Liberating Dress – Vestoj http://vestoj.com The Platform for Critical Thinking on Fashion Thu, 04 May 2023 05:45:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.5 ‘A society of ugly people is an immoral society’ http://vestoj.com/a-society-of-ugly-people-is-an-immoral-society/ http://vestoj.com/a-society-of-ugly-people-is-an-immoral-society/#respond Mon, 18 Jan 2016 10:20:17 +0000 http://vestoj.com/?p=6193 IN 1920, A GROUP of youth leaders walked out of the Boy Scout movement in Britain, disillusioned with the increasing militarism of its methods. Led by the former scout commissioner and artist John Hargrave, the pacifists styled themselves as The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, adapting a term from archaic Cheshire dialect meaning ‘proof of strength.’ This new, all-ages group promoted creative expression, physical health and fitness through camping, hiking and handicraft. They aimed to produce hard bodies and straight thinking as solutions to what they believed to be a civilisation in crisis in the wake of the First World War. Although largely forgotten now, during the 1920s Kibbo Kift’s ambitions and practices attracted the attention and endorsement of a range of high profile figures across the arts, humanities and sciences, from H. G. Wells to D. H. Lawrence. While membership numbers were small – never amounting to many more than a thousand in total – Kibbo Kift’s spiritual seekers, life reformers, educators and dreamers wished for nothing less than to fashion a new world, and they did so with the help of their dress and self-presentation.1

Kinswomen dancing, c.1924. © Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of London School of Economics Library.

Radical intervention in sartorial appearance was a core part of Kibbo Kift’s project, and the group developed an original and idiosyncratic aesthetic across all aspects of their art, craft and design. Taking inspiration from the author and artist Ernest Thompson Seton’s theory of ‘woodcraft,’ as a form of outdoor living and naturalist educational training, Kibbo Kift’s leader believed in ‘picturesqueness in everything.’2 What the Kindred looked like mattered. This focus was not simply a surface issue; the group’s ambitions and vision were underpinned by an interest in aesthetic beauty and physical culture, which intersected with post-war concerns with fitness and reconstruction. From the outset, the group’s wide-ranging ambitions for world reform and peace were addressed in terms of reverence for the body, while group costume ranged from the practical to the dramatic. Flowing green hooded cloaks were worn for camping and hiking; skimpy exercise garments comprised brass brassiere tops for women and Native American-style breechcloths or ‘gee-strings’ for men. Each outfit had to be handmade by individual Kinsfolk to an original Hargrave design. This was a demonstration of practical self-reliance in craft as well as symbolic commitment to the cause.

Kinsmen exercising, Althing, 1927. © Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of London School of Economics Library.

In the group’s elaborate cultural activities, which included spiritual ritual as well as original theatre and song, ceremonial surcoats featured occult insignia and dramatic robotic silhouettes; performance costumes updated medieval jesters’ outfits with avant-garde elements. In these elements of Kibbo Kift’s wardrobe, the group’s spiritual and aesthetic influences, from hermetic religion to cutting-edge advertising, were made clear. The outfits had to be uncompromising because radical sartorial action was required for total cultural transformation. Hargrave described conventional dress, such as the bowler hat, as ‘pathetic – a tragi-comedy – the headgear of purposeless routine. It is the symbol of frustration – physical, psychological, and religious. It is an inane thing. Similarly,’ he pronounced, ‘the waistcoat, coat and trousers are the livery of a particular form of slavery.’3 Kibbo Kift’s outlandish and sometimes self-consciously ridiculous costuming communicated the group’s radical distinctiveness and their wholesale rejection of ‘civilised’ culture. Through dress that liberated the body and that adopted elements from the past as well as the future, Kibbo Kift aimed to show the redundancy of the present day and its finery, in order to enact the next stage of cultural evolution.

A group of Gleemen and Gleemaidens, Gleemote, 1929. Photographed by Angus McBean. Stanley Dixon collection, courtesy of Tim Turner.

The Kindred were not alone in their ambition to reform dress practices in the period. The Men’s Dress Reform Party, established in 1929, featured several prominent Kibbo Kift members who were active in its ambitions for more colour and comfort in dress for the modern male. Although this endeavour generated some public ridicule, the MDRP sought to do away with neckties and stiff collars, adopting scouting-style shorts for everyday wear to improve ‘hygiene’ in clothing and to reflect increasing informality of behaviour.4 The restrictions and impracticalities of women’s clothes had also long been subject to critique by health campaigners and dress reformers and Kibbo Kift members also added to these debates throughout the 1920s. While Kibbo Kift cultivated drama in dress, comfort and practicality were always emphasised over fashionable silhouettes and frivolous fabrics. As part of Hargrave’s ambitions to correct what he saw as an increasingly unnatural existence, he placed significant emphasis on the natural human form as a foundation for a healthy society, unfavourably comparing the constrained gait of a ‘civilised’ woman with the physical perfection of animal movement, for example. These ideas about the apparently inherent superiority of the natural world drew on biologist Herbert Spencer’s assertion that ‘to be a nation of good animals is the first condition of national prosperity.’ This phrase was a familiar one within experimental health and physical culture circles in the interwar period, for Kibbo Kift was not alone in its interest in cultural and physical regeneration in Britain. Bodily beauty and fitness were widely perceived in moral terms as an index of the state of the nation.5

Angus McBean. Cecil Watt Paul Jones (Old Mole) as Gleemaster, 1928. Stanley Dixon collection. Courtesy of Tim Turner.

