Publisher's Synopsis
Coarse dress did not long remain in the wardrobe, particularly not among those political classes who talked most about it. Nevertheless, exhortations of industry and simplicity became a fixture of American discourse over the following century of industrial revolution, as the mass-produced suit emerged as a badge of a uniquely virtuous American polity. It is here, Zakim argues, in the evolution of homespun into its ready-made opposite, that men's dress proves to be both material and metaphor for the rise of democratic capitalism-and a site of the new social arrangements of bourgeois life.
In thus illuminating the critical links among culture, ideology, political economy, and fashion in antebellum America, Ready-Made Democracy will be essential to anyone interested in the history of the United States and the construction of modern life.