At The Mercy Of Theirc Lothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow, and British Garment Culture

6. In this regard, this book is part of the material turn in modernist studies. As critics like Judith Brown have demonstrated, to read substances like cellophane through contemporary eyes is to misread: materials that now seem ordinary, cheap, or unremarkable were regarded as modern and glamorous a century ago. Brown’s readings of Chanel No. 5, plastics, and other materials are models in this regard. While I have been inspired by her example, we part ways in that Brown sees the “object recede” behind its effects (Glamour in Six Dimensions: Modernism and the Radiance of Form [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009], 9). In contrast, the garments I discuss seldom recede; they remain palpable and in the foreground.

7. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 17.

8. As Faye Hammill notes, middlebrow writers often “responded to modernist innovation in serious ways, and some of their texts have affinities with experimental narrative projects.” She therefore concludes, “It is possible to read them as participants, however tentatively, in modernist experiment” (Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007], 9). See also Nicola Humble, who writes, “‘Middlebrow’ and ‘highbrow’ are far from impermeable categories, and many texts shifted their status from one to the other or were uneasily trapped in the no-man’s land in-between” (The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism [New York: Oxford University Press, 2001], 26).

9. In Genevieve Abravanel’s words, “There was no full-fledged material divide between modernism and mass culture, [but] the early twentieth century saw the development of ideologies of division, as embodied, for instance, in the use of the terms highbrow and lowbrow” (Americanizing Britain: The Rise of Modernism in the Age of the Entertainment Empire [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012], 17).

10. As Hammill writes, middlebrow authors were not cynical about this goal but regarded wide audiences and fame as “reward[s] for genuine achievement” (Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture, 15).

11. I am in sympathy with Rita Felski’s complaint that “context is often wielded in punitive fashion to deprive the artwork of agency, to evacuate it of influence or impact, rendering it a puny, enfeebled, impoverished thing. We inflate context, in short, in order to deflate text” (“Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42, no. 4 [2011]: 582). My aim throughout this book is not to use “context” to explain or pin down literary texts but to demonstrate the way fiction participates in a conversation about the affective and even physical power of garments.

12. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Britain was increasingly sidelined by the sartorial interchange between France and America, countries that Caroline Evans notes were “respectively, the most important exporter and the most important importer in the international fashion trade” (The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013], 2).

13. “Dressing on a Post-War Income,” Vogue (Britain), September 1923, 64.

14. Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 187.

15. Georg Simmel, “Adornment” (1908), in The Rise of Fashion: A Reader, ed. Daniel Leonhard Purdy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 79–86; Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899); J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930); Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (1937), in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 46–133.

16. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 126.

17. Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 6.

18. Evans demonstrates that women who worked as mannequins (models in couture houses and department stores) occupied an ambiguous position between subject and object. Such women performed objecthood, so female spectators could imagine themselves in the clothes they modeled; their job was to “animate the dress” and to efface their particular identities (Mechanical Smile, 197, chap. 9 passim). My study complements her work by examining parallel ontological issues in British literature of the period; together, these books suggest that the boundaries between persons and things were uniquely troubled in the early twentieth century.

19. My project is in sympathy with Jessica Burstein’s formulation of cold modernism, in which “the status of the human has no especial purchase, and thus the human form is on par with seemingly dissimilar entities in the world: clothing, cars, and curtains, for example” (Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012], 13).

20. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 12.

22. I am wary of drawing a sharp divide between Victorians and moderns, but there is something to Johnson’s suggestion that “what defines such [literary] movements may well be the way they see the relationships between persons and things” (Persons and Things, 3).

23. Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology (New York: Appleton, 1897), 1:311.

25. Bill Brown, “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 3.

26. Johnson, Persons and Things, 142.

27. As Bill Brown succinctly states in a summary of Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, “The history of modernity, propelled both by capital and by instrumental reason, is the history of proscribing objects from attaining the status of things, proscribing any value but that of use or exchange, secularizing the object’s animation by restricting it to commodity fetishism alone” (A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], 185).

28. Johnson, Persons and Things, 232.

29. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 72.

30. Ibid., 39. Latour calls the former an “intermediary” and the latter a “mediator.” In what follows, I prefer Brown’s less clunky “objects” and “things.” Brown, who takes the fundamental distinction between these ontological categories from Latour, designates “objects” as those items that are inert and do not particularly influence the outcome of plots and “things” as those items that rise above the inert status of the mere object. See Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, special issue, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.

31. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 39.

32. Ibid., 148. The phrase belongs to Rem Koolhas, but Latour has popularized it.

33. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 123.

37. For an economical account of modernity’s ever increasing “scopic technologies,” see Liz Conor, The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 23. Morrell, who sat for several unflattering portraits that were widely reproduced and discussed in periodicals, would realize how quickly the combination of new and old technologies could make an individual vulnerable (chap. 1).

38. Brown, Sense of Things, 18. Bill Brown, like Judith Brown, sets up his work as not always keeping a focus on things. In his words, the experiment his book represents “has been recast into essays that do not always maintain a focus on things, but that nonetheless show how the question of things has been integral to what the text at hand is trying to get said” (ibid.). My own study is a bit more literal minded in keeping the focus on garments, a strategy that results in brief readings of a variety of literary and cultural texts instead of the extended readings of single literary works that Brown offers.

40. Flügel, Psychology of Clothes, 37.

41. I use “haunted” in the sense that Avery E. Gordon employs it: “In haunting, organized forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our analytic separations and confounds the social separations themselves” (Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997], 19). Haunting is thus less spectral than agency that appears out of place—when it is exercised by purportedly inanimate material.

42. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 79–81.

43. Ibid., 81; Gell, Art and Agency, 18.

44. For example, Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones have published on the glove in Renaissance portraiture (“Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” in “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, special issue, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 [2001]: 114–32); Stallybrass has worked on Karl Marx’s coat (“Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places, ed. Patricia Spyer [London: Routledge, 1998], 183–207); and Sophie Woodward has employed Gell’s theory of the distributed person to interpret case studies of contemporary women in which “clothing opens up the person to wider layers of externalized, potentially distributed, mind” (“Looking Good, Feeling Right: Aesthetics of the Self,” in Clothing as Material Culture, ed. Susanne Küchler and Daniel Miller [Oxford: Berg, 2005], 37). One exception that focuses on the early twentieth century is Christina Kiaer’s work on the Constructivist flapper dress, which designers hoped might effect a transformation in Russian women’s relationship to clothing (“The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress,” in “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, special issue, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 [2001]: 185–243).

45. Brown, Sense of Things, 188.

46. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), 129.

48. Orwell’s experience may seem a twentieth-century reflection of Swiss writer Gottfried Keller’s short story “Clothes Make the Man” (1874). In this tale, an impoverished tailor is mistaken for an aristocrat, and the character eventually marries a society beauty whose dowry enables him to elevate his class status. Despite its title, Keller’s story suggests that clothing alone cannot “make” a man: the tailor passes as a count not only because he is well dressed but also because he arrives in town in an expensive coach, displays fastidious table manners, and is a talented horseman. Keller’s title has become an idiom, but his original story indicates (in contrast to Orwell) that it takes much more than clothes to make a man.

49. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 99–100.

51. Alan Sheridan, “Translator’s Note,” in Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1982), xiii.

52. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits, 2 (emphasis in original).

53. My reading of Lacan builds on Johnson’s argument that the reflection in the mirror is fundamentally an object (Persons and Things, 57), “the statue in which man projects himself,” in Lacan’s words (“Mirror Stage,” 2). As Johnson writes, “For Jacques Lacan, the possibility of becoming a statue is not something that may or may not happen to a subject. It must happen if the little man is to become human” (Persons and Things, 57).

54. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), 49.

55. I am indebted to LacanOnline.com for offering a compendium of “Lacan’s antecedents in the mirror stage theory” (http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/09/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-mirror-stage-part-i/). Borch-Jacobsen notes that Lacan’s claim to have “invented” the mirror stage is challenged by the work of several earlier thinkers who described and drew similar conclusions that “the body proper…is first of all an image of the body—that is, a visual image” (Lacan, 47). Darian Leader points to Charles Darwin, James Baldwin, Charles Horton Cooley, René Spitz, Henri Wallon, and Roger Caillois as forming the “backdrop” for Lacan’s work, in Freud’s Footnotes (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), 196–97.

56. Leader, Freud’s Footnotes, 197.

57. Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Scribner, 1902), 151.

58. Ibid., 151–52.

59. Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” 1.

60. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (1985; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 58–60.

61. Burstein, Cold Modernism, 218.

62. Paul Poiret, advertisement, Vogue (Britain), May 16, 1928, 28.

63. Selfridges, advertisement, Daily Telegraph, May 3, 1920, 12. Elizabeth Outka has explained how Selfridges could reconcile such claims with the mass production of its wares. Her formulation “the commodified authentic” captures “both a dream of exclusivity and a select audience and at the same time a desire for ready accessibility and a wide market” (Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic [New York: Oxford University Press, 2008], 13).

64. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “fancy dress,” http://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&q=fancy+dress&_searchBtn=Search.

65. Herbert Marcuse identifies such ontologies as those in which the “noncorporeal being of man is asserted as the real substance of the individual” (“Philosophy and Critical Theory,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro [Boston: Beacon Press, 1968], 104).

1. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Thing,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (New York: Routledge, 2009), 125.

2. My analysis of Jean Rhys alongside Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West is less natural than it seems, as Rhys articulated explicitly anti-feminist views throughout her life. She was, however, a sharp critic of cultural institutions and behaviors that worked to oppress women; she was, in the words of Rishona Zimring, “a dissonant female voice” (“The Make-up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction,” Novel 33, no. 2 [2000]: 226). Her works can therefore be placed in productive dialogue with those of her more clearly feminist contemporaries.

3. Jane E. Heglund, “Evening Dress,” in Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, ed. Valerie Steele (Farmington Mills, Mich.: Scribner, 2005), 1:428–30.

5. “Every Evening Occasion Has Its Appropriate Style of Dress,” Vanity Fair, March 1923, 8.

6. Quentin Bell, On Human Finery (1976; New York: Schocken, 1978), 166. In Bell’s case, the “futility” of day wear inheres in “sporting wear” worn for everyday activities; the “futility” of evening gowns suggests, in contrast, the waste of time and money in conspicuous leisure.

7. Quoted in C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Present Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 211.

8. Ibid., 110–11, 171. While it was no doubt possible to find less expensive garments in each year, evening dress was consistently more expensive that other garments of the same quality due to materials and construction.

9. Georg Simmel, “Adornment” (1908), in The Rise of Fashion: A Reader, ed. Daniel Leonhard Purdy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 81.

10. In Jane Bennett’s words, “Bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage. What this suggests for the concept of agency is that the efficacy or effectivity to which that term has traditionally referred becomes distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body” (Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010], 23 [emphasis in original]). Although the language is different, Simmel’s attribution of agency to evening dress when on a human body is in harmony with Bennett’s concept of the heterogeneous assemblage.

11. C. Willett Cunnington, Why Women Wear Clothes (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 19.

13. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., s.v. “dress.”

14. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 61.

15. Heglund, “Evening Dress,” 428.

17. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (1985; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 123.

18. Lady Duff (“Lucile”) Gordon, Discretions and Indiscretions (New York: Stokes, 1932), 66–67.

19. Cunnington, Why Women Wear Clothes, 105.

21. Fashion journals repeatedly noted that twentieth-century gowns, unlike those of the past, revealed as much as they concealed, including a woman’s body type. An article on evening gowns, for example, observed that “we have outline—our own, whether we like it or not, for styles are statuesquely straight and clinging” (“The Evening Gown,” Women’s Supplement, October 1920, 50). For a detailed account of the new fashions that emphasized slimness and the role of mannequins in popularizing a “slender, active body,” see Caroline Evans, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 211–15, chap. 10 passim.

22. The couturier Worth decided to close its London showroom for the duration of the war, as reported in Sunday Pictorial, August 15, 1915, 17. Standard or National Dress was proposed as an economizing measure toward the end of the war and relied on a simple design that conserved fabric and labor. While this style of dress never ousted individual styles and trimmings, it was somewhat popular in 1918. See “Page Mainly for and About Women,” Sunday Pictorial, February 3, 1918, 10.

23. Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing, 137.

24. Cunnington, Why Women Wear Clothes, 220.

25. Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. “dress.”

27. Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 147.

28. A Ballroom Tragedy (New York: American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1905), 35-mm film, 1:10 min., YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuTer7iOy8. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company distributed films to Great Britain.

29. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

30. The male characters thus provide examples of what J. C. Flügel called “the great masculine renunciation.” Briefly put, Flügel argues that men gave up “sartorial decorativeness” for political and social reasons and thus freed up for other purposes energy “that formerly expressed itself in clothes” (The Psychology of Clothes [London: Hogarth Press, 1930], 103, 107). Men’s evening dress is undifferentiating in A Ballroom Tragedy, although Brent Shannon has called the renunciation of “decorativeness” into question in The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006).

31. Kathlyn Rhodes, “The Harvest of Folly,” Sunday Graphic, March 4, 1928, 16.

32. “Eve in Paradise,” Eve, April 15, 1920, 198.

33. “Fashions at the Riviera,” Gentlewoman, January 7, 1922, 12–13.

34. Jean Patou, advertisement, Vogue (Britain), October 17, 1928, 44.

35. Juliet Nicolson, The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 19.

36. Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 124.

37. Paquin, advertisement, Times (London), May 9, 1910, 9.

38. Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (New Haven, Conn.: Ticknor & Fields, 1983), 26.

39. Quoted in Taylor, Mourning Dress, 146.

41. Although the voice comes from an earlier period, it is useful to listen to Charles Baudelaire, who wrote about men’s formal wear, explicate the affective resonance of black evening dress:

Is this not an attire that is needed by our age, which is suffering, and dressed up to its thin black narrow shoulders in the symbol of constant mourning? The black suit and the frock coat not only have their political beauty as an expression of general equality, but also their poetic beauty as an expression of the public mentality: an immense cortège of undertakers…. We are all attendants at some kind of funeral. (Quoted in Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” [1937], in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006], 105–6)

42. Margaret Haig, This Was My World (London: Macmillan, 1933), 240.

44. Grosz, “Thing,” 132.

45. Diana Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 241.

46. Virginia Stephen to Emma Vaughn, April 23, 1901, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 1, 1888–1912 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 43.

47. Virginia Woolf, “Am I a Snob?” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 210–11.

48. Virginia Stephen to Emma Vaughn, August 8, 1901, in Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1:42. Although Stephen’s dressmaker has not been previously identified, the woman she called “Sally Young” was Sarah Fullerton Monteith Young. Spalding gives the location of Young’s premises as South Audley Street, in Vanessa Bell, 26–27; this was her address from 1895 to 1907, according to Amy de la Haye, Lou Taylor, and Eleanor Thompson, A Family of Fashion: The Messels: Six Generations of Dress (London: Wilson, 2005). Young’s “hey-day” ran from 1890 to 1907 when she was a “fashionable court dressmaker” (ibid., 9, 37). Although Stephen’s evening gowns do not survive, examples of Young’s work are preserved in the Messel Collection, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.

49. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, 150.

53. Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, September 1902, in Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1:55.

54. Woolf, “Sketch of the Past,” 150–51.

56. Ibid. In a discussion of this passage, R. S. Koppen describes the green dress as “Woolf’s…attempted sartorial insubordination.” Although she dismisses the dress itself as a “rather banal experiment,” Koppen argues that the act of wearing it takes “on the force of conscious threats to cultural practice and to the norms and assumptions it embodies” (Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009], 11).

57. Woolf, “Sketch of the Past,” 152.

59. Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, December 27?, 1902, in Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1:63.

60. Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 168.

61. Kathryn S. Laing has compared the two writers to argue that “the metaphor of the feminine contributes to their evolving creation of new identities and spaces for themselves as women writers” (“Addressing Femininity in the Twenties: Virginia Woolf and Rebecca West on Money, Mirrors and Masquerade,” in Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins [New York: Pace University Press, 1997], 67). Although I am, like Laing, interested in parallels between Woolf’s and West’s figurations of clothes, I do not read the dresses they record as metaphors as she does.

62. Rebecca West, “The World’s Worst Failure” (1916), in The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Bonnie Kime Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 580 (emphasis added).

63. Feminist psychoanalytic critics have framed discussions of the femme fatale in terms that are similar to West’s. Jessica Benjamin, for example, argues that “the ‘sexy’ woman—an image that intimidates women whether or not they strive to conform to it—is sexy, but as object, not as subject. She expresses not so much her desire as her pleasure in being desired; what she enjoys is her capacity to evoke desire in the other, to attract” (The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination [New York: Pantheon, 1988], 89). While this formulation parallels West’s view of the Frenchwoman, the subject/object binary on which Benjamin’s claim rests is complicated by the narrator’s experience of fashion in West’s essay.

64. West, “World’s Worst Failure,” 581.

67. For a discussion of the role of clothing in the formation of an ego ideal, see the introduction. West’s experience approximates Charles Horton Cooley’s “looking-glass self” and serves to contest Wilson’s optimistic theory that fashionable dress consolidates “the shaky boundaries of the psychological self” (Adorned in Dreams, 60).

68. Laing, “Addressing Femininity in the Twenties,” 69.

69. West, “World’s Worst Failure,” 583.

70. In another essay, West describes herself as “insane on the subject of clothes”: “I may have half a dozen evening dresses hanging in my wardrobe; but if the fit comes on me I will sit blankly in my bedroom…because I am in the grip of the conviction that I have nothing to wear. I finally have to pull myself together and force myself to put on some dress, which then seems to me, though I know perfectly well that it is a worthy product of Nicole Groult [Parisian designer], a worthless rag” (“I Regard Marriage with Fear and Horror,” Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan Magazine, November 1925, 209). In this essay, the evening dress comes to be a locus of sorrow because it can be enjoyed only if it does not, through its highlighting of the wearer’s femininity and body, lead West into marriage—in other words, if it fails in the traditional purpose of the dress.

