Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion - Hardcover

$198.00

Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion - Hardcover

Name: Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion - Hardcover
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9780231164344
Price: 198.00 USD
Availability: InStock

by Margaret Waller

$198.00

Book Overview

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by Margaret Waller (Author)

Why do the most powerful men in the West wear sober, understated attire? Until the "Great Masculine Renunciation" in the eighteenth century, luxurious and often flamboyant clothing signaled social superiority for men as well as women.

Margaret Waller's fresh account of this historic recalibration of gender and class centers on an unlikely pair: Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican upstart who crowned himself emperor of France, and Pierre Antoine Le Boux La Mésangère, the defrocked priest who became Europe's premier fashion editor. Looking at knee breeches, schoolboy and officer uniforms, priests' robes, and imperial regalia, this book shows how misogyny and homophobia helped make Bonaparte, La Mésangère, and their peers men.

Napoleon's Closet shows when male fashion editors first associated women with fashion and urged men to renounce "feminine" frivolity in their dress. It connects French revolutionaries' masculinist construction of citizenship to the Church's long-standing requirement that its rank and file wear plain, modest clothing. It demonstrates that although Napoleon's reinstitution of sumptuous uniforms for men might seem the exception, he reserved for himself the modern male privilege of dressing down.

A lively and unorthodox exploration of the paradoxical history of male clothing, this book unveils the origins of modern ideas about normative masculinity, queerness, and "the closet."

Author Biography

Margaret Waller is professor emerita of French at Pomona College. She is the author of The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (1992) and the translator of Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (1984).

Number of Pages: 360

Dimensions: 0.94 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN

Publication Date: September 01, 2026

ISBN	9780231164344
Author	Margaret Waller
Publisher	Columbia University Press
Genre	History and Education
Format	Hardcover
Published	September 2026
Language	ENG- English
Pages	360
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print