Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • Literature conveys emotions and feelings about clothes that can highlight character and further the plot of a play or a novel [...] Fashion itself can be said to produce fiction • Aileen Ribiero, Fashion and fiction: Dress in art and literature in Stuart England, New Haven, Yale University, 2005, p. 1

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • More subtly than most objects and commodities, precisely because of [the] intimate relationship to our bodies and the self. • Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: fashion and modernity, London, Tauris, 2005, p. VII

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • With hegemonic norms and domination; its regulating force incites conformity but sometimes resistance. To adopt a style (or uniform) is to choose a socio-economic milieu and a future . • Peter Mc Neil, Vicki Karaminas, Catherine Cole, (eds.), Fashion in Fiction: Text and Clothing in Literature, Film and Television, Oxford, Berg, 2009, p. 6

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • Victorian women of all classes were expected to exercise literacy in what I call - "dress culture"- that is, the interrelated skills of constructing and interpreting clothes and household textile. • Christine Bayles Kortsch, Dress Culture in late Victorian Fiction, Burlington,Ashgate, 2009, p. 4.

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • "alternative discursive systems", "traditionally masculine structures of knowledge" • Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837-1914, Oxford, Claredon Press, 1993, p. 40

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • Writing, as piecing, is the art of arranging disparate scraps of material into a unique and distinctive design. A text is always a second-hand piece, made of words which have had a life of their own in previous arrangements, as are the fragments of fabrics of a patchwork quilt which have served other purposes and which, stitched together in a particular fashion, form new patterns. • Géraldine Chouard's “Sew to Speak: Text and Textile in Eudora Welty”, South Atlantic Review, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), pp. 7-26, p. 7.

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • In such system women themselves became 'movable', changing their names and presumably their identities as they moved from one male- headed household to another . • Lauren Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, New York, Vintage, 2001, p. 130

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • Creating lineages, they asserted their ownership of things and sometimes of other people as well. • Lauren Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, New York, Vintage, 2001, p. 133

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • [y]et it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are “important”; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes “trivial”. • Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (1929) London, Triad Grafton, 1987, p. 70 .

Almack’s Assembly Rooms was a social clubin London from 1765 to 1871 and one of the first to admit both men and women.

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • "How can you ..be so. ", she almost said strange. (N.A., Ch. 3, p.28.) • "tend to promote the general distress of the work" (N. A.,Ch. 2, p. 21)

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • “that is exactly what I should have guessed”. "Do you understand muslins, sir?” “Particularly well…my sister has often trusted me in the choice of a gown. I bought one for her the other day. […] I paid but five shillings a yard for it,and true Indian muslin” • (N.A., Ch. 3, p.28.)

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • “[o]pen carriages are nasty things. A clean gown is not five minutes wear in them. You are splashed getting in and getting out” “[Why] did you not tell me before? I am sure that if I had known it to be improper, I would not have gone with Mr Thorpe at all” (N. A. , p. 93)

"dress [is] her passion" (N. A., Ch. 2, p. 21) Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • From a married woman engaged in family concerns a more staid behaviour is expected than from a young woman before marriage; and consequently a greater simplicity of dress. • Lord Kames Home, Loose hints upon Education Chiefly concerning the Culture of the Heart, Edinburgh, 1781, p. 231

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • A mode of performance in which- through play on a disjunction between clothes and body- the socially constructed nature of sexual difference is foregrounded and even subjected to comment. • Annette Kuhn, "Sexual Disguise and Cinema" in The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 49

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • "put on a white gown" (N.A., Ch. 7, p. 87) • "quite wild to speak to [him] and make [her] apologies" (N. A., Ch. 7, p. 89) • "My dear, you tumble my gown"(N. A., Ch. 7, p. 89)

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • "hardly understood by her (N. A., Ch. 3, p. 25) • "I am afraid it has torn a hole already" (N. A., p. 28) • "Do you understand muslins, sir?" (N. A. , p. 28)

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • forming his features into a set smile, and affectedly softening his voice (N. A., p. 26) • In effecting a distance between assumed persona and real self, the practice of performance constructs a subject which is both fixed in the distinction between role and self and at the same time, paradoxically, called into question in the very act of performance. For over against the "real self", performance poses the possibility of a mutable self, of a fluidity of subjectivity. • Annette Kuhn, "Sexual Disguise and Cinema" in The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality, Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985, p. 52

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • Friday, went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings—plain black shoes—appeared to much advantage; but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man, who would make me dance with him, and distressed me by his nonsense. (N. A., p. 26).

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • sincerely attached to her (N. A., p. 227) • in suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife, she had scarcely sinned against his character, or magnified his cruelty (N. A., p. 230) • in which [he] talked at random, without sense or connection (N.A. p, 227).

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction • Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim. Catherine knew all this very well; her great aunt had read her a lecture on the subject only the Christmas before; and yet she lay awake ten minutes on Wednesday night debating between her spotted and her tamboured muslin, and nothing but the shortness of the time prevented her buying a new one for the evening. (N.A., p. 71)

Fashion between “frivolous distinction” and powerful fiction