71. Jean Rhys, “Illusion,” in The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1987), 1.

74. Ibid. As Laura Doan has demonstrated, during the 1920s “the sartorial distinction between the mannish woman and the lesbian was by no means ‘clear.’” Nevertheless, Doan acknowledges that “within a discrete, perhaps miniscule, subculture, lesbians passed as stylishly recognizable lesbians as well as women of fashion” (Fashioning Sapphism: The Origins of a Modern English Lesbian Culture [New York: Columbia University Press, 2001], 112, 120).

75. Rhys, “Illusion,” 3.

80. I am here in agreement with Zimring, who, in her brief analysis of the story’s representation of cosmetics, calls “Illusion” “a tale of the closet” (“Make-up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction,” 217).

81. Rhys, “Illusion,” 5.

86. Ibid., 5. Zimring notes that Rhys’s characters listen to commodities, in “Make-up of Jean Rhys’s Fiction,” 218. While such listening may seem an acute form of commodity fetishism, Bennett views anthropomorphism generally as a type of ontological experiment that “can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations” (Vibrant Matter, 99). Rhys’s narrator in “Illusion” is aware of the vital potential of so-called mere objects.

87. Rhys, “Illusion,” 5.

88. West, “World’s Worst Failure,” 581.

89. Descriptions of “Ott’s” outrageous costumes pepper accounts of weekends at her home, Garsington Manor, and parties in London. Her sartorial performances led Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, and Duncan Grant to debate whether she was an artist in her own right, but the Bloomsbury circle was largely unanimous in its critique of her appearance as, in Leonard Woolf’s words, a “fantastic hotchpotch” (Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972], 198).

90. Janet Lyon includes Morrell in her study of the bohemian salon and notes that outlandish garb was common in such settings: “[C]ostumes, many of them referencing a kind of premodern, or perhaps countermodern, habitus, helped to link bohemian subculture to a whole set of anti-bourgeois postures, including, most obviously, the postures of unassimilated artistic and social freedom” (“Sociability in the Metropole: Modernism’s Bohemian Salons,” ELH 76, no. 3 [2009]: 694). Morrell was, however, mocked for adopting this posture.

91. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 103.

92. Morrell Dress, Archive, BATMC 2000.191, Fashion Museum, Bath.

93. Miranda Seymour, Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), 70.

94. Morrell Dress, Archive, BATMC 2000.299.

95. Seymour, Ottoline Morrell, 70.

96. Morrell’s dresses may be understood as performative in a Butlerian manner, but as the rest of this chapter suggests, neither speech-act theory nor gender performance account for the relationship between a human subject and garment actants. As Judith Butler writes, “Within speech act theory, a performative is that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names” (Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” [New York: Routledge, 1993], 13). Butler complicates the origin of discursive authority by critiquing naïve formulations of the voluntary subject/individual, but her argument grounds performance in a symbolic order of sexual norms that work with and through subjects, not objects (13–15). Here and throughout my argument, meaning emerges as external to subject and to dress as actant: it is gestured at by both and inheres in the fraught assembly of humans and objects.

97. Miss Breton to Ottoline Morrell, n.d., quoted in Seymour, Ottoline Morrell, 70 (emphasis added).

98. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Waste Land and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 100–101.

99. Morrell Dress, Archive, BATMC 2000.312.

100. The profiles were published in 1923 and 1928. These two dates are significant, as Morrell appeared in the magazine under the auspices of two very different editors. In 1923, British Vogue was edited by Dorothy Todd, who wanted to fuse the magazine’s traditional focus on women’s fashion with coverage of the avant-garde. In 1928, Vogue was edited by Edna Woolman Chase, whose charge was to increase readership and, in her words, to “get our British edition back into the Vogue formula” of high fashion, celebrities, and society news (Always in Vogue [New York: Doubleday, 1954], 152). Chase occasionally included “features in line with the kind of thing Dorothy was promoting”; it is not clear whether Chase ran Morrell’s picture because she was Todd’s “kind of thing” or Chase’s own.

101. My reading of Morrell’s appearance in Vogue has been informed by Aurelia Mahood’s analysis of the magazine’s pursuit of a “double readership” (“Fashioning Readers: The avant garde and British Vogue, 1920–9,” Women: A Cultural Review 13, no. 1 [2002]: 42).

102. In 1928, Paul Nystrom would note that “Spanish art has been the inspiration for several fashion motives during the last ten years, such as the use of rouge, certain types of hair dressing, softening the line of the feminine silhouette, and so on” (Economics of Fashion [New York: Ronald Press, 1928], 87–88).

103. Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 176.

105. Morrell’s dresses provide an example of Bruno Latour’s concept of “interobjectivity,” which dislocates “actions so much that someone else, from some other place and some other time, is still acting in it [an object] through indirect but fully traceable connections” (Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 196).

106. Virginia Woolf, “The New Dress,” in The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick, 2nd ed. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 171.

108. Ibid., 171. “The New Dress” records the way that social anxiety is most keenly mediated by material possessions, as Bill Brown notes in “The Secret Life of Things (Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism),” Modernism/modernity 6, no. 2 (1999): 12. Similarly, Jessica Burstein argues that “for Woolf, the dress means a way of relating, or a failure to relate. The story is driven by the character’s cathexis onto the dress, and accordingly it is the dress that betrays her” (Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012], 129). Lisa Cohen observes that the dress is uniquely able to generate social anxiety, writing that “there is a exhaustingly small space dividing proper femininity from its failure” (“‘Frock Consciousness’: Virginia Woolf, the Open Secret, and the Language of Fashion,” Fashion Theory 3, no. 2 [1999]: 153).

109. Woolf, “New Dress,” 175.

110. Ibid., 173. Readers may be tempted to regard Waring’s reaction as simply a paralyzing form of self-consciousness. But the narrator is careful to include comments by other characters, who regard Waring as “absurdly dressed” and vow to “tell everyone about Mabel’s fantastic appearance” (175). Such moments make it plain that the community in the drawing-room does criticize the new dress and Mabel for wearing it.

111. Burstein, Cold Modernism, 128.

112. Woolf, “New Dress,” 174 (emphasis added).

114. Sean Latham, The Art of Scandal: Modernism, Libel Law, and the Roman à Clef (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 132. I am indebted to Latham’s study, which identifies novels and characters based on Morrell and argues that she “bears a terrible burden, becoming the abject figure for the failure of aesthetic autonomy” in modernist romans à clef (141).

115. When Vanessa Bell first proposed the Omega Workshops dressmaking scheme, the idea was bound up with Morrell as client, patron, and source of material support. See Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, April 9?, 1915, in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 173–74.

116. L. Woolf, Beginning Again, 199.

117. Virginia Woolf to Clive Bell, January 21, 1928, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 3, 1923–1928 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 448.

118. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, vol. 3, 1925–1930 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 36.

119. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, June 1916, in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, 199.

120. Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow (New York: Harper, 1922), 16.

122. Osbert Sitwell, Triple Fugue (1924; London: Penguin, 1940), 191.

124. Evans chronicles the scandal created by the French designer Margaine Lacroix, who sent mannequins wearing evening styles to the Longchamp Racecourse in 1908, in Mechanical Smile, 60–62. The outrage that greeted the three women may be placed on a continuum with these representations of Morrell; even in the 1920s, it was scandalous to wear evening dress during the day.

125. W. J. Turner, The Aesthetes (London: Wishart, 1927), 40.

127. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 239.

128. Roger Fry to Lady Mariabella Fry, December 14, 1913, in The Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton (New York: Random House, 1972), 2:375.

129. Cunnington, Why Women Wear Clothes, 188–89.

130. John Frow, “A Pebble, a Camera, a Man Who Turns into a Telegraph Pole,” in “Things,” ed. Bill Brown, special issue, Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 274.

131. Crane, Fashion and Its Social Agendas, 241.

132. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 28.

1. C. Willett Cunnington, Why Women Wear Clothes (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 239.

2. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; New York: Vintage, 1990), 110.

3. Ibid., 254, 333, 427.

4. P. G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh,” in Very Good, Jeeves (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1930), 142.

5. For example, Jane Marcus argues that “the trench-coat is a class and gender mark covering the body of women at/in this war” (afterword to Helen Zenna Smith [Evadne Price], Not So Quiet…Stepdaughters of War [1930; New York: Feminist Press of CUNY, 1989], 291). Many scholars have also commented on the mackintoshes in Ulysses and Mrs. Dalloway. I will address these interventions more extensively later in the chapter.

6. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “mackintosh,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/111902?redirectedFrom=mackintosh#eid.

7. Nancy Mitford, ed., Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry into Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956), 30.

8. The spelling of the word “mackintosh” is varied; writers, perhaps following the spelling of the first manufacturer’s name, regularly drop the k. I use the “mackintosh” spelling, as this is a standard version offered by the OED.

9. Sarah Levitt, “Manchester Mackintoshes: A History of the Rubberised Garment Trade in Manchester,” Textile History 17 (1986): 51.

11. Quoted in Christina Walkley and Vanda Foster, Crinolines and Crimpling Irons: Victorian Clothes: How They Were Cleaned and Cared For (London: Peter Owen, 1978), 138.

12. Levitt, “Manchester Mackintoshes,” 56.

13. Quoted in ibid., 58.

14. Sarah Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned: Registered Designs for Clothing, Their Makers and Wearers, 1839–1900 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 184.

15. Levitt, “Manchester Mackintoshes,” 51.

16. Alison L. Goodrum, The National Fabric: Fashion, Britishness, Globalization (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 106.

