Dressed for Success: Fashioning Manhood at the Tampa Bay Hotel offered an intimate portrait of the Hotel’s staff during a transformative decade of American history. 
 
How can the lives of clerks, cashiers, waiters, and sports professionals at the Tampa Bay Hotel in the 1890s inform present-day conversations about young men’s declining college attendance and dissatisfaction with the job market? The economic depression that began with the Panic of 1893 led many young men to doubt they could achieve the same success as their fathers, especially since the financial downturn coincided with the rise of large corporations and the decline of small business ownership. Even more frightening to some, women invaded the male office as secretaries and bookkeepers, positions previously held by men.
 
This exhibit offered an eye-opening and entertaining glimpse at the strategies adopted by a new generation of men in the 1890s to get ahead. In addition to fashion and grooming, they created the modern craze of bodybuilding, not to mention prizefighting and other practices that Teddy Roosevelt dubbed “the strenuous life.” A diverse sample of the Tampa Bay Hotel’s male staff guided viewers through the causes and consequences of the decade’s so-called “Crisis of Masculinity.” Dressed for Success presented stories of real people, brought to life with rare photographs and ephemera, sports equipment, and period garments and accessories. Thanks to a generous grant from the Henry B. Plant Museum Society, the exhibit featured newly restored objects from the original Tampa Bay Hotel lobby that vividly recreated the workspace of cashiers and clerks. 
 

This exhibit was graciously underwritten by:

Charles and Elizabeth Harris