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Van Slooten proposes that the novels’ sentimental labels may be reconsidered in light of the more modern sensibilities visible in the female characters’ relationships to dress.
Such modifications show how the development of mass-produced clothing leads to wider self-fashioning choices for consumers. Women’s dress reform of the nineteenth century, for example, gives way to the “new woman” figure of the early twentieth, with a refined functional and visual form. The tradition of haute couture may signal prestige and perpetuate a downward diffusion of the “latest” styles, but the modern dislocation of what was previously considered to be a unified social self also ushers in important changes. Moving from the sincere effort to directly associate oneself with a specific class toward a more self-conscious performance that operates on several levels proves especially useful for the revision of borders. For example, according to Rachel Warburton, in “‘Nothing could be seen whole or read from start to finish’: Transvestism and Imitation in Orlando and Nightwood,” cross-dressing in the novels functions as an appropriate device for destabilizing gendered subjects and disrupting a binary logic of marking. Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes challenge the idea of connections between linguistic/vestimentary signifiers and their signifieds, illustrating the shifting nature of such discourse and, ultimately, of identity itself.
The complicated relationship between image and intention is represented in children’s literature as well. In “Ecological Dress: Art, Pedagogy, and Ambiguity in the Work of C.M. Barker” Carole Scott examines the early twentieth-century British series, “The Flower Fairies.” The fairy-children’s clothing presents not only botanical precision but also suggestions of cultural resistance aimed at children and adults alike. Barker’s overt and covert sartorial implications involve issues such as ecology, gender construction, sexuality, and behavioral norms.
Subversive tendencies are also noted in Lori Harrison-Kahan’s “No Slaves to Fashion: Designing Women in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Anzia Yezierska,” which analyzes how the fashion revolution of the early twentieth-century is figured in fiction.