17. The Aquascutum Story (London: Aquascutum, 1994), 8.

18. Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 546.

20. “Personal,” Punch, May 6, 1925, 488–89.

21. Leonard de Vries, comp., Victorian Advertisements, text by James Laver (London: Murray, 1968), 126.

22. Nicola Shulman suggests that popular demand for clothed animals was fortunate for Beatrix Potter, as “many of her stories would have no plots if the animals had no clothes.” As she notes, this is true of The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, in which a “mackintosh saves his life” (“Beatrix Potter’s Tales of Escape,” Times Literary Supplement, February 21, 2007). Carole Scott similarly notes that the mackintosh “serves to keep one from being eaten alive” (“Between Me and the World: Clothes as Mediator Between Self and Society in the Works of Beatrix Potter,” Lion and the Unicorn 16 [1992]: 197).

23. Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906; New York: Warne, 1987), 41, 45, 49.

24. Sunday Pictorial, November 21, 1926, 13.

25. Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918; New York: Penguin, 1988), 9, 48.

28. Ibid., 68. It is this aspect of Grey’s clothing that has received scholarly attention. As Wyatt Bonikowski writes, “Margaret’s lower-class standing…can be read on her clothes and body” (“The Return of the Soldier Brings Death Home,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 51 [2005]: 521).

29. West, Return of the Soldier, 64 (emphasis added).

30. As Barbara Johnson has argued, the “I–it” relationship is “a relation between a person and non-persons” (Persons and Things [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008], 9). Angela K. Smith notes that Grey is regarded as a cipher elsewhere in the novel, as Jenny casts her as “a draught-ox or a dog, rather than a fellow human being” (The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism and the First World War [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000], 177).

31. West, Return of the Soldier, 88.

33. Graham Green, Brighton Rock (1938; New York: Penguin, 2004), 183.

35. Johnson, Persons and Things, 6.

36. Greene, Brighton Rock, 184.

37. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (1939; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), 271.

39. Annette Federico, “Making Do: George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air,” Studies in the Novel 37 (2005): 51. Federico argues that this reading ignores the novel’s celebration of “faith in the existence of the ordinary as a repository of meaning” (51). While I find her reading of the body of Orwell’s novel suggestive, it ignores the conclusion of the book, in which Bowling finds the ordinary more burden than pleasure.

40. Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (1929; New York: Anchor, 2000), 106, 198.

41. Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 193–94. Hermione Lee concurs, viewing the novel as “full of retarded overgrown juveniles…reckless innocents, characters who haven’t found ways of compromising with adult society” (introduction to The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee [London: Virago, 1986], 3).

42. Bowen, Last September, 129.

43. Kathryn Klein has argued that Lois’s “Sapphic feelings” for Marda “encourage Lois to question the ‘pattern’ of her existence” (“Writing Sapphism: Troubling Genre in Interwar Fiction” [Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2013], 86 [ProQuest (3588126)], 86). I am in agreement with Klein’s reading; the mackintosh in The Last September is thus aligned with the queer desires mobilized by other garments in this study.

44. Bowen, Last September, 42–43.

45. Ibid., 42. Enda Duffy observes that IRA terrorists, gunmen, and bomb carriers “were conventionally shown in trench-coats or macintoshes in photographs from the 1916–21 period.” Bowen’s novel thus represents the sartorial choices that mark the Irish “late-colonial context” (The Subaltern Ulysses [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994], 66).

46. Bowen, Last September, 120.

48. The trench coat was “a waterproofed overcoat worn by officers in the trenches” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd ed., s.v. “trench coat,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/413383?redirectedFrom=trench+coat#eid). Although trench coats had what might seem to be signature details, including a gun flap, storm pockets, and a belt fastened with D-rings, these coats were produced by different manufacturers and in differing cuts, so any waterproof coat might be seen as a trench coat. The line between trench coats and mackintoshes was thus blurred.

49. Brent Shannon, The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860–1914 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 58–59.

50. Jennifer Craik, Uniforms Exposed: From Conformity to Transgression (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 22.

51. Simmel, “Fashion,” 554.

52. Derry & Toms, “Gentlemen’s Raincoats” [advertisement], Daily Mail, April 11, 1916, 1.

53. Craik, Uniforms Exposed, 7.

54. Elizabeth Grosz, “The Thing,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (New York: Routledge, 2009), 125.

55. Douglas Mao argues that “the object world represented for modernists…a realm beyond the reach of ideology but not secure against the material consequences of ideological conflicts” (Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998], 9). In the case of the mackintosh, however, the object does not seem beyond the reach of ideology so much as infused with it.

56. Aquascutum, advertisement, Punch, April 18, 1917.

57. Burberry, advertisement, Daily Telegraph, October 7, 1918, 3.

58. Smith, Not So Quiet…Stepdaughters of War, 218.

61. Burberry, advertisement, Times (London), July 1, 1915, 12.

62. Burberry, advertisement, Times (London), August 23, 1915, 11.

63. Because Dunlop’s letter does not contain his full name, it is difficult to determine who, specifically, wrote it. One candidate is Major John Kinninmont Dunlop, a member of the Rangers (Twelfth London) Machine Gun Corps who served in France and was awarded the Croix de l’ordre de Sainte-Anne de Russie in 1916 for heroics at Delville Wood.

64. Quoted in Patrizia Calefato, “Signs of Order, Signs of Disorder: The Other Uniforms,” in Uniform: Order and Disorder, ed. Francesco Bonami, Maria Luisa Frisa, and Stefano Tonchi (Milan: Charta, 2000), 201.

65. Aquascutum, advertisement, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, June 7, 1919, 497.

66. Burberry, advertisement, Times (London), July 16, 1915, 15.

68. Burberry, advertisement, Daily Telegraph, July 2, 1917, 2.

69. Harrods Weekly Price List [advertisement circular], July 23–28, 1917, 32. These coats are also advertised in Harrods Weekly Price List [advertisement circular], February 5, 1917, 35.

70. Camilla Loew, “Miss Represented: Women at War, Propaganda vs. Autobiographical Writing,” in (Mis)Representations: Intersections of Culture and Power, ed. Fernando Galván Bern, Jului Cañero Serrano, and José Santiago Fernández Vázquez (Bern: Lang, 2003), 124.

71. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (1933; New York: Penguin, 1978), 251.

73. Classified advertisement, Daily Telegraph, January 5, 1917, 1.

74. This type of trade was so common that Punch depicted Kaiser Wilhelm running a secondhand shop after the war. In a series of sketches titled “The Hohenzollerns Under a German Republic,” the former kaiser is depicted “in business as a second-hand wardrobe dealer.” A trench-mac hangs in the doorway of his shop with the label “Uniforms slightly soiled” (“Winter Almanack,” Punch, November 1917).

75. Marcus, afterword to Smith, Not So Quiet…Stepdaughters of War, 292.

76. I am here thinking of Grosz’s assertion that “the stability of one, the thing, is the guarantee of the stability and on-going existence or viability of the other, the body” (“Thing,” 132). The mackintosh suggests that such a model of the relationship between persons and things is optimistic; instead, the thing only guarantees its own existence. For more on Grosz’s suggestion, see chapter 1.

77. For examples of the former, see J. Benjamin Cosgrove, “Macintosh and the Old Testament Character Joseph,” James Joyce Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1992): 681–84; and John Gordon, Joyce and Reality: The Empirical Strikes Back (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2004). Other critics agree that, in Maria DiBattista’s words, “there are certain mysteries that are, narratively as well as spiritually, best left unanswered” (“Ulysses’s Unanswered Questions,” Modernism/modernity 15 [2008]: 270). Frank Kermode argues that “the appearances of MacIntosh lack coherence because they mime the fortuities of real life; a coherence related to another of our conventional expectations of narrative” (“The Man in the Macintosh,” in Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism, 1958–2002 [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004], 124). Bernard Benstock concurs, writing that “the mysteries of Ulysses are those of an ordinary day in an extraordinary universe, and are only mysteries because they contain and present unsolved and unresolved dilemmas and possibilities” (“The Mysteries of Ulysses,” in International Perspectives on James Joyce, ed. Gottlieb Ganser [Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1986], 43). Michael J. Sidnell’s argument is the closest to my own in that he focuses on the figure’s name and observes that “the garment stands forth as a man.” His essay explores “whether words are convertible to persons, or whether language may construct, or logos create, them” (“Mac[k]intosh the Noun,” Joyce Studies Annual 13 [2002]: 194, 195).

78. Sidnell, “Mac(k)intosh the Noun,” 193.

79. Joyce, Ulysses, 254.

81. As Stacy Gillis elegantly notes, poppies were part of a postwar “cult of remembrance” (“Consoling Fictions: Mourning, World War One, and Dorothy L. Sayers,” in Modernism and Mourning, ed. Patricia Rae [Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2007], 186). Duffy argues that Joyce’s man in the mackintosh is an IRA “proto-gunman,” who wears the mac because it enables him to be inconspicuous (Subaltern Ulysses, 66). While I find Duffy’s placement of Ulysses in a late-colonial context suggestive, M’Intosh fits less neatly in this framework given the cannons and poppies that mark the character’s exit in “Circe.”