The role of beauty in the Kibbo Kift was linked not only to their ideals for dress reform but also to their particular approach to gender and sexuality. Advice given to girls and women – always by Kibbo Kift men, even if the subject was menstruation or contraception – was that they ‘should do their utmost to be attractive, well dressed, and graceful.’6 Kinswomen were expected to hike long distances, carry heavy packs, wear stout shoes and suffer the same improving hardships as men, but they needed to do so in a dress and stockings (a motion that Kinswomen should be permitted to wear green, brown or grey ‘rational dress,’ that is, trousers, was passed at the 1924 annual gathering but was never enacted). Despite the group’s radical approach to dressing, they had conformist attitudes to sex roles and relationships. Heterosexual, monogamous partnerships were strongly encouraged alongside early marriage and childbearing. Women and men were expected to inhabit their assigned roles as active and passive sexual ‘polarities.’ These gendered ideas played out in the leadership roles in the organisation and consequently affected directions about appearance, where Kinswomen were instructed to appear ‘free, natural, unconventional,’ but never ‘mannish.’7

Kinsman in surcoat in camp, c.1927. © Kibbo Kift Foundation, courtesy of London School of Economics Library.

Although the group was open to all ages, like many outdoor movements and societies across Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, Kibbo Kift promoted the virility and vitality of youth. From 1929, two specially designed Kibbo Kift leather belts were commissioned from Liberty’s of London, where two of the central Kin members were employed. These featured ornate Celtic-styled buckles in silver, embedded with K symbols and semi-precious jewels. Each was engraved with the archaic message, ‘Wes Hael! Be thou whole in body-fastness.’ As a celebration of physical health and spiritual wholeness, these were presented annually to the fittest young man and woman of the Kin.8 Images of the recipients were published in Broadsheet, the Kibbo Kift magazine. Nietzschean ideas about human perfectibility, with Kinsfolk as the embodiment of the superman ideal, were sometimes denied in Kin literature, but they undoubtedly underpinned much of Kibbo Kift’s thinking about bodily beauty and sexual behaviour.9

Kibbo Kift’s concerns with physical fitness, the cultivation of natural beauty and the propagation of a new, healthy generation echo some aspects of the eugenic ideal in the early decades of the twentieth century, which circulated among a wide range of reformers across the political spectrum in search of social betterment.10 There is a tendency to read such ideals retrospectively through their later development in the hands of national fascist regimes but it is important to view the ideas in their localised cultural contexts. Like many of their peers in the 1920s, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were concerned about physical degeneration in the wake of the First World War but they aimed to solve the problems themselves through positive interventions at the level of their own bodies. Kibbo Kift’s dance and drama, hikes and handicrafts were intended to foster physical strength and clarity of mind as qualities that would be required by those who wished to survive the expected cultural collapse. In designing a new world from the bottom up, Kinsfolk’s bodies and dress provided privileged sites onto which dramatic new dreams and retro-futurist fantasies could be projected.

 

Annebella Pollen is Principal Lecturer in the History of Art and Design at the University of Brighton. She is the author of The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, published by Donlon Books, and the co-curator, with Nayia Yiakoumaki, of the exhibition ‘Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred’, which runs at Whitechapel Gallery, London until 13 March 2016.


  1. For a full discussion of Kibbo Kift’s purpose and philosophy, from founding to decline, see A Pollen, The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, Donlon Books, London, 2015. 

  2. Seton first set out his nine woodcraft principles in 1910; this quote is taken from his summary of thirty years of woodcraft training: E Thompson Seton, Woodcraft and Indian Lore, Doubleday, Doran and Company, London, 1930, p. 7. 

  3. J Hargrave. The Confession of the Kibbo Kift, William Maclellan, Glasgow, 1979 [1st ed. 1927], p. 99. 

  4. For more on men’s dress reform, see J Bourke, ‘The Great Male Renunciation: Men’s Dress Reform in Inter-War Britain’, Journal of Design History, 9.1, 1996, pp. 23–33; also I Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Managing the Body: Beauty, Health and Fitness in Britain, 1880–1939, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010. 

