From the costumes of Jacobean drama to Miss Havisham’s wedding dress, clothes have always played a key part in literature. Sometimes they symbolise frivolity, at other times melancholy. So why is the study of fashion in fiction so neglected? What can the clothes which characters wear tell us about their inner as well as outer lives? Women who dress up in the fashions of the day have been condemned as ostentatious, while men who wear the outfits of dandies have been satirised as libertines. How was fashion transformed, in the world of literature, from something beautiful and admirable, to something untrustworthy and superficial?
Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England, Aileen Ribeiro
Dressed in Fiction, Clair Hughes |