82. Robert Spoo, “‘Nestor’ and the Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses,” Twentieth Century Literature 32, no. 2 (1986): 151.

83. Joyce, Ulysses, 56.

84. John Blanford, advertisement, Sunday Graphic, September 9, 1928, 21.

85. Mattamac, advertisement, Daily News, June 7, 1920, 5. Such claims were contested by cartoons of the era, such as one that personifies coats on pegs and depicts expensive ones exclaiming, “UGH! And a yellow mackintosh!” (“Snobbery in the Cloak-Room,” Punch, September 10, 1924, 301).

86. “Pearls and New Wraps,” Eve, April 8, 1920, xiv.

87. “Vogues and Vanities,” Sunday Graphic, August 4, 1929, 19.

88. “ ‘Mosco’ Mackintosh” [advertisement], Vogue (Britain), February 1932, 3.

89. Aquascutum, advertisement, Vogue (Britain), Early August 1923, iii.

90. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 12.

92. Ibid., 126. As Laura Gwyn Edson writes, the mac becomes “an encapsulation of everything she [Clarissa] can’t stand about Miss Kilman. The hostess figures the tutor as the coat.” For Edson, what is most significant about the garment is that “Woolf has submerged clothing into the substrata of multiple consciousness where clothing is claimed as cover or protection but also revealed as a projection of innermost secrets” (“Kicking Off Her Knickers: Virginia Woolf’s Rejection of Clothing as Realistic Detail,” in Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Diane F. Gillespie and Leslie K. Hankins [New York: Pace University Press, 1997], 122, 123). While the coat certainly functions in this manner, I am interested in how Woolf engages the relationship between person and thing (and between thing and history) through Kilman’s garment.

93. Doris Kilman’s mackintosh in Mrs. Dalloway is uncannily similar to that of Margaret Grey in The Return of the Soldier. Woolf was almost certainly familiar with West’s novel; in May 1918, the year it was published, she offered Vanessa Bell Return of the Soldier for her birthday (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 2, 1912–1922 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976], 245), and on June 7, 1918, Woolf told Molly MacCarthy that she was going to read “Rebecca West’s new novel” (247). Thanks to Mark Hussey for pointing me to the link between Woolf and West.

94. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 12.

95. As Karen L. Levenback has argued, Clarissa’s thoughts about Kilman suggest that her “emotions may, in fact, have seemed minor and trivial to Woolf herself” (“Clarissa Dalloway, Doris Kilman and The Great War,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 37 [1991]: 3). Levenback’s larger point is that Kilman’s character signals the lingering effects of World War I in the postwar period, an argument with which I am in complete agreement.

96. West, Return of the Soldier, 88.

97. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 131, 132.

103. As Christine Froula argues, “Mrs. Dalloway poses the great question of Europe’s future…as the fate of collective mourning—a historic question of genre for a traumatized Europe poised between elegy and revenge tragedy” (Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005], 89).

104. Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 585.

105. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938; London: Virago, 2003), 261.

107. Graham Greene, The Third Man (1949; New York: Penguin, 1999), 24.

108. In this respect, Calloway is quite different from Greene’s other main character, the popular author Rollo Martins; in The Third Man, Martins is famously unable to answer questions about James Joyce (ibid., 94). This scene serves as a sly dig that positions Greene himself as better read and more knowing than Martins.

109. Alison Clarke and Daniel Miller, “Fashion and Anxiety,” Fashion Theory 6, no. 2 (2002): 193.

110. “Happiness,” Punch, June 18, 1924, 661.

111. Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927; New York: Avon, 1964), 116. Gillis argues that detective novels “encoded war narratives” and serve as a form of “witness to World War I” (“Consoling Fictions,” 185, 194). In her words, Sayers’s fiction depicts Wimsey as effecting “his own ‘talking cure,’ ” as his cases require that he speak about the impact of the war on himself and others (192).

1. Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Sanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1986), 341.

2. In addition to Castle, two writers on fancy dress bear mentioning. Historian Beverly Gordon examines early-twentieth-century costumes in the United States and reads them as important for group formation, in The Saturated World: Aesthetic Meaning, Intimate Objects, Women’s Lives, 1890–1940 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006). Her study focuses on the transformation of everyday experience through making and wearing costumes. Nicholas Foulkes offers a richly illustrated celebration of legendary international costume balls, emphasizing the craftsmanship that went into fancy-dress costumes and settings and observing that “it is possible to set these events in their cultural and social contexts and to appreciate them for what their hosts knew them to be: examples of a unique and fragile art form” (Bals: Legendary Costume Balls of the Twentieth Century [New York: Assouline, 2011], 43). His is a work of appreciation rather than analysis. There is little work on modernism and fancy dress. Kate McLoughlin writes that “party-going…is as much an art-form as party-giving. Appearance is the first consideration in preparing the performance” (“Introduction: A Welcome from the Host,” in The Modernist Party, ed. Kate McLoughlin [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013], 5). Despite this important observation, the collection pays little attention to fancy dress.

3. Herbert Marcuse identifies such ontologies as those in which the “noncorporeal being of man is asserted as the real substance of the individual” (Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro [Boston: Beacon Press, 1968], 104).

4. George J. Nicholls, Bacon and Hams (London: Institute of Certificated Grocers, 1917).

5. Daniel Miller, Stuff (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 13. Miller’s work at once underlines the promise of contemporary thing theory and articulates assumptions that would have been anathema in the period I address here. In Stuff, for example, his “starting point is that we too are stuff, and our use and identification with material culture provides a capacity for enhancing, just as much as for submerging, our humanity” (6).

6. Such representations reflect middle-class opinion, which often took “the form of hostility to the aristocracy and the rich as profiteers from the First World War, a criticism that lingered well into the 1920s in journalism and popular literature” (Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: The Rise and Sprawl [London: Phoenix, 2003], chap. 3).

7. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 332.

8. Anthea Jarvis and Patricia Raine, Fancy Dress (Aylesbury: Shire, 1984), 14.

9. Nannette Thrush, “Clio’s Dressmakers: Women and the Uses of Historical Costume,” in Clio’s Daughters: British Women Making History, 1790–1899, ed. Lynette Felber (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007), 273.

10. Jarvis and Raine, Fancy Dress, 23.

12. “Fancy Dress Ball for Germans,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, April 11, 1915, 7. The prevalence of American-themed costumes in this list is remarkable and suggests that Hollywood films influenced fancy-dress choices quite early. British prisoners of war in Holland seemed more eclectic in their choices when photographed in fancy dress as Pierrette and a geisha. See “Interned Sailors in Fancy Dress,” Sunday Pictorial, June 6, 1915, 8. For discussion of cross-dressing on the British front lines, see David Boxwell, “The Follies of War: Cross-Dressing and Popular Theatre on the British Front Lines, 1914–18,” Modernism/modernity 9, no. 1 (2002): 1–20.

13. “Through the Eyes of a Woman,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, June 20, 1915, 19.

14. Jarvis and Raine, Fancy Dress, 24.

15. “Our Lives from Day to Day,” Vogue (Britain), July 25, 1928, 45.

16. “By Their Fruits and Flowers Ye Shall Know Them,” Vogue (Britain), January 1923, 40–41.

17. Jarvis and Raine, Fancy Dress, 25.

18. Geoffrey D’Egville, How and What to Dance (London: Pearson, 1919), 24–25.

19. Mrs. Charles J. Ashdown, British Costume During XIX Centuries (Civil and Ecclesiastical) (London: Nelson, [1910?]), 75.

20. Ardern Holt, Fancy Dresses Described; or, What to Wear at Fancy Balls (London: Debenham & Freebody, 1887), 9.

21. Ashdown, British Costume During XIX Centuries, viii.

22. “Our Lives from Day to Day,” 45.

23. Holt, Fancy Dresses Described, 254.

24. Fancy Dresses at Harrods [catalog], November 1927, 1. It seems clear that some costumes, such as “Merry and Bright,” were intended for holiday parties.

25. Jarvis and Raine, Fancy Dress, 16.

27. Thrush, “Clio’s Dressmakers,” 258. Less lavish but still remarkable (and well-documented) fancy-dress balls were the Victory Ball, held to celebrate the end of World War I, which was covered by the Sunday Pictorial, December 1, 1918 (Viola Tree attended as Winged Victory and was, according to the reporter, “greatly impeded by her vast wings” [13]), and, in 1919, the Chelsea Arts Club Dazzle Ball, which “took the inspiration of wartime camouflage” (Tim Newark, Camouflage [New York: Thames and Hudson, 2007], 88).

28. Vogue (Britain), August 22, 1928, 18.

30. Fancy Dresses at Harrods, 2.

31. Faye Hammill writes, “The word ‘unpretentious’ is a key term in the definition of the English middlebrow, which is characterized by a resistance to pretension in all its forms” (Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007], 186). While there was not a complete correspondence between middle-class writers and readers and the middlebrow, the latter’s treatment of pretension is reflected in widespread middle-class “cultural disapproval of conspicuous consumption,” a form of economic pretension, according to Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 72.

