Jerry in training for a “Swell”

In this print, Corinthian Tom’s tailor, Mr. Primefit, has come to Corinthian House to fit Jerry Hawthorn for a new suit. Jerry stands in the center, his back to the viewer, while Mr. Primefit measures his back with tape. Jerry wears a bottle green coat, fawn breeches, and a white shirt and stockings, while the tailor wears high-waisted, tight-fitting trousers, pale blue, and a maroon coat, with a bright yellow handkerchief poking out of his back pocket. Mr. Primefit is apparently taking longer than usual because he is distracted by the various paintings that have been hung in the room since his last visit. Tom lounges on a couch on the left wearing baggier white trousers, a smoking jacket with a white and pale blue pattern, and an elaborate pink patterned cravat. The figures are in a fine but casual room, hung with sporting pictures of dogs, race horses, boxing, shooting, hunting, and cock fighting. In addition to the couch there are a couple of chairs, a semicircular commode, and a table draped with a green baize cloth. Boxing gloves and a book of "Sporting Anecdotes" are strewn about the room, together with tools of the tailor’s trade: two rolls of patterns, a top hat and hat box, and tall boots. On the table are some papers, an inkstand, a quill pen, and another top hat, while the mantel of the fireplace behind the table is graced by a large, German pipe. 

This print depicts Corinthian Tom initiating his country cousin Jerry into the practice of being fitted by a tailor, and so portrays the typical mode of men’s fashion production for the wealthy. Affluent men patronized tailors, who both sold suiting fabrics and fashioned them into garments. Customers could be fitted at the tailor’s establishment, or, if special clients (as in this case), in the comfort of their own home.

This image captures how fashion was perceived as an artistic endeavor in the Romantic period, primarily by representing the tailor, a producer of male fashion, as a creative professional. Furthermore, not only does the text explicitly describe him as an artist, but the image further portrays Mr. Primefit as a connoisseur of fine art: he is visibly distracted by the paintings on the wall during Jerry's fitting, and so his love of fine art appears to take precedence over his business. The print also emphasizes the role of fashion as a tool for producing a certain “look,” in this case the “look of a gentlemen,” a visual creation that is specifically classed and gendered as an elite masculine prerogative (Egan 146). Fashion not only creates a costume, however: it can also refashion the inner man. Once Jerry receives the “swell suit,” he discards his country clothes or “rustic habits” and is very pleased with his London wardrobe, even though he “scarcely knew himself, as his eyes ran over the mirror which reflected the elegant metamorphose he had undergone” (Egan 148). Jerry’s gaze in the mirror is the last of a series of homoerotic inspections enabled by the process of clothes fitting. Jerry is subjected to the objectifying male gaze of Mr. Primefit, Corinthian Tom, and himself; as a result, he is viewed as a tasteful object—a fashionable gentleman, a swell—rather analogous to the paintings that the men also view on the walls.

As depicted here, the swell lacks the fashionable and effeminate extremes of the dandy. The swell’s interest in masculine fashion is represented as one among various gentlemanly pursuits, such as boxing, horses, country sports, reading, writing, and smoking. The contrast between the well-rounded swell and the dandified artist is made visually explicit in the central juxtaposition of Jerry and Mr. Primefit. Jerry takes an almost colossal stance, his broad back and exaggerated calf muscles giving him a burly heft, whereas the tailor’s slim legs and high waist liken him to a contemporary woman of fashion in an empire-waist dress. In contradistinction to the swell, Mr. Primefit is portrayed as both effeminate and myopic: his glasses signify a shortsightedness in which he can only focus on the artistic—the cut of a coat or the paintings on the wall. The tailor could therefore be read as lacking the ability to take in the broad view, an ability that country landowners like Jerry were presumed to have and make use of in their capacity as members of the “public,” or participants in political affairs. In this way, the gendered juxtaposition between Jerry and Mr. Primefit is also a classed distinction between the country landowner and the professional working man.