Khaki and Civvies

In the first in-depth critical history of men's everyday dress in the First World War, Rachel Neal analyses how clothing shapes men's wartime identities, and how those wartime identities shape men's clothing, becoming a material embodiment of experience and emotion. The First World War shone a spotlight on men's clothing as a unique and powerful symbol of masculine identity. Yet while history has paid great attention to military uniforms and womenswear, the influential role of men's civilian dress has long been overlooked. Drawing on letters, personal writings, newspapers, and photographs alongside surviving garments, Neal moves beyond the standard narrative of collective identity to recover the individual behind the uniform. She shows how men used dress to negotiate the boundary between civilian and military life, how visual culture and the idealisation of soldiers challenged everyday masculine dress, and how the war accelerated lasting shifts in menswear – from the demob suit and the rise of knitwear, to the resonance of a father’s wartime greatcoat. Reused, repurposed, and accumulating multiple narratives, surviving wartime garments hold evidence that written sources cannot; through these, Neal recovers a tactile, intimate history of the wartime everyday and reveals the enduring afterlives of the men who wore them.