This chapter introduces an interdisciplinary study of empire, where material culture takes center stage. Emphasis is placed on the tangible features of this socio-economic, cultural structure, attending to everyday practices that shaped and defined the empire and its aims, evading or working against that power. A theorized fashion is foundational to this study and diverse fashion-actors as well. The creative persistence of colonized and racialized communities is highlighted. Themes are outlined to be explored in later chapters: the cultural weight of whitewashing, entangled with a whiteness agenda, and the initiatives of Black laundresses, seamstresses and fashion-makers in the Caribbean; the advent of trousers as a genteel imperial fashion, birthed from maritime, plebeian roots; the determined self-directed travel of sailors, Black servants, men and women; and the material politics of British masquerades. These topics may surprise or unsettle expected narratives, with themes involving women and men, free and unfree, of diverse ethnicities, with subaltern agency centre stage.

This chapter focuses on the multiple identities performed by William Burroughs through the sign system of his distinctive fashion choices. It explores the paradox that Burroughs’ sartorial appearance made him both immediately recognizable and yet permanently elusive. In particular, it reads the many significations of his trademark choice of hat, arguing that it aligned Burroughs with identities ranging from gangsters to bankers as well as a specific past era at odds with his futuristic writing. The hat also had a psychological function as a mask for Burroughs’ emotional vulnerability and ambivalence about being an outsider. Miles makes a comparative analysis with such figures as David Bowie, to argue that in his fashion choices, “El Hombre Invisible” was at his most visible as a performance artist.

Chapter 5 examines the popularity of sewing shops and apprenticeships amongst fashion-conscious young women on tight budgets. Focusing on materiality, the chapter develops the book’s discussion of how uncertainty is employed in future-making strategies by considering how young women engage with counterfeit commodities and use skilful artistry to reveal – or bring forth in material form – the individuals they believe God intends them to be. Focusing on young women’s desire for bespoke clothes, which they often create for themselves after learning how to sew, the chapter highlights how young women avoid clothes sold in the market not because they are fakes or imitations of global brands but because, as mass-produced commodities, they deny young women their uniqueness and risk making them a counterfeit of someone else. As the chapter explores, making bespoke clothes that are fashionable does not depend only on individual inspiration but, ironically, requires young women to carefully imitate others’ designs. Detailing how young women make clothes by skilfully copying current trends and mirroring the contours of their own bodies, the chapter discusses the art and ethics of imitation.

This chapter draws on recent work in transnational feminist studies and critical beauty and fashion studies to examine South Asian American chick lit. It attends to how the transnationalization of Indian fashion and beauty industries produce new definitions of cosmopolitanism through economic citizenship, or the “right to work” in a global economy. The chapter focuses on Kavita Daswani’s chick lit novel Salaam, Paris (2006) and the Indian Muslim protagonist Tanaya Shah’s entry into the world of fashion modeling. It argues that Tanaya’s Muslimness contributes to the construction of fashion as a failed moral economy, in addition to operating as a racialized identity that facilitates the multicultural brand expansion of a global clothing retailer in a post-9/11 world. The chapter reads the sexual management of Tanaya's identities as a post-9/11 Muslim subject and an Indian model as allowing the fashion industry to produce convivial relations between Muslim identities, fashionability, and cosmopolitanism.

This chapter examines how fashion points to alternative forms of pleasure that exceed conventional narratives about choices between a life of political struggle and one of security and luxury. It focuses on British Labour politician Ellen Wilkinson’s novel Clash (1929), which is set during the 1926 General Strike and features a feminist heroine whose male suitors offer two distinctly different futures: one committed to the workers’ cause, and the other an escape into bohemian indulgence. Appropriating the genre of the romance, Wilkinson configures her protagonist’s conflict through two key fashion and design networks of the 1920s, Bloomsbury bohemianism and the European avant-garde, against which a third realm, the world of class struggle, is positioned as a counter-text. Engaging recent theories of affect and aesthetics, this chapter reveals how fashion attunes characters and readers to otherwise foreclosed ways of sensing and being, including unrealized forms of women’s expression and cross-class solidarity.

