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“Practically the Uniform of the Tribe”: Dress Codes Among Commercial Travelers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Andrew Popp  and
Michael French
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Extract

“Our outer dress does inner work for us, and if clothes “mean”, it is in the first place to ourselves, telling us we are or may be something we have meant to be”

What is it to wear a uniform? Some occupations involve enforced adoption of a uniform, the police and armed services most obviously. Yet other occupations—such as management consultants—adopt styles or codes of dress that, while not enforced, have a currency and coherence such that we might think of them as a tacit uniform. Why—and to what effect—do some occupational groups voluntarily adopt tacit dress codes? This essay will explore those questions in relation to depictions of English traveling salesmen from the start of the nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. Representations of English traveling salesmen (“commercial travelers” in British parlance, the usage that will be adopted hereafter) frequently highlighted their physical appearance and in particular their modes of dress, showing remarkable continuity, certainly across the greater part of the period covered here.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2010 , pp. 437 - 467
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2010. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved.

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