Styling Texts: Dress and Fashion in Literature By Cynthia Kuhn an ...

While popular fads may smack of superficiality, such movements actually indicate meaningful social currents. In “‘Clothes would only confuse them’: Sartorial Culture in Oryx and Crake,” Cynthia Kuhn focuses on how trends contribute to the dystopic fabric of the novel. She explores the complicated significance of fashions, from the sartorial to the scientific, as well as the compelling power of self-decoration in even the most surprising circumstances.

Since style cycles foreground the tenor of a particular era, we might describe early twenty-first century fashion as highlighting a facility for infinite play. However, some might argue that this has always been the case; certainly the following essays address a wide variety of inventive uses of clothing and fashion in literature, opening the texts for us with fascinating results.