Beyond its role as a badge of respectability and service to state and commerce, the suit is a device for subverting the status quo. Artists, musicians and social revolutionaries have adapted the rules of suit-wearing to provoke and undermine.Breward describes its adoption by women and its usefulness as an index of character in painting, photography and film. And finally, at a moment when suit-wearing appears to be on the decline, will it survive in the twenty-first century and in the human imagination?Beautifully illustrated and written with authority, Suit offers new perspectives on this most mundane, and yet poetic, product of modern culture.
