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Fashion theory is an area of study unto itself, and just dipping one’s foot (stylishly clad, of course) into the pool demands commitment. There appear to be as many ways to approach dress and fashion as there are appropriately concerned disciplines, and even a rudimentary sally must chart a labyrinthine path through fields as varied as anthropology, psychology, art history, or textile studies.1 We might also note that some disagreement remains over the relationship of the terms “clothing” or “dress” and “fashion,” which signify and shift depending on what part of speech is used. Perhaps we could use the vocabulary of our own discipline in this case and simply suggest that dress is to fashion what language is to poetry. One provides the material for the other, yet there is a difference between common usage and that which is recognized as more accomplished, sophisticated, innovative, or stylish—evincing an entire system of creation, diffusion, and evaluation. Moreover, fashion and literature have obvious linguistic connections: commentators may discuss the “lines” or “statement” of an outfit, designers describe their collections as “telling a story” or “having a voice,” and the ubiquitous concept of “style” underwrites them both. Both are arts of expression and craft with an intriguingly mutable quality: it may be determined that a celebrated professional has missed the anticipated mark, and there is always room for the unexpected voice to become catalyst for a new trend.
This project emerged from our interest in dress, in general, and our inability to locate an overview of its functionality throughout literary history, in particular. Although we found material on clothing or costuming in visual and cinematic art that provided a sense of chronology as well as theoretical discussion, existing studies of literary fashioning typically focused on a specific text, author, or period.