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Foreword
The connection between literature and fashion is inevitable, for “style” refers simultaneously to literary expression and fashionable dress. When we speak about fashion we are not talking simply about clothes, but clothes in relation to the body and to our society. In a sense, fashion is a visible language with meanings that change over time and within cultures.
Prior to the late twentieth century, however, a collection such as this would have seemed frivolous. As Elizabeth Wilson argued in Adorned in Dreams, “Because fashion is constantly denigrated, the serious study of fashion has had repeatedly to justify itself” (47). It was considered the purview of those in the business of designing, creating, and marketing clothing, or perhaps historians tracing the development and changes of fashion as an art form, just as they would sculpture or painting. The focus on fashion emerged with the advent of cultural studies and the recognition of material and popular culture as worthy of serious investigation. Indictments of fashion, such as those by Thorstein Veblen (1899), as a pursuit of the leisure class, a form of conspicuous consumption, gave way, if not to praise, at least to acknowledgment of fashion’s rich cultural significance.