American Antiquarian Society
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How did black suits become so ubiquitous? Drawing on her new book, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (2026), Broadway-costumer-turned-Harvard-historian Chloe Chapin traces the shift from the colorful, flamboyant attire of eighteenth century men to the plain, dark suits of the nineteenth century. Building on the innovations and ideas of both the American and the Industrial Revolutions, Chapin characterizes this swift style change as the “Sartorial Revolution,” which radically rewrote the language of fashion, gender, and power.
A former Broadway costumer, Chloe Chapin has a doctorate in American Studies from Harvard University, and master’s degrees from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), and the Yale School of Drama. She has taught at Harvard, FIT, Parsons, and Reed College. For her first book, Suitable: The Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026), Chapin took her designer’s eye into the historical archives, in order to better understand the visual, material, embodied, and performative elements of men’s suits and their impact on the modern world. She conducted research for her book at AAS as a David Jaffee Fellow in Visual and Material Culture in 2019-20.