32. E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady (1931; Chicago: Academy Chicago, 2002), 382.

35. Ibid. References to “carnival” in twentieth-century works underline the difference between the festivals analyzed by Mikhail Bakhtin and modern fancy-dress parties. Fancy dress, frankly, was too aspirational and uptight to embrace the grotesque qualities that made carnival transgressive before and during the Renaissance. Twentieth-century costumes tilted toward the classical. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White clearly outline the distinction in their introduction to The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 1–26.

36. The reference is to Philippians 3:21, which promises that God “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able even to subdue all things unto himself.”

37. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930; Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), 170–71.

42. Jarvis and Raine, Fancy Dress, 24.

43. Evelyn Waugh, “Cruise (Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure),” in The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999), 124.

44. Examples of a body’s imperviousness to costuming are rare but occasionally surface, especially in cartoons. In one, an overweight middle-aged lady tells a clerk, “I’m going to a fancy-dress dance, and I want you to make me up as one of those ‘Vamps’ one sees on the pictures” (Punch, December 21, 1921, 485). This woman wants the impossible and grants almost limitless power to things through her faith that a costume can transform her weighty body.

45. D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London’s Jazz Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 79.

46. Lindsay Cable, “Carnival Week” [cartoon], Punch, September 9, 1936, 303.

47. G. L. Stamps, cartoon, Punch, January 5, 1938, 7.

48. P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves! (1934), Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10554.

51. Arthur Moreland, “Simple Stories: The Fancy-Dress Dance,” Punch, June 12, 1929, 654.

55. As Nina Auerbach puts it, “Throughout the novel she is a docile companion to the overbearing rich.” Moreover, she “cringes before the servants” in a way that demonstrates that she is not of Maxim’s class (Daphne du Maurier: Haunted Heiress [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000], 102, 117).

56. See, for example, Gina Wisker’s argument that “du Maurier’s writing exposes the hollowness of the decadence of an upper class while drawing us wholesale into the dream—it is an imaginative lie we need but can see through” (“Dangerous Borders: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: Shaking the Foundations of the Romance of Privilege, Partying and Place,” Journal of Gender Studies 12, no. 2 [2003]: 85–86).

57. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1938; London: Virago, 2003), 239.

65. Ibid., 239–40.

73. Wisker, “Dangerous Borders,” 84.

74. du Maurier, Rebecca, 316.

75. Miller, Stuff, 10.

76. The evidence for this claim can only be indirect, but it is significant to note that successful industrialists in the period seldom accepted knighthoods. Such “trappings” were unwelcome to men who continued to identify as middle class despite their wealth. For examples, see Gunn and Bell, Middle Classes, chaps. 2 and 4.

77. George Rylands, interview, in Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries, ed. Joan Russell Noble (London: Peter Owen, 1972), 140.

79. Woolf’s novel has been understood in relation to costuming since Sandra Gilbert’s monumental “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 391–417. In an article that highlights differing attitudes toward costuming among male and female modernists, Gilbert asserts, “Woolf’s view of clothing implied that costume is inseparable from identity—indeed, that costume creates identity” (391). While my reading of Woolf’s novel is indebted to Gilbert’s work, I build on her argument by moving beyond a focus on sex and gender identity and by attending to the specific sartorial form that encouraged Woolf’s experimentation. Gilbert’s treatment of costuming is less material than metaphorical, an approach that serves to highlight Woolf’s difference from her male counterparts but occludes the author’s immersion in a cultural practice of literal, not figurative, costuming.

80. Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 180.

81. Virginia Woolf, “Am I a Snob?” in Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (San Diego, Calif.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 200.

82. Virginia was recruited into the hoax after it had been planned; in her brother Adrian Stephen’s words, he “got hold of my sister” (The “Dreadnought” Hoax [London: Hogarth Press, 1983], 31). As Georgia Johnston has documented, Virginia herself said she “signed on ‘at the last moment’ when two of the planners had withdrawn, because ‘Either they were ill; or they were afraid; or they had urgent business elsewhere’ ” (“Virginia Woolf’s Talk on the Dreadnought Hoax,” Woolf Studies Annual 15 [2009]: 1). While scholars have argued that her participation in the hoax constituted a political act, she presented her actions as a joke. In her disguise, she felt that “I became another pseroen [sic]” and noticed that others “didnt seem to see that was a young lady [sic]” (15).

83. Woolf, “Am I a Snob?” 200.

84. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, vol. 2, 1920–1924 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 223.

86. Virginia Woolf to Clive Bell, January 18, 1930, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 4, 1929–1931 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 128.

89. At a costume party in 1931, Vanessa asked guests to wear masks and noted that “Virginia came as Sappho I believe, at any rate a most voluptuous lady casting her eyes up to heaven” (Vanessa Bell to Quentin Bell, January 26, 1931, in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler [New York: Pantheon, 1993], 357). And in 1933, Woolf described yet another fancy-dress party for which “I dressed up as Queen Victoria on her wedding night and fell into the arms of the Prince Consort,” who was of course Leonard (Virginia Woolf to Elizabeth Bowen, January 3, 1933, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 5, 1932–1935 [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979], 145).

90. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, vol. 5, 1936–1941 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 203.

91. See, for example, Nancy Cervetti, “In the Breeches, Petticoats, and Pleasures of Orlando,” Journal of Modern Literature 20, no. 2 (1996): 165–75; George Piggford, “‘Who’s That Girl?’: Annie Lennox, Woolf’s Orlando, and Female Camp Androgyny,” Mosaic 30, no. 3 (1997): 39–58; and Talia Schaffer, “Posing Orlando,” in Sexual Artifice: Persons, Images, Politics, ed. Ann Kibbey, Kayann Short, and Abouali Farmanfarmaian (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 26–63. Schaffer’s argument is closest to my own, as she observes that Orlando “is about costuming, precisely because costuming is what gender is all about” (36). I argue more broadly that the novel is “all about” identity writ large.

92. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (1922; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 122.

94. Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5:203.

95. Although they do not look at Woolf’s novel through the lens of fancy dress, I am in accord with R. S. Koppen and Christy L. Burns, who are interested in the ways in which Orlando challenges models of essential selfhood. Koppen reads Woolf’s presentation of history “as a sequence of fashions, and sexual identity as mutable and performative” against “a nineteenth-century idealist discourse of authenticity and Geist” (Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009], 57); Burns notes that “Woolf’s conception of Orlando’s identity holds within it the possibility for participation in social and self construction” by means of the clothing the character chooses for herself (“Re-Dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions Between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal 40 [1994]: 346, 351). Koppen and Burns see Woolf as working through and against (different) theorists of biography and identity; I am instead interested in the way that a specific sartorial form encouraged the author to see selfhood as less essential than put on.

96. Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, November 11, 1927, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, vol. 3, 1923–1928 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 435.

97. Koppen, Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernity, 51.

98. Ibid., 53. Schaffer writes that in this photograph, Sackville-West “resembles nothing so much as a woman dressed for a fancy dress ball” (“Posing Orlando,” 52), which is precisely my point.

99. Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 138.

104. Miller, Stuff, 40.

105. Woolf, Orlando, 189.

108. Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5:203.

109. Woolf, Orlando, 221.

118. Lisa Rado, for example, sees Orlando as “a novel about identity crisis” and asserts that Woolf’s character is “unable to register reality, distinguish between objects, or presuppose any pure and stable singularity” at the end of the book (The Modern Androgyne Imagination: A Failed Sublime [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000], 161, 169). Rado comes to this conclusion through a framework that posits the androgyne as in tension with Orlando’s physical body. Her approach, like that of many other critics, focuses on the relationship between Orlando’s sex and identity; here, I want to argue that we parse the novel’s experiment with identity too narrowly if we attend to Orlando’s “identity” only through gender, the character’s sexed body, or sexuality.

119. Woolf, Orlando, 313.

124. Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5:203.

125. Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood offers one of the other rare examples of a fictional character who becomes what she wears. Frau Mann’s circus costume pervades her body and being: “She seemed to have a skin that was the pattern of her costume: a bodice of lozenges, red and yellow, low in the back and ruffled over and under the arms, faded with the reek of her three-a-day control, red tights, laced boots—one somehow felt they ran through her as the design runs through hard holiday candies” (Nightwood [New York: New Directions, 1961], 13). In contrast to Woolf, Barnes’s challenge to depth ontology stems from her contact with actors, circus performers, and the Baroness Elsa (who made dress into a form of street art).

126. Dorothy Sayers to Her Parents [Henry Sayers and Helen Mary Leigh Sayers], October 27, 1912, in The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 1899–1936: The Making of a Detective Novelist, ed. Barbara Reynolds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 65.

127. Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997), 45–46.

129. Dorothy Sayers to Her Parents, October 1913, in Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 81.

130. Robert McGregor and Ethan Lewis argue that Wimsey’s talents in Murder Must Advertise are “merely a collection of things” that “do not make him a superior, or even a better, human being” (Conundrums for the Long Week-End: England, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Lord Peter Wimsey [Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2000], 144). Such desires for the character miss the point that, through things, Wimsey questions the very nature of what it means to be human. Sean Latham is much nearer the mark when he argues that characters in Sayers’s early Wimsey novels adopt “a series of poses” and that “the substance of subjectivity is replaced by the sign of style” (“Am I a Snob?” Modernism and the Novel [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003], 180, 194). I believe that such arguments occlude the fact that Murder Must Advertise questions whether subjectivity has a substance.

131. Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1927; New York: Avon, 1964), 107.

138. Reynolds notes that a story by G. K. Chesterton, whom Sayers admired, includes a criminal dressed as Harlequin. In “The Flying Stars” (1911), Chesterton’s character wears this costume to perform in a Christmas play. Reynolds calls Sayers’s use of the same costume “part of a literary game” (“G. K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers,” Chesterton Review 9, no. 2 [1984]: 151).

139. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 71.

148. Ibid., 296–97.

151. Wimsey continues to use his full name in later novels, including Gaudy Night, and thus continues to be “Death Bredon” long after the conclusion of Murder Must Advertise. For a different reading of the novel’s conclusion, see McGregor and Lewis, Conundrums for the Long Week-End, 150.

152. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise, 333.

153. Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1936; New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 314.

154. Matthew Levay, “Remaining a Mystery: Gertrude Stein, Crime Fiction and Popular Modernism,” Journal of Modern Literature 36, no. 4 (2013): 4.

155. Sayers, like others who wrote detective fiction in the period, had both middlebrow and highbrow readerships. The author herself once wrote that “I can’t write for low-brows. It’s the merry high-brows who like my books, those who feel…that ‘the detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds’ ” (Dorothy Sayers to John Cournos, February 3, 1925, in Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 229). Although Sayers does not mention her vast middlebrow readership in this letter, middlebrow and highbrow tastes overlapped in detective fiction, as Nicola Beauman argues in A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel, 1914–39 (London: Virago, 1983), 173. Indeed, interwar debates about detective fiction were continuous with debates about modernism, according to Victoria Stewart, “Defining Detective Fiction in Interwar Britain,” Space Between 9 (2013): 102.

156. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Waste Land and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 107.

157. Woolf, Orlando, 309.

158. Jarvis and Raine, Fancy Dress, 30.

161. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization, 341.

162. P. G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning (New York: Doubleday, 1946), 36.

1. Rachel Ferguson, Alas, Poor Lady (1937; London: Persephone, 2006), 390.

3. As Marilyn Strathern notes in her foundational analysis of Melanesian anthropology, in Western formulations a person is “axiomatically ‘an individual’ who…derives an integrity from its position as somehow prior to society” (The Gender of the Gift [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 93). This individual works throughout his or her life to master the physical world, a process that takes in consumption, relationships with others, and additional acts of self-definition. Secondhand clothing disrupts this process because garments highlight a decidedly non-Western model of the self, one in which “items flow between persons, creating their mutual enchainment. The items carry the influence that one partner may have on another” (178). I am not alone in viewing the early twentieth century as a moment when serialization was perceived as a threat to human individuality. Caroline Evans argues that the mannequin and fashion shows came to be seen as carrying the taint of mass production and the loss of individualism, in The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900–1929 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), especially chaps. 3 and 6.

4. Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 70.

5. Although many of these texts are humorous, I use the term “comedy” in its broader sense of a text that has a positive understanding of human experience that is particularly reflected in a happy conclusion.

6. Beverly Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes,” Journal of British Studies 27 (1988): 21.

7. Stanley Chapman, “The Innovative Entrepreneurs in the British Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” Textile History 24 (1993): 5.

8. George R. Sims, “The Londoner out and at Home,” in Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humor and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes (London: Cassell, 1903), 303.

9. The jumble sale (or, in the United States, rummage sale)—defined as “a sale of miscellaneous cheap or second-hand articles at a charitable bazaar” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “jumble sale,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/102009?rskey=3B0blL&result=1#eid40237844)—dates to the 1890s but became popular during World War I as a means of raising funds. For an example, see “Page Mainly for Women,” Sunday Pictorial, October 14, 1917, 10. Although the columnist asserts that “you would have laughed a few years ago at these girls [munitions workers] buying Paquin and Lucille gowns,” she later concludes that “now—well, I think gowns should only be sold to women producing certification of war-work.”

10. Lady Sempill was quoted as saying that “fashions in wartime are wicked” (Sunday Pictorial, November 11, 1917, 10), and it was reported that “Mrs. Waldorf Astor, the wife of Major Astor, M.P., is so depressed by the sad sights she has witnessed among the wounded men at Marlow that she has turned her back on fashion” (Illustrated Sunday Herald, June 6, 1916, 9).

11. Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: The Rise and Sprawl (London: Phoenix, 2003), chap. 3.

12. Quoted in Christopher Breward, The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 201.

13. “Every Woman Her Own Chimney Sweep,” Lady, June 24, 1920, 744. Such sentiments point to a powerful affective state that did not entirely reflect economic circumstances. McKibbin has argued that while it was “widely believed that much of the middle class had been pauperized after the war” (Classes and Cultures, 52), the “new poor” were generally only declassed temporarily: “For two or three years after the war many middle-class families suffered an appreciable loss of real earnings and the social disappointment that comes with frustrated expectations” (53), but the losses were mostly made up by 1923. Nevertheless, he notes that “the ‘crisis’ left long memories” (54) and inculcated frugality.

14. Vogue (Britain), Late May 1924, 97.

15. Vogue (Britain), October 31, 1928, 79. A sampling across issues of Vogue points to a steady uptick in classified advertisements for secondhand dealers during the 1920s: the Late June 1924 edition has fourteen (ix); by Early November 1924, there are fifteen (xviii); and the May 2, 1928, issue has twenty-two ads for dress agencies (99).

16. Vogue (Britain), June 1923, x.

17. Vogue (Britain), May 1925, xiv.

18. Vogue (Britain), January 6, 1932, 6.

20. Some women were willing to buy and sell used clothes directly. In the 1920s, the Gentlewoman in Town and Country operated “The ‘G’ Private Exchange,” and the Lady organized the “Private Exchange and Sale” for its readers.

21. Lemire, “Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England,” 1. Christopher Breward concurs: “There are, unsurprisingly, no retailers’ guides or trade publications to help reconstruct the appearance, stock and profile of selling practices that lay at the peripheries of legal and social acceptability” (The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 1860–1914 [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999], 123).

22. Robina Wallis’s business records are held at Blythe House, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s off-site storage facility. The archive contains letters written to Wallis by her clients as well as ledgers. Unfortunately, Wallis’s letters to her clients are not part of the collection. I have explored the significance of this archive at greater length in “Smart Clothes at Low Prices: Gendered Alliances, Class Divisions in the Interwar Secondhand Clothing Trade,” in Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion, ed. Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth Sheehan (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2011), 71–86.

23. Barbara Armstrong to Robina Wallis, no date, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/7, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

24. Barbara Armstrong to Robina Wallis, June 28, no year, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/5.

25. Mrs. Alderson Archer to Robina Wallis, March 26, no year, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/2.

26. A. Bailey to Robina Wallis, no date, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/15/.

27. G. Birch to Robina Wallis, January 5, 1935, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/24.

28. In his analysis of Karl Marx’s coat, Peter Stallybrass noted, “In the language of nineteenth century clothes-makers and repairers, the wrinkles in the elbows of a jacket or a sleeve were called ‘memories.’ Those wrinkles recorded the body that had inhabited the garment. They memorized the interaction, the mutual constitution, of a person and thing. But from the perspective of commercial exchange, every wrinkle or ‘memory’ was a devaluation of the commodity” (“Marx’s Coat,” in Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Places, ed. Patricia Spyer [London: Routledge, 1998], 196). While, as Igor Kopytoff writes, there is a section of most economies “in which the selling strategy rests on stressing that the commoditization of goods bought for consumption need not be terminal,” worn, stained, or unfashionable clothing appeared to all but the most penurious consumers as in terminal condition (“The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 75).

29. Lesley Paul to Robina Wallis, no date, Archive of Art and Design, AAD1989/8/1/155.

30. A. Linton to Robina Wallis, no date, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/122.

31. For example, someone requested “a tennis frock and a mackintosh” but stipulated that they “must be inexpensive as I have very little money” (Jones to Robina Wallis, no date, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/115). Since, as chapter 2 demonstrated, new mackintoshes were available at inexpensive prices (and some makers even offered financing plans), this consumer was obviously of quite limited means.

32. M. A. Smith to Robina Wallis, no date, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1989/8/1/168.

33. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., s.v. “dress.”

34. C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Present Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 19.

35. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion; Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60. As Lipovetsky writes, “New signs, more subtle and more nuanced, particularly in the realm of labels, shapes, and fabrics, ensured that dress would continue to mark social distinctions and social excellence” (61).

36. Breward, Culture of Fashion, 187.

37. I emphasize this point because only recently have scholars challenged the democracy of dress thesis. Rosy Aindow argues that “a real democratisation of clothing was not achieved during this period (and never has been)” (Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914 [Farnham: Ashgate, 2010], 22). By investigating the trade in secondhand clothing between the wars, which has been ignored to date, I want to suggest that scholars must consider more than periodical culture, the rise of department stores, and the expansion of designer brands in their assessments of modern fashion.

38. Elizabeth C. Pilkington, “Milly’s Old Lavender Gown,” Windsor 10, no. 4 (1899): 419.

41. Ibid., 422–23.

43. I am here thinking through Alfred Gell’s model of distributed personhood: “[A]s social persons, we are present, not just in our singular bodies, but in everything in our surroundings which bears witness to our existence, our attributes, and our agency” (Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], 103). For more on Gell, see the introduction.

