Styling Melville

Melville’s visit to London in November of 1849 appears at the interstice between two materialist domains: that of dress as coded status and that of fashion as we know it today. This interstice will act as the conceptual, if not historical, crux of this article, which examines the framing of performative masculinity in Melville’s London journal entries. Melville’s self-consciousness regarding his wardrobe and his reception in London finds a parallel in The Confidence-Man, which explores the inauthenticity, or irregularity, of masculinity through the coding of dress. By focusing on the character of the Cosmopolitan—a “parti-hued,” trans-cultural dresser—I employ “trans-vestism” as a critical term to analyze the crossing of not only gender lines, but also of national, cultural, and social boundaries. Tracing the development of dress as trope and historical signifier from Melville’s journal to The Confidence-Man, this paper will culminate in a Melvillean theory of fashion that re-contextualizes his sense of material aesthetics in relation to an example from the twenty-first century fashion scene.