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Reviewed by:
  • Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion
  • Amy L. Montz (bio)
Katherine Joslin, Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion. Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2009. xv + 209 pp. $30.00 (cloth)

Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion begins with the argument that dress does not elicit a tactile sensation alone; dress, as Edith Wharton's prose reminds us, assaults all senses. The softness of velvet or the scratchiness of wool is felt against the skin. The rustle of silk or the jangle of beads is heard by the ears. Dress even evokes olfactory senses, in that fabric retains the scent of where it has been so that smell is with us wherever we go. And dress, as Katherine Joslin's meticulously researched and beautifully sculpted text informs us, was as important to Edith Wharton as it should be to her contemporary scholars. Joslin moves from dress's sensory underpinnings to its memory to show that when we see dress as "cast-off," we both acknowledge the ownership of clothing—this or that article "belonged" to Edith Wharton, although its provenance may originate elsewhere—and the social willingness to discount clothing's importance—dress can be "cast-off," allowed to be subsumed into triviality and unimportance (1–2). As Joslin argues, Wharton's literature and writings on fashion reiterate fashion scholars' insistence that dress has significance; its production as the result of labor and its symbolic and economic worth all culminate into a multitude of meanings on a variety of levels. What makes Joslin's argument unique and ultimately compelling is that she reads Wharton's literary use of dress as meaningful because dress was, for Wharton, meaningful. By seeing the interplay between Wharton's own love of dress and fashion, her anxiety over fashion's shifting signals in an increasingly modern social scene, and her characters' development through those fashions themselves, Joslin offers textual readings of Wharton's novels that cannot be separated from the materiality in which they were so deeply entrenched.

Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion is divided into seven chapters that move fluidly and, for the most part, chronologically, through Wharton's writing and her life. Chapter One, "Dressing Up," introduces the reader to the importance of fashion in Wharton's life by showing the ways in which fashion created Wharton. The chapter begins with a quote from Wharton's autobiography that acknowledges that the "'birth of her identity' had come as a child in the ritual of dressing up" (14). It is important to begin thinking through Wharton's fashionable beginnings in this sense, as so many of her characters identity themselves through that very act of "dressing up," as well as their allegiance to and deviation from what Joslin characterizes as the defining aesthetic principles of Wharton's own dress: "moderation, fitness, and relevance" (14). Joslin distinguishes the use of dress in Wharton's novels through the following formula: "Reading the depiction of dress in Wharton's writing, we find that the later a novel was written and the earlier the setting of the story, the more precise and even lavish the detail about garments and accessories" (34). Joslin demonstrates this by showing how The House of Mirth's "Lily Bart's gowns exist in suggestion rather than precise design or fabric" (34), but by the novels of the 1920s, "many of her heroines come gowned in rich fabrics and specific styles from the late nineteenth century" (35). The remaining chapters of this [End Page 114] text weave seamlessly between Wharton's life and her writing, and maintain a constant awareness of the larger metaphor inherent in Joslin's text. This is a scholarly study of Edith Wharton and the making of fashion. Both Wharton and Joslin must make fashion real for their readers, and this comes into particular relevance in Chapter 2.

"The Underside of Fashion" discusses the multiple meanings dress possessed during Wharton's lifetime; dress itself represented the work of multiple classes and perhaps even dozens of persons, all to be worn on one singular body, or to be written about for one singular character. Joslin's recognition of the "strange experience for a...

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