Michelle Liu Carriger’s expansive and provocative study, Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan, is ambitious both in its attempt to theorize and conceptualize the ways in which clothing operates as a metaphor and as a mechanism for visualizing identities, and in the ways that Carriger brings together seemingly disparate moments in dress history from nineteenth-century Britain and Japan. Carriger’s main point throughout is that “clothing matters” (4). Fashion trends, disruptions, makeovers, and sartorial reimaginings set the stage and engender periods of change, tension, transgression, and revelation. Clothing and costume (sometimes Carriger will use overlapping terminology for good reasons) are not frivolous afterthoughts or simple protective gear; garments literally shape the way we view people—individually and collectively. Using four case studies, two from Britain and two from Japan, Carriger offers new ways of thinking about how dress and the theatricality of sartorial presentation complicate present and historical readings of the overlaps and distinctions among markers of identity (sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and class). She privileges the idea of “inhabiting” an identity, noting that “habit,” another word for clothing, is contained in the term. For Carriger, inhabiting a persona or subjectivity “evokes the notion of living within various social identities, without necessarily being inseparable or permanently subsumed within” (9). It is possible, Carriger proposes, “to inhabit subjectivities without being defined by them” (9).

Chapter 2, “‘Typical Modern Amazon’: Freaks of Fashion, Newspaper Nightmares, and the Girl of the Period,” explores the trope coined by Eliza Lynn Linton of the excessive and monstrous modern woman, described as “a creature who dyes her hair and paints her face, as the first articles of her personal religion; whose sole idea of life is plenty of fun and luxury; and whose dress is the object of such thought and intellect as she possesses” (39–40). Attacks on women’s concerns with fashion and public display reflect long-held anxieties about the visibility and circulation of female bodies as producers and consumers in the public sphere. If actresses and courtesans could dress like ladies, and ladies preferred to style themselves after actresses and high-class mistresses, the fabric of social structure seemed imminently threatened. Marshaling a wonderful array of archival materials, Carriger demonstrates that the ubiquity and vehemence of attacks on the “Girl of the Period” found in newspapers, periodicals, caricatures, pamphlets, and advertisements were equally matched by the celebration of her persona onstage and in print, particularly by the burlesque performer Lydia Thompson, whose fabulous fashion sense included a hat adorned with a stuffed squirrel.

Chapter 3 explores the trial of Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, charged with “outraging public decency” after they had appeared dressed as women for an evening out at the theatre (78). The crime was initially pronounced a misdemeanor until a court physician examined the defendants to “determine their sex” and “testified that the bodies of the defendants bore proof of felonious sexual activity” (78). A search of Boulton and Park’s rooms by the police produced an incriminating array of dresses, photographs, and letters from “an ever-widening circle of men, who seemed to make up a ‘hermaphrodite clique’ of well-connected ‘gentlemen-women’” (78). Savvy defense lawyers managed to obtain an acquittal for Boulton and Park by emphasizing their participation in amateur theatricals. Although Carriger acknowledges that Boulton and Park are now “celebrities in gay history books” (78), her central interest in the case is about fashion and clothing: in other words, what was in their closet. Carriger argues persuasively that the “‘theater defense’” for Boulton and Park provided an “alibi and an outlet for socially unsanctioned behaviors and desires” (82).

Chapter 4 centers on the fashionable makeover of Emperor Meiji of Japan, who presented himself in modern European dress as part of a larger campaign designed to promote Japan’s alignment with westernization and modernity. Carriger’s research in this chapter is fascinating and revealing. She carefully demonstrates through depictions of the emperor and empress that fashion shifts theatrically advertised new attitudes toward national identity, “pitched explicitly toward impression management of foreign treaty powers” (121). On the flip side, Carriger explores negative European reactions to Japanese royalty donning Western styles. In a section on “monkeys and children” (147), she considers how a racist caricature depicting Japanese figures dressed in Western clothes in front of a mirror that reflects images of disembodied apes suggests ridiculous imitation and mimicry. Evoking repeated images of mirrors, Carriger problematizes the Meiji makeover, highlighting its “bifurcation” (172). On the one hand, “strategically mirroring the most powerful technologies and attitudes of their rivals (and colonizers)” was partially effective (172); on the other, it also represented a significant strategy of theatricality and performance designed to create an inauthentic illusion.

Carriger’s final chapter, on gothic lolita fashion in contemporary Japan (also popular across the globe), brings the study full circle into the present and involves a different kind of practice-based research, in which Carriger attends the gothic lolita convention “Rufflecon,” joins online chat groups, conducts interviews with live subjects, and wears some of the clothing herself. Carriger argues that gothic lolita fashion is distinct from individual identity categories as a form of “identity insulation” (204), or a fashion border that enables one to inhabit varied subjectivities under the guise of fantastic fantasy clothing—garments that evoke the Victorian past and its revivification in the present.

Theatricality of the Closet is bursting with new ideas, exciting theoretical insights, and excellent archival research. While Carriger’s study is well informed by performance theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory, fashion theory is not as prominent. The book invites future conversations with projects like Catherine Spooner’s Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester University Press, 2004) and Aileen Ribeiro’s Clothing Art (Yale University Press, 2017)—a combination that I will certainly use when I teach this important text in my classes.