Chris Breward

Principal
Edinburgh College of Art
University of Edinburgh

Chris Breward is Professor for Cultural History at the University of Edinburgh, where he also holds the positions of Principal of Edinburgh College of Art and Vice Principal of the University (Creative Arts). He was trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MA, PhD), London, and has subsequently taught at Manchester Metropolitan University, the Royal College of Art and London College of Fashion. Before taking up his post at Edinburgh he was Head of Research at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Chris has published widely on the history and theory of fashion and its relationship to masculinities and urban cultures. Key publications include The Culture of Fashion (MUP 1995), The Hidden Consumer (MUP 1999), Fashion (OUP 2003) and Fashioning London (Berg 2004). He co-curated the V&A’s major Olympic season exhibition British Design 1948-2012. Chris’ latest book is The Suit: Form, Function & Style (Reaktion 2016).

Since moving to Edinburgh, Chris has taken up roles on the boards of the National Museums of Scotland, the Fruitmarket Gallery and Hospitalfield House. He also sits on the Advisory Council of the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and is a Governor of the Pasold Institute.

Abstract:

The meaning of the suit

Professor Chris Breward will address some of the key issues in his forthcoming book The Suit: Form, Function and Style, Reaktion Press, April 2016.

The suit’s simple forms, inspired by royal, military, religious and professional clothing have provided a functional and sometimes elegant uniform for modern life. But its everyday ubiquity has meant that its complex construction, symbolic power and shifting meanings have often been taken for granted. Breward demonstrates how the suit’s emergence in Europe in the seventeenth-century reflected political rivalries and the rise of democratic society. He demonstrates the ways in which new technologies of measurement and manufacture produced an ideal template for modern fashion, and he considers the suit’s potential for subverting the status quo. At a moment when suit wearing appears to be on the decline in certain areas of life, he questions its survival in the twenty-first century and in the human imagination, offering new perspectives on this most mundane and poetic of garments – the perfect harnesser of uncertainty for over four hundred years.