The history of fashion is an important part of social history – especially for women. So we make a rare departure from our usual beat to look at some of the literature it has inspired.
Fashion historians Caroline Evans and Reina Lewis join us to discuss their latest books. Evans' The Mechanical Smile is a study of the birth of the fashion show and modelling in the early years of the 20th century. She explains how they revolutionised ideas of the female body, introducing ways of being and moving that were new and shocking. Reina Lewis is the editor of a book of essays examing the global fashion for modest dressing. She explains why more and more women the world over are opting to conceal rather than display themselves, and why denim is banned by certain religious sects ...
Then we pick up on a recent blog on clothes in fiction in a discussion with blogger Moira Redmond of the way novelists through the ages have used dress. For Daphne du Maurier in Don't Look Now it was a means to frighten the reader, while Dickens used it to define character, as in David Copperfield. But for PG Wodehouse the clothes his characters wore was a tool to be used for comic effect.
Reading list
Modest Fashion: Styling Bodies, Mediating Faith, edited by Reina Lewis (IB Tauris)
The Mechanical Smile: the birth of the first fashion shows in France and America, 1900-1929 by Caroline Evans (Yale)
Clothes In Books