Critical thinking on the relationship between fashion and ideas of personhood tends to fall into two approaches: (1) the violation or diminishing of persons by fashion as an oppressive expression of gender expectations and base commercialism; (2) the celebration of fashion as an agential mode of performance and resignification. Both leave uncontested a set of mutually imbricated oppositions between persons versus nonpersons, interiority versus exteriority, essence versus surface, organic body versus synthetic dress. What happens to how we think about fashion and beauty when they take place on the denigrated, racialized, and gendered body? The woman of color presents a provocation about the toggle between personhood and objecthood. What if race is fashion (that is, stylized, transferable, synthetic), and what are the political implications of posing such a question?

This chapter argues that throughout his prose works, Wilde demonstrates ambivalence regarding the significance of fashion in relation to flesh, and this chapter traces that ambivalence through texts including The Picture of Dorian Gray, De Profundis, and “The Birthday of the Infanta.” Treating ugliness and beauty, monstrosity and martyrdom, this chapter demonstrates Oscar Wilde’s continued fascination with beautiful flesh that is betrayed as such flesh decays, rots, and becomes loose and baggy, like an ill-fitting garment. Wilde writes against the backdrop of eugenicist discourse, which proves a foil to his aesthetic project while simultaneously animating his response to criminal charges against him for gross indecency. But Wilde also looks to an earlier precedent to work out questions of flesh and fashion, particularly that of baroque painting and sculpture by artists such as Guido Reni and Gianlorenzo Bernini in their representations of the flesh of martyrs. The world remains unsure whether Wilde was a monster or a martyr; this chapter shows that Wilde himself shared those concerns.

Seen as a path to Americanization, the sweatshop is a cultural trope. From Abraham Cahan’s fictional autobiography, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), to Amy Sherman-Palladino’s comedy-drama, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (2017-), stories set in the sweatshop comprise a subgenre of US immigrant narratives. Melissa Rivero’s The Affairs of the Falcóns (2019) adds to and disrupts that subgenre while challenging dominant conception of assimilation. As a story about undocumented labor and the informal economy, The Affairs of the Falcóns seems to say little about assimilation as it is widely perceived and celebrated. Yet Rivero’s novel offers a fresh take on this concept: Ana is incorporated in the US economy not only as a sweatshop seamstress, but also as a disposable worker. The Affairs of the Falcóns calls attention to the paradox of assimilation – inclusion via marginalization and subordination – and to the elusiveness of the American dream.

What is literary about fashion and what are the ways in which fashion is literary? How and why does this matter for Black designers who reference Black history and culture in their work to intervene in dominant narratives about Black identity and the ways in which fashion broadcasts and/or delimits Black cultural expression? This chapter discusses the work of two Black fashion designers, Patrick Kelly and Kerby Jean-Raymond, both of whose careers can be described as “literary,” albeit in different ways. It argues that, despite the very different grammar of Kelly and Jean-Raymond’s work, as well as the decades that separate them, Jean-Raymond finds himself (at times) inside of Kelly’s story, mounting a similar critique of the fashion industry and its “single story” of Black designers and Black culture as available for exploitation and appropriation. This chapter proposes that Kerby’s literariness, his insistence that he tell his story with a capital “I” – intimately involving and representing his loved ones and a diasporic Black family in his clothes and in their performance at his shows – might create a new, liberatory language for and with fashion and race.

This chapter examines representations of wedding attire in a popular, though now defunct, feminist wedding blog, A Practical Wedding. The analysis compares two genres: posts sponsored by apparel brands and posts contributed by people about their own weddings. I argue that the two genres underline two forms of feminist personhood. On one hand, we find the rhetoric of neoliberal individuation, whereby the role of clothing is to help wearers present their best selves, wholly unfettered by others and their expectations. On the contrary, wedding accounts authored by readers-turned-contributors outline a model of clothing that is networked and connects the wearer to others alive and dead. I argue that the cleavage between these two models of dressed selfhood maps on to divergent impulses – toward individualism and being-in-relation – in contemporary feminism. Ultimately, the model of “haunting” by others that is implied by first-person accounts of dressing for the wedding provides a model for thinking about the ghosting of neoliberal feminism by relational ethics.

