Abstract
In Edith Warton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), the style-obsessed Newland Archer decides that fashion, for American women, serves as ‘armour … their defense against the unknown, and their defiance of it’.1 Defensiveness and audacity, traits that are both markedly of twentieth-century America, in fact define many of the character studies in Lauren S. Cardon’s Fashion and Fiction. In her research, which delineates representations of fashion within the era’s first three decades of influential literature, Cardon identifies clothing and the ethos of the fashion industry as powerful determinants of economic success. Indeed, personal style functions as a symbol of the American Dream – shorthand for the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – as this vision of prosperity coincides with the mass production of factory-made clothing after the turn of the century.
In arguing that American authors ‘use clothing as a barometer for achieving American ideals of upward mobility and the pursuit of happiness’, Cardon interprets such existential contentment as the ‘expression of individual desire’ (p. 5). Congruent with the transition from a reliance on Parisian imports and fashion cues to ‘the emergence of distinctly American style in the 1930s’, she introduces a formative term, ‘democratic fashion’ (p. 5); this denotes the new accessibility of fashion to the working classes, as well as the influence of couture and upper society on American design industries. Cardon contends that vis-à-vis a newly formed middle class, diversification and the creation of an innovative fashion market, Americans have increasingly constructed their social identities around clothing, as evinced in the textual examples she provides. At the same time, she explains, fashion’s influence emanates not only from rapidly changing culture but also the individual manipulation of imagery to create newly nationalised styles.
Cardon, who specialises in ethnicity, American studies and post-1865 American literature, employs her expertise here in the sociality of aesthetics, as in her previous work on popular culture’s depictions of interracial marriages. The analytical focus of this work similarly exhibits the hyper-visuality of the public sphere, where appearances influence and are often subverted by the trajectory of characters’ lives. Access, then, to their particular visions of the American Dream, in which consumerism and visual perceptions are often implicated, becomes of import to Cardon’s sociocultural approach to identity in fashion.
Each chapter, logically and compellingly structured, traces the evolutionary facets of American fashion through early twentieth-century writers’ apparent fascination with their characters’ personal style. Cardon structures her analysis by arranging texts around topical foundations of identity signification – the ‘free spirit’, the social climber, the immigrant, the ‘modern woman’ and the black middle class – within twentieth-century fashion eras. By placing them in a sociohistorical context, she documents the effects of class and ethnicity on traditionally marginalised populations. The first chapter introduces the Gilded Age’s sartorial social restrictions through two of Edith Wharton’s major works, The House of Mirth (1905) and the aforementioned The Age of Innocence. In the second chapter, Cardon contrasts the elitist connotation of haute couture in the previous survey with blue-collar manufacturing; she accomplishes this by highlighting the role of immigrant labour throughout the garment industry in Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) by Abraham Cahan. Cardon then attends to a post-industrial analysis of fashion in the third chapter, and takes a more vigorous look at the influence of European designers like Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel in the immigrant narratives of Anzia Yezierska. Her penultimate chapter explores the canonical modernist fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, which figuratively disrobes women characters as they traverse racial, gender and class boundaries. The final chapter expands on the cultural thematic, looking specifically at the unique pressures of the fashion industry on African-American women. Cardon notes the entanglement of primitivism and modernism in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1926) and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Comedy: American Style (1933). Culled from the Harlem Renaissance, these novels spotlight her term ‘democratic fashion’ by revealing a burgeoning movement of individualistic difference.
This interdisciplinary approach to American literature traces the classist aspect of fashion and its trajectory. Initially restricted to the upper classes, fashion symbolises the hope of a more equitable future while simultaneously paralleling race in the US – as a sociocultural system rife with inequality. Cardon closely considers ethnicity and its attendant struggles in attaining such identifiers of status; for instance, she addresses the African-American experience of ‘passing’ as white, and locates the role of clothing as accomplice in this often necessary, albeit dangerous, deception. In particular, she attends to ethnically diverse Jewish characters often overlooked or outright ignored in early Western fashion markets, filling gaps in scholarship among these connective fields. This work thus assists in situating early twentieth-century African-American and Jewish populations as emergent consumers amid codification as the racial Other.
While deconstructing these signifiers of the fashion system, Cardon initially appears to concentrate on the identity-focused analysis that is so frequently invoked in fashion theories. However, her intellectual engagement with the underpinnings of context and symbolism effectively unpack the societal risks and artistic innovations associated with stylistic reinvention. While some of the characters she chooses to include here, like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby (1925) and Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises (