Margaret Waller takes a deeply researched but unconventional look at fashion conventions in this engaging study of the way dress reflects and constructs identity, class and masculinity. Her book illuminates, and interrogates, the period (roughly 1760 to 1830 in France) fashion historians call "the great male renunciation," a time during which men's fashion garb moved from the flamboyant peacockery of earlier eras into the darker, simpler and less varied types of garments that remain the norm for men today. To explore the issues involved, she focuses on two men: Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who became the Emperor of France, and Pierre Antoine Le Boux La Mésangère (1761-1831), a defrocked priest who became a celebrated fashion arbiter—an emperor, so to speak, of fashion. Different as the men seem superficially, Waller perceives crucial similarities, noting that "both were provincial outsiders from the lower nobility who had to learn to look and behave like insiders," and "each wielded the power to tell others what to wear while breaking their own rules."
Waller had me at the first line of the Preface: "'What if I told you I don’t have a belly button?' Father McCrory asked. Some of my classmates shifted in their seats. Silence." While the book's main text is typically less surprising than that example, one of its great strengths lies in Waller's ability to marry scholarly research with ideas and queries that are anything but dull, dusty and drably "academic." The result is a book that has much to share about cultural history and also much to say about the construction of—and conflicts around—ideas of masculinity today.
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Napoleon's Closet: The Emperor, the Priest, and the Men Who Invented Modern Fashion by
Margaret Waller at
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Columbia University Press, 2026.
