the American Revolution Seminar: "‘The Simple Dress of an American Citizen’: Fashioning the American Revolution” with Chloe Chapin

The third 2024-2025 David Center for the American Revolution Seminar will take place December 4, 2024 at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom.

The speaker, Chloe Chapin, is an independent scholar working on her first book, Suits: the Making of Modern Men. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard University in 2023. Before that, she spent two decades as a professional costume designer. Her research focuses on fashion, gender, and American identity.

Chapin will be presenting her paper titled: "'The Simple Dress of an American Citizen’: Fashioning the American Revolution.” A description of the paper is below. The paper will be pre-circulated to registered participants in advance of the seminar meeting.

To attend the seminar and to receive a copy of the paper, please register via Zoom.

The David Center for the American Revolution Seminar serves as a forum for works-in-progress that explore topics in the era of the American Revolution (1750-1820). Questions about the series may be directed to Brenna Holland, Assistant Director of Library & Museum Programs, at [email protected].

NOTE: Seminars are designed as spaces for sharing ideas and works still in-progress. For this reason, this event will not be recorded.

"'The Simple Dress of an American Citizen’: Fashioning the American Revolution”

When Benjamin Franklin donned a plain suit at the courts of Versailles, he invented the American character by giving it a recognizable costume. Franklin’s character and his simple suit were repeatedly—if inaccurately—cited by diplomats for the next century as the model of the plain American citizen. Plain black suits became a symbol of respectability, rational enlightenment, and republican values. American men wore the suit as a costume of Americanness, adopted it as the regalia of liberty, and then proscribed it as the uniform of democracy. But when Americans understood black suits as a symbol of democracy and modernity, they harnessed these ideas to white masculinity. The uniformity of menswear evoked themes of liberty and brotherhood, but it did so by obscuring racial, gendered, and economic hierarchies behind a veil of American egalitarianism.