Misogynist attacks on women for a purportedly vain and frivolous preoccupation with fashion have proliferated for centuries. This chapter focuses on a feminist response to such rhetoric by a seventeenth century Italian nun, Arcangela Tarabotti. Forced to enter a convent as a teenager, Tarabotti defended women's free enjoyment of fashion and pointed out men’s obsession with adornment. As Eugenia Paulicelli shows, Tarabotti’s theory of fashion offers a feminist critique of masculinity and patriarchy, links women’s right to fashion to their right to education, and articulates the value of women’s work with texts and textiles. Through her engagement with fashion, Tarabotti recasts early modern ideas about gender, as well as distinctions between bodily and intellectual pursuits. She also cannily takes advantage of the ways that her own writing and nuns’ traditional needlework are able to circulate despite their authors’ physical confinement.

This chapter introduces readers to the field of fashion and literature and explains how fashion has functioned as an influential but underrecognized concept and force in literary studies. It identifies key questions and concerns that have fueled work on fashion and literature for decades, including temporality, subjectivity, materiality, labor, genre, and style, and it locates the field at the intersection of literary studies, fashion studies, and material culture studies. The introduction also highlights the role that work on gender and sexuality, often in relation to race and colonialism, has played in research on fashion and literature, as well as the importance of women’s labor as a topic and factor in the field. It explains the organization of the volume, highlighting how various chapters address broader debates and point to emerging directions for scholarship.

This chapter examines the significance of fashion in Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Briefly tracing the use of fashion, gloves, and related accessories in American and Black women’s literature, the chapter closely reads two moments in the novel in which the protagonist, Lutie Johnson, dons white gloves. The chapter argues that although the gloves are signs of Lutie’s financial aspirations and facilitate her movement away from her confined apartment, the gloves ultimately fail to protect her from the violence of the street.

This chapter yokes sartorial fashion and the literary trends that cultural colossus Rabindranath Tagore shapes and critiques in the early twentieth century. Bringing the figure of the dandy to a global stage in his late novel Shesher Kobita or Farewell Song (also translated as The Last Poem, 1928), Tagore lightly cloaks a manifesto on self-fashioning, modernist literary form, and the power of style. Farewell Song not only draws upon the history of textiles in Bengal, but also occasions a contest of fashions between British and Bengali forms of dress. The ensuing debate between Fashion and Style speaks across aesthetic fields and serves to highlight India’s rightful place on the modernist literary stage.

This chapter explores how fashion journalism shaped the development of the realist novel in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on scholarship that explores the interdependence of these forms of writing, it notes that both fashion journalists and novelists including Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola seek to create what Roland Barthes described as the “reality effect” – in which the inclusion of particular details generates in the reader the sense that a text describes the real world. Ultimately, this chapter argues, the fantasy of fashion lies at the heart of the fantasy of realism as a way of representing the word, from fictional depictions of the values and mores of different social worlds to attempts to capture the experience of urban modernity. Hence fashion and femininity – though often dismissed or diminished by male realist novels – are at the heart of their literary innovations.

We often conceive of objects as fixing us – and themselves – in time and space. We place them by their dates, materials, manufacturers, and other markers of origin. Yet exemplary narratives from the eighteenth century – such as “it-narratives” that imagined material objects as sentient protagonists – prioritize objects in motion. Accordingly, this chapter attends to moveable goods and what their circulation unveils about the slipperiness and unknowability of material culture. It tackles mobile material culture from three intersecting perspectives: material culture’s multidisciplinary terrains; the movements of objects across and within cultures; the movements of objects between the material and the literary. In addition to foregrounding how circulation might enrich the multidisciplinary study of material culture, it examines the key role of the cultural and geographic movement of literary and fashionable things across a global eighteenth century. Rather than fixing what we know about objects in provenance and place, this chapter highlights how objects might unmoor us and invites us to rethink rigid disciplinary categories.

The collectivization of one profession, hairstyling, is the focus of this chapter. Barbershops, with bathhouses and photographers, were considered an essential service for city residents and were therefore part of those benefits that had to be provided under the commune umbrella. Yet during the Great Leap not only did hairstyling fashions and a correspondent hierarchy of hairdressers persisted, but they were recognized and actively fostered by local and state authorities. The case of hairdressers and barbers in Great Leap Beijing thus shows not only the attentiveness some cadres paid to the minute aspects of the quotidian but also the resilience of subtle (and not so subtle) social differences in the midst of what was supposed to be one of the “egalitarian” moments in the Maoist era.