Thread for Thought pulls together another nifty little piece about fashion in literature (for more great ones: a series of posts detailing the history of cross dressing/drag, the politics and evolution of mannequins.)
I feel like I’ve (and half the internet, or at least half the internet I read) been beating the dead horse of Look Guys Fashion Is Relevant In A Lot of Ways And Is Like A Big Cultural Signifier of Different Stuff for ages now, but this stuff IS really interesting, I SWEAR, and in some ways somehow I’d never thought of the role that descriptions of clothing and style played in much of the fiction I’ve read in my life.
And while I tried to come up with several uber-highbrow examples here for you — that amazing painfully metaphorical passage about shopping for hats in Good Morning Midnight which is half the reason this blog is titled such! Nora’s dress crinkling in The Dead! probably something about class and femininity in Austen or the Brontes! anything ever about corsets and petticoats! something fascinating about costuming in Shakespeare! this essay about colourful fabrics marking alterity in drab, foggy, 16th century London which I loved to death when I had to read it senior year of college!
But somehow the first thing I could really come up with was this weirdly striking memory of reading The Little House on the Prairie series when I was in third grade or so and there being achapter in one of the books where the mother takes the girls to buy fabric for a new dress, and there’s something about floral muslin or something. I remember being completely baffled by the concept that people mother’s had to travel far to fabric stores to pick out fabric for a new dress, and also not understanding what the heck muslin was, but whatever it is (I know now, jeez) it’s firmly entrenched in my memory along with blind sisters, badgers, and houses made out of sod as a sole indicator of Americana and pioneer life.
