Wearable Memorials

Demonstrates that the mackintosh is associated with poverty and lack of social capital; after the mac was reconfigured into the trench coat during WWI, it became aligned with the lack of individuality required by military service. After the war, writers used it to draw attention to the serialization of individuals as the result of global conflict. Writers continued to use the old time mackintosh to figure the limits placed on choice and singularity

Introduction

The commodity becomes our uncanny double, evermore vital as we are evermore inert. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty Readers of modernist fiction find few characters more marginalized and abject than Mrs. Dalloway’s Doris Kilman. Highly educated and deeply religious, the all-but-unloved and-unlovable woman tutors Richard and Clarissa Dalloway’s daughter, Elizabeth, and “year in year out” wears “a green mackintosh coat.”...

Serialized Selves

Takes up secondhand clothes, the trade in which picked up between the wars as individuals who had formerly purchased new attire saw their earnings drop. Both middlebrow and modernist fiction suggests that secondhand clothing can distribute aspects of the original owner's persona, but only modernist work depicts such distribution as imprinting successive owners with an alien personality. I argue that this difference maps onto attitudes toward the artist, with writers who base characters on modern artists equating secondhand clothes with secondhand style.

Aspiration to the Extraordinary

Examines fancy dress, which was wildly popular wear for costume parties in the early twentieth century. In a range of popular publications, authors suggest that such costumes cannot change or transform the characters that wear it. In contrast, Woolf and Dorothy Sayers write fiction in which costumes can utterly change those who wear them but limit such powers to upper-class, highly educated characters

What Do Women Want?

Argues that the evening gown expresses tensions between women's evolving social, sexual and economic opportunities and a sartorial genre that encodes conservative forms of femininity. Popular texts represent the dress as threatening to the women who wear it, while the professional work of modernist writers at once criticizes and expresses longing for the form. Even women who wanted to experiment with the form found themselves caricatured for doing so.

Coda

The advent of World War II put an end to a period when garments—at once newly plentiful and thus purportedly reflective of individual choice—rendered wearers at the mercy of their clothes in British fiction and nonfiction. As rationing (instituted on June 1, 1941) restricted access to new clothing, garments came to seem increasingly precious. The war changed all: official rhetoric suggested that funding weapons was far more important than purchasing clothing. Oliver Lyttleton, president of the British Board of Trade, advised his compatriots that “when you feel tired of your old clothes, remember that by making them do you are contributing some part of an aeroplane or a gun or a tank,”...