Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion, and: Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity (review)

In the early 1980s, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia smugly informed me that no one who lacked a thorough knowledge of the work of Lacan and Derrida was fit to teach modern literature. Today, some scholars might say that it has become more important to know the work of Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel. Devotion to theories disconnected from the world of things that surround the creation and production of literature has been replaced by a new interest in the material—often in the most literal and specific meaning of that word. Textiles and modes of dress are ubiquitous as expressive forms, whether in the actual clothes worn by authors or in the imaginary clothes worn by characters in their fiction; yet, until recently, it was as though these phenomena had been rendered invisible, for critics were trained never to notice them or examine their significance.

Katherine Joslin’s Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion and R. S. Koppen’s Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity testify to how far we have come in reconsidering early twentieth-century Western fashion, in particular, as a serious object of study that enriches our understanding of cultural innovation, literary invention, and even biography. For two academic publishing firms (University of New Hampshire Press and Edinburgh University Press, respectively) to have issued such volumes thirty years ago, when deconstruction reigned, would have been unthinkable. It is no accident, though, that both books focus on women’s writing. No male author—with the exception, perhaps, of Oscar Wilde—has received this sort of careful and lengthy analysis of his manner of dress nor had it applied equally to the clothes worn by his characters. (Terry Castle’s 1996 Noël Coward and Radclyffe Hall: Kindred Spirits, for instance, pays attention to Coward’s personal style, but only in counterpoint to Hall’s, while saying little about how he chose to clothe the figures who moved languidly through his plays or through his many short stories.) Dress is no longer unmentionable in literary criticism, but the traditional link between femininity and fashion is still intact.

Of these two recent volumes, Katherine Joslin’s is unquestionably the handsomer. University of New Hampshire Press appears to have spared no expense in making this an attractive book. Not only are the nearly one hundred illustrations (a quarter of them in color) visually appealing—the full-page photographs of period clothes from the collections of the Mint Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are especially beautiful—but they also prove a boon to readers whose minds might not come prestocked with images of Victorian undergarment construction or who cannot immediately conjure the details of turn-of-the-century evening dresses by Jacques Doucet and distinguish such creations from those by Charles Frederick Worth. R. S. Koppen’s book, on the other hand, which sells in the United States for more than three times the price of Joslin’s, offers a mere nine black-and-white photographs, all with the grayish graininess one might expect from do-it-yourself scanning. Moreover, several are overly familiar from frequent reproduction, such as Angelica Bell in pseudo-Russian costume from Orlando and Virginia Woolf photographed by Man Ray.

The inviting production values of Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion nicely suit the audience-friendly style of the text itself. This book has crossover potential, written in a jargon-free prose that makes it accessible to what Woolf would have called “common readers,” as well as scholars of Wharton and scholars of fashion history alike. It fully lives up to its stated aim: “This study focuses on both changes of dress and changes in dress at the turn into the twentieth century and offers through a study of apparel a fresh reading of Wharton’s...