  5. I Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Raising a Nation of “Good Animals”: The New Health Society and Health Education Campaigns in Interwar Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 20.1, 2007, pp. 73–89. 

  6. J Hargrave. ‘The Women of the Kindred’, Broadsheet [Kibbo Kift magazine], 28, November 1927, p. 3. 

  7. ‘An Outline of Kibbo Kift Training: The Woman’, Nomad [Kibbo Kift magazine], 1:11, April 1924, pp. 128–129. 

  8. The belts can be seen in the exhibition, Intellectual Barbarians: The Kibbo Kift Kindred, Whitechapel Gallery, London, until March 2016. 

  9. F W Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Books, London, 2003. 

  10. For contextual literature on eugenic concerns, see L Bland and L A Hall, ‘Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole’, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, edited by A Bashford and P Levine, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010; also R Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilization, 1919-1939, Penguin, London, 2009. 

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Loose Fit http://vestoj.com/politics-policy-and-dress-reform-in-the-20th-century/ Tue, 15 Oct 2013 04:55:38 +0000 http://www.vestoj.com/current/?p=1729 THE FOURTH ISSUE OF Vestoj, On Fashion and Power. features an essay by the esteemed fashion academic Shaun Cole on Eldridge Cleaver; the Black Panther cum fashion designer of the eccentric, and ambitious piece of menswear, the ‘Penis Pants’. Historically, Cleaver was not the first to take on the perceived physical and social constraints of men’s clothing. The little-known Men’s Dress Reform Group (MDRG) of the early twentieth-century was instigated as an offshoot of the New Health Society in central London, and is another example of such a movement. Founded in 1929 (and disbanding in 1940) by renowned radiologist Alfred Jordan, along with a collection of eugenicists, the party was formed with the intention of furthering the human race through men’s dress and correcting its various physical and social constraints by addressing the health concerns of highly tailored and un-washable men’s dress of the time, as well as outlining aesthetic reform, that attempted to further the beauty of men.

Members of the Men’s Dress Reform Party in London, 1929.

The proposed silhouette of the MDRP was not only outlined to be looser, more comfortable; but also encouraged garments in brighter colours and a more personally expressive approach to dressing that would supposedly make men more aesthetically pleasing, and therefore more attractive to their female counterparts. For instance, trousers were condemned by the party to be ‘horrible contraptions-tho stupidest, dirtiest garments yet devised, unaesthetic in their gaunt tubularity, and having the serious disadvantages of being damp and dust collectors, especially when the ends are permanently turned up.’ Historian Joanna Burke explains in an article on the MDRP that the party believed ‘middle-class men were oppressed by the disciplines imposed by capitalist labour. […] The tailoring profession, in particular, was responsible for men’s chronic unhappiness which resulted from being forbidden any creative role in fashioning their own bodies through the use of clothing.’1 Furthermore, in the context of the emerging technologies of the time, at the cusp of mass-production; lightweight, easy-care and breathable garments, particularly those associated with sportswear, were becoming more readily available, and at a cheaper price. Despite this, the designs created by the party were original, and customised to suit the political views and policies laid out by them, reflecting a sort of politically-driven design approach.

The MDRP also had deeper significance in addressing how we define fashion, and its role in our lives as individuals and social collectives: party member John Carl Flügel went on to publish The Psychology of Clothes in 1930, largely regarded as the first psychoanalysis of clothes. The work investigates more deeply what role dress has in our perception of ourselves; Flügel contends that, ‘The exhibitionistic instinct originally relates to the naked body, but in the course of individual development it inevitably (in civilised races) becomes displaced, to a greater or lesser extent onto clothes. Clothes are, however, exquisitely ambivalent, in as much as they both cover the body and thus subserve the inhibiting tendencies that we call ‘modesty’, and at the same time afford a new and highly efficient means of gratifying exhibitionism on a new level.’2 Although Flügel is today regarded as a substantial figure in the landscape of fashion academia, needless to say, the party itself was not so successful in this grander scheme and remains a sort of novelty in the history of politics and dress, much like the Futurists before them.

Contemporary efforts towards men’s grooming, involving increased attention to almost every aspect of the presentation of a man, from beauty, suiting to undergarments are a product of an increased interest in men’s fashion which, for some time, was deemed to be a domain left to itself. Although more recent trends for change or liberation of dressing (sneakers, for example) for both men and women drift in and out of fashion, reflective of consumer behaviour and desires, rather than political policy, the Men’s Dress Reform Party echoes an era where dress was a serious political and social matter. The MDRP, like Cleaver, was concerned with the empowerment of men for a better social outcome, however both cases proved to be largely unsuccessful as a viable solution in the context of the industry.


  1.  J Burke, ‘The Great Male Renunciation: Men’s Dress Reform in Inter-war Britain’ Journal of Design History, Oxford University Press, London, 1996. 

  2. J C Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes, Hogarth Press, London. 1930 

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