Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870-1914
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A01=Rosy Aindow
Author_Rosy Aindow
beth
Beth Book
book
Category=AKT
Category=DS
Category=KND
century
Christopher Breward
class anxiety in British fiction
Common Language
Contemporary Society
Draper's Shop
Draper’s Shop
Dressmaking Establishment
Dressmaking Trades
early
Early Twentieth Century Fiction
EDM
Elizabeth Siddal
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_business-finance-law
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Esther Waters
False Hair
fashion
Fashion Industry
fashion industry history
fashionable
Fashionable Consumption
Fashionable Dress
fiction
gender and consumption
Hilda Lessways
industry
Lady's World
Lady’s World
literary class mobility
Men In Black
modern
Modern Fashion Industry
Monica Madden
Mrs Mason
nineteenth-century social identity
Robert Elsmere
Shop Girl
twentieth
Victorian fashion studies
Walworth Road
women in literature
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781138265530
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 11 Nov 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Rosy Aindow examines the way fiction registered and responded to the emergence of a modern fashion industry during the period 1870-1914. She traces the role played by dress in the formation of literary identities, with specific attention to the way that an engagement with fashionable clothing was understood to be a means of class emulation. The expansion of the fashion industry in the second half of the nineteenth century is generally considered to have had a significant impact on the way in which lower income groups, in particular, encountered clothing: many were able to participate in fashionable consumption for the first time. Remaining alert to the historical specificity of these events, this study argues that the cultural perception of the expansion of the industry - namely a predominantly bourgeois fear that it would result in a democratisation in dress - had a profound effect on the way in which fashion was approached by contemporary writers. Drawing on existing cultural analogies that associated fashion with women and artifice, it concludes that women were particularly implicated in fictional accounts of class mobility. This transgression applied not only to women who wore fashionable clothing, but to those working in the fashion industry itself. An allusion to fashion has a socio-specific meaning, one which gained a new potency in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives as a vehicle for the expression of class anxieties.
Rosy Aindow is Tutor in the School of English at The University of Nottingham, UK
