Leather Apron Men and Nostalgia: Using Images of Victorian Industry to Construct a Modern Masculinity
The rapid decline in industrial employment in the latter part of the twentieth century and the growth of service sector jobs in the early twenty first century, has shifted the ways masculinity is performed and perceived. Graeber (2013) argues that many of the roles performed in a post-industrial economy are not essential and are often simply the provision of services to workers in other non-essential roles. Building on the work of scholars of nostalgia such as Trimm and Myers this presentation examines the modern trend for leather aprons, industrial design in coffee shops, and the styling of hipsters and considers how nostalgia for a time when men worked in heavy industry is used to build, and protect, a particular type of modern masculinity. By comparing contemporary advertising images, quasi-industrial interior design, and hipster dress with pictures of nineteenth-century factories and labour it demonstrates that the photographs used by the companies selling the aprons mirror images from the industrial past and imply a direct equivalence between the hot and heavy labour in factories and foundries and the modern man at his barbeque or espresso machine. The aprons protect the modern men both literally and figuratively, allowing them to signal and perform their masculine identity in a post-industrial economy where work often has no tangible product. The time that has elapsed allows for a nostalgic reconstruction of the reality of working in heavy industry, an elision of the hard, physical labour, and the construction of an almost mythical real man.
Kay Lawrance recently graduated from the University of Brighton’s BA Hons Fashion and Dress History course and will be joining the History of Design and Material Culture Master’s programme at Brighton. She is particularly interested in why people choose the clothes they wear and what influences their choices.