44. Molly Keane, Devoted Ladies (1934; London: Virago, 1984), 79.

47. L. B. Martin, cartoon, Punch, August 19, 1925, 168.

48. Gell argues that human agents are “not just where their bodies were, but in many different places (and times) simultaneously” (Art and Agency, 21). While clothing represents a much softer technology than the landmines that Gell uses as his particular example, the shock on the face of sellers in Punch cartoons makes quite clear that their cast-offs remain “components of their identities” (21).

49. Norman Pett, cartoon, Punch, April 30, 1924, 468.

50. E. M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady (1931: Chicago: Academy Chicago, 2002), 138–39.

52. Critics disagree on how to characterize Thompson’s tone. Richard Mabey asserts, “Lark Rise to Candleford is remarkable for its celebratory realism. It neither romanticises poverty nor underplays it” (“Diary of a Country Woman,” Guardian, December 12, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/dec/13/lark-rise-candleford-flora-thompson). Ruth Collette Hoffman, author of a rare book-length study of Thompson’s work, concurs in calling the novels “sensitive but not sentimental” (Without Education or Encouragement: The Literary Legacy of Flora Thompson [Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009], 81). In contrast, Barbara English calls Thompson’s work an “optimistic view of rural poverty” (“Lark Rise and Juniper Hill: A Victorian Community in Literature and in History,” Victorian Studies 29, no. 1 [1985]: 10).

53. Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 19.

55. Ibid. Diana Crane documents a similar fashion lag in both rural France and the United States, although she suggests that the lag shortened earlier than Thompson’s novel represents, in Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), chaps. 2 and 3.

56. Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, 497.

58. Ferguson, Alas, Poor Lady, 390.

59. Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford, 171–72.

60. As Gillian Lindsay, one of Thompson’s biographers, writes, the timing of the Candleford trilogy “was fortuitous. A few decades earlier, Flora would have been telling her readers about things which many of them would have preferred to forget;…but in the uncertain world of 1939 the 1880s had stability which held great appeal” (Flora Thompson: The Story of the “Lark Rise” Writer [Bordon: John Owen Smith, 2007], 145).

61. Ferguson, Alas, Poor Lady, 390.

62. Garry Leonard has argued that “subjectivity in modernity is the state of being transfixed before or amidst or among a constellation of objects” (“Holding on to the Here and Now: Juxtaposition in Modernity and in Joyce,” in James Joyce and the Fabrication of an Irish Identity [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001], 42). I agree with Leonard’s formulation but want to extend it: the constellation of secondhand clothes that confront modernist characters are not inert materials but the presence of subjects in (and as) objects.

63. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; New York: Vintage, 1990), 268–69.

64. Don Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 299.

65. As Judith Walkowitz observes, “Since the eighteenth century, the Jewish old clothes’ pedlar appeared in literary texts and illustrations as an iconic symbol of ethnic difference and degraded commerce” (Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012], 147).

66. Joyce, Ulysses, 268.

69. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; New York: Penguin, 1993), 275.

70. Roy Gottfried writes that the diary “suggests that Stephen can never flee the absurdity of the language which is his,” and specifically calls the “new secondhand” construction “a comic contradiction, even if an expression of the economic reality in Ireland” (Joyce’s Comic Portrait [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000], 81). I agree that Stephen’s language is absurd but want to think more carefully about the types of secondhand clothing Stephen confronts in both Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses.

71. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 275.

73. Joyce, Ulysses, 6.

76. R. J. Schork, Latin and Roman Culture in Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 99.

77. Leonard, “Holding on to the Here and Now,” 42.

78. Leonard further writes that “the loss of belief in transcendental certitude—God—does not eliminate the need to believe in the presumed individual coherency of identity” (ibid., 48). I wholeheartedly agree with this diagnosis of Stephen’s problem; by recovering the way in which specific garments interfere with a coherent identity, I am working in harmony with Leonard’s call to historicize “subjectivity within the physical environment generated by modernity” (43).

79. Joyce, Ulysses, 49.

81. Christine Froula discusses this passage as an example of Stephen’s identification with both men and women; Buck, she writes, in “obliviously handing down cast-off boots, fails to see [Stephen] ‘as I am’ ” (Modernism’s Body: Sex, Culture, and Joyce [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], 114). Here, I argue, part of Stephen’s problem is that he also sees himself as Buck through the mediation of his secondhand shoes.

82. Stephen’s many refusals of mutual dependence or responsibility are too numerous to mention, but notable examples include his tacit decision not to aid his sisters (and specifically Dilly) in “The Wandering Rocks” and his refusal to stay with the Blooms in “Ithaca.” As Catherine Driscoll argues, Stephen uses his vocation as artist to declare “his place outside social fixities and responsibilities” and thus his “social mobility” (Modernist Cultural Studies [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010], 57). What Froula calls Joyce’s “technology of resistance” (Modernism’s Body, 17) emerges, I argue, not only in his rejection of Church, state, and family but also in his desire to reject material forms of connection and assistance.

83. Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930; New York: Norton, 1997), 58.

84. “A Solid House” was published in Tigers Are Better Looking, with a Selection from The Left Bank Stories (London: Deutsch, 1968); although the precise date of its composition remains unknown, it was probably drafted by 1945. See Jean Rhys, Letters, 1931–1966, ed. Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly (London: Penguin, 1985), 40n.2.

85. Jean Rhys, “A Solid House,” in The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, 1987), 226.

87. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady, 241.

88. Frank Whitburn, cartoon, Punch, September 22, 1926, 319.

89. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938; New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), 159.

93. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (1985; New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 12.

94. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 194.

95. It is illuminating to compare Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist with George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which depicts a character who regards used books and secondhand clothing as equivalent. The protagonist’s employer, Mr. Cheeseman, runs a bookstore but “had been brought up in the old-clothes trade”: “Over this dustheap Mr. Cheeseman had presided…presently it was borne in upon him that books, properly handled, are worth money. As soon as he had made this discovery he developed an astonishing flair for book-dealing. To him a book was as purely an article of merchandise as a pair of second-hand trousers” (Keep the Aspidistra Flying [1936; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956], 205). While this passage expresses sentiments at odds with those of Stephen Dedalus, it is important to note that Orwell’s narrator regards Cheeseman with irony; Keep the Aspidistra Flying critiques romanticized ideals about artists and literature, but it does not endorse Cheeseman’s entirely commercial view of the written word.

96. Faye Hammill, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 6.

97. The autobiographical elements of the fiction of Joyce, Rhys, and Woolf are too well known to need comment here. Even when some of their characters—like Rhys’s Teresa—are not explicitly identified as artists, the parallels between author and character suggest that, as Oscar Wilde once quipped, “every portrait is a portrait of the artist.”

98. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Caine (New York: New Press, 2002), 114.

99. Le Corbusier, Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning, trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 12.

100. Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92.

101. Sax Rohmer, The Orchard of Tears (1918; Holicong, Pa.: Wildside Press, 2003), 26.

102. William Butler Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” in Selected Poems and Four Plays, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York: Scribner, 1996), 40.

1. “Clothing and Footwear Rationed,” Times (London), June 2, 1941, 5.

2. Geraldine Howell, Wartime Fashion: From Haute Couture to Homemade, 1939–1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 26.

6. The government’s “Clothing Coupon Quiz” included a table that indicated that macs could require as many as eighteen coupons; thus it was the most costly garment of them all. According to Howell, each person was allotted sixty-six coupons in 1941/1942 and forty eight coupons in 1942/1943 (ibid., 95–96). These numbers are adjusted to reflect coupons per calendar year. See also “Clothing Coupon Quiz,” in Make Do and Mend: Keeping Family and Home Afloat on War Rations (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 2007), 69–92.

7. Ministry of Supply, How to “Make-Do-and-Mend,” YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RpJcVs1VI.

8. Ministry of Information, Clothing Coupons Trailer, 1943, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgPlf2Pjm2A.

9. E. Baxter to Robina Wallis, May 1945, Archive of Art and Design, AAD1989/8/1/23, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

10. Howell details the manner in which the coupon/points value for used clothing was determined, in Wartime Fashion, 134–35.

11. Angela Thirkell, Marling Hall (New York: Knopf, 1942), 106.

12. Howell, Wartime Fashion, 112–13.

13. By 1914, “wages had almost doubled from their level of 1851,” and the social historian Harold Perkin’s work demonstrated that “real wages increased between 1880 and 1913 by 34%” (Rosy Aindow, Dress and Identity in British Literary Culture, 1870–1914 [Farnham: Ashgate, 2010], 17).

14. Angela Thirkell, Northbridge Rectory (1941; New York: Carroll & Graf, 1991), 241.

16. Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 102.

17. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 99.

18. As Ilya Parkins observes, Christian Dior and Walter Benjamin describe fashion as both the “coupling of the organic with the inorganic” and the “momentary triumph of the inorganic—the garment itself” (Poiret, Dior and Schiaparelli: Fashion, Femininity and Modernity [London: Berg, 2012], 140 [emphasis in original]). It is the triumph of the inorganic world, generally with a negative outcome, that surfaces most often in British literature of the early twentieth century.