Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (review)

Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England stands as a testament to the power of sumptuous clothes to communicate social status and political authority in the early modern period. Surveying the development and significance of dress over the long seventeenth century, Ribeiro offers a tour of portraits, costume plates, woodcuts, embroideries, and engravings, all of which are beautifully reproduced to enhance the vibrant colors, lush textures, and intricate styles that characterize elite clothes. Ribeiro complements this impressive display with discussions of representations of dress in seventeenth-century poems, dramatic literature, essays, and sermons. Comprehensive in scope and rigorous in detail, Fashion and Fiction moves gracefully between the micro and the macro, offering fascinating close readings of portraits and clearly written overviews of the changing political, economic, and social climates influencing attitudes towards changing fashion trends in this period.

Ribeiro has organized her material chronologically, and she builds her analyses of her visual and literary sources within each chapter around key political events, intellectual trends, or cultural fads. In the introduction, she explains that she intends to examine the ways in which “clothing is perceived both as a reality (that is, worn in real life) and as a discourse to underline allegory and the fanciful or romantic impulse, which is seen particularly in art” (1). Here Ribeiro puts forward her central claim that “dress is a common metaphor of language and creates webs of meanings, some explicit, some implicit” (3) and goes on to provide an overview of her various sources. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on elite dress in the reigns of James and Charles. We are treated to readings of several royal portraits as Ribeiro dilates the significance of particular items, such as a glove or ruff, by panning out to the fabric trade, conditions of domestic commerce and cloth production, and broader fashion trends. In these two chapters the distinctive features of men and women’s dress are also described in detail, as are the sartorial inflections of the Stuart melancholic and the Caroline pastoral. Chapter 3 examines dress in the period of the Civil War and the Interregnum and takes up the moral concerns around dress associated in the first half of the century with Puritan reform. The final two chapters survey dress in the later Stuart period, and along the way we are introduced to gallants and gulls and cavaliers and roundheads, as we move from the elaborate couture of the Stuart court toward the virile simplicity of the court of Charles II.

Fashion and Fiction is at its best when Ribeiro treats her reader to the insights of a seasoned art historian expertly trained in the nuances of the periods’ representational media and textiles. The sections on royal images are particularly strong. Portraits with which many historians and literary scholars, especially those working on dress, may be familiar come to life through Ribeiro’s meticulously researched findings. Ribeiro’s informative interpretations potentially open up new avenues for scholars working on dress and material culture. For instance, her observation that garments and shoes were not made to size (there was no left or right shoe) but had to be worn until they took on the specific form of wearer’s body and feet over time would seem to have significant bearing on discussions of the constitutive power of clothes to fashion bodies and selves.

Ribeiro appears to be aware of the abundance of research on early modern clothing and she concedes that recent scholarship “suggests complex patterns of sartorial behaviour, with varying gender, occupational, and regional differences” (19). Such complexities, however, are diminished largely because Ribeiro identifies dress as a crown and court phenomenon. Since those of us who work on clothing cultures approach the history of fashion, dress, and style from different disciplinary backgrounds, we surely have a lot to learn from one another. For this reason, I was dismayed that Ribeiro...