Made to measure? Tailoring and the ‘normal’ body in nineteenth-century France

[para. 1]: "During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientists, administrators, artists and doctors abstracted and depersonalised the human body using a new tool: statistics. As Ian Hacking argues in The Taming of Chance, the nineteenth century established the hegemony of statistical measurement as a mode of scientific and social investigation.1I am interested in the profound effects this growing determinism had on conceptions of the male body. The Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci revived classical canons of bodily pro-portions based on abstract geometry in his drawing of Vitruvian Man. By contrast, early statisticians such as Adolphe Quetelet mathematically quantified the height, weight and chest measurements of flesh-and-blood populations and used his measurements to calculate bodily means or norms. In effect, he defined the concept of the ‘average man’. All individual variations could literally be measured against this normative but abstract body. The quirks of the asymmetrical human being – who had uneven shoulders, a curved spine or a large stomach – became abnormal deviations rather than personal traits. Many contemporary social commentators read these infinite variations as visible markers of the degenerative effects of urban modernity. The depressing ‘realities’ of these pathological symptoms came into increasing conflict with classical, medical and fashionable models of the ideal body. The contrast between the ideal and the average man was debated in the realms of art, medicine and the military, domains that often overlapped in nineteenth-century discourse.3This chapter focuses on the practice of tailoring – a process of production and consumption in which the problem of dressing actual, not ideal, bodies was a constant and compelling concern."