Clothes ‘R’ Us: We all wear them, we all buy them: sometimes for a lot of money, sometimes for a few pennies at thrift shops. They identify us. In short, dress speaks. What we wear matters, in all senses. Much is revealed by and about clothing, fashion, and design (and thus about subjectivity) through their presentation within literary works, visual art, and other expressions of culture—magazines and film in particular. As an industrial system, a sociological formation, a semiotic code, and an expressive form, clothing—as idea and material—figures class relations, gendered presentations, sexualities, labor, and aesthetics. The investigation of the ephemeral nature of clothing and its representations opens up ethical and political questions.

Take the mackintosh, as Celia Marshik does in At the Mercy of Their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture. Its ubiquity in the modern British imaginary, and in others' imagination of Britain, makes it nearly as emblematic of national identity as the Union Jack—but more practical. It is exemplary of how an item of clothing can become a life-form and instill itself in the identity of its wearer while simultaneously erasing the body underneath its rubberized exterior. As surface, it is deep. Its presence on the battlefield turned it into a marker of death; its mass appeal on the streets made it into a brand name. How does this twofold process work?

In “Lady Chatterley's Sneakers” (London Review of Books, 2012), David Trotter notes that in a seemingly offhand mention, D. H. Lawrence has Connie donning a pair of “rubber-soled tennis shoes, a lightweight mackintosh [first blue, then violet in a later version], a bottle of perfume by Coty,” before she leaves home to spend the night with her lover in his cabin. Teasing out many sides to this newfangled gear, part of the growing craze for sporting activities among the middle class, he shows the eroticism lodged in their everydayness. Such items—which Marshik sees flittering along the London streets of much modernist fiction—might enable the mistress of the house to sneak (as in sneakers) out unawares because the rubber soles would presumably muffle the sound of footsteps on the creaky floors of an English country house, while her rubberized coat would keep out the damp night air of the woods as she hiked to her tryst. Moreover, Connie's sneakers and mackintosh—as objects made of canvas and rubber—point to British imperial power that captured the labor and resources of far-flung lands to provide new materials through technologies of extraction—rubber, dyes—and manufacturing. Advertisements for them in newspapers, magazines, or circulars funded by the British Rubber Growers Association appeared in 1921. Sneakers, perfect for dancing naked in the woods, reify the living residue of the forests of Malaya and Ceylon, connecting England to Empire. The economic exploitation of the invisible laborers working rubber plantations and chemical factories congeals within these lowly items of clothing—more or less proletarian pieces of her wardrobe, sort of cool—and condense into a rich theoretical node in which one cannot tell the dancer from the dance, as (political and aesthetic) ideology and materiality embrace: a rich critical tradition thinks through things.

Modern theory, like literature, tosses on some garments in its travels. Less than ten pages into Capital, Karl Marx uses the coat as exemplary object for making visible how use value (keeping warm) and exchange value (tailored styling) intertwine under capitalism. Of course, the tailor's labor had been preceded by that of the weaver (of linen, his relative “equivalent” material, or of wool or rubberized cotton soaked in naptha) and before that of the flax farmer or shepherd, the rubber-plantation workers or chemical-plant hands. One might argue that the entire theory of abstract labor, the basis of the Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, volume 1 of Capital, depends upon rags—on sartorial commodities different but fungible. For Gertrude Stein (in Tender Buttons [1914]), “A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer … is a hollow hollow belt, a belt is a shawl.” Interchangeable. For Marshik, this means modernism, like the mackintosh as emblem, is an amalgam of Ulysses and Vogue and second-hand shops and advertisements—and the clothed bodies produced within all these and many other texts and locations.

In the critical gaze Marshik casts on various aspects of interwar British dress—not only the mackintosh reeking of trench warfare and death, but fancy dress and eveningwear, any of which might wind up in a secondhand shop—apparel conforms to the body, yet counterintuitively, forms the body. Clothing shifts from substance to metaphor and back. This flexibility allegorizes the work clothing performs in literature: as lack, it produces volume. Dress covers body as an object made for use, even at its most extravagant. It signals something underneath, constructing depth even as it not only presents the plane on which affect is delineated, but also belabors the clothed body as artifice. Attention to the details of dress—not merely a mackintosh, but a blue or violet one—bares, within the world of the literary garment, those who work with, care for and describe these materials. Literary dress theorizes (class) form.

Appraising dress in literature means pulling at threads not yet clipped from seams—belaboring dress—seeing what goes into the making and wearing of clothes and, as Marshik makes clear, the writing about them. The literary garment emblematizes a philosophy of clothes, as Thomas Carlyle at once spoofs and conveys in Sartor Resartus (1833–34), paradoxically perhaps the first modernist perception of the literary garment, either “thought-woven or hand-woven,” a manifestation of human labor: “Clothes, as despicable as we think of them, are so unspeakably significant.” The ruffle on a dress is far more the eternal than any idea, in my mangling of Walter Benjamin's observation—its very excess, the ephemeral rustle extra fabric excites, reveals the hands that first rucked the cloth into this styled detail. The literary garment, akin to Benjamin's constellation, crystallizes abstract labor. Connie's mackintosh or Marx's coat works—as material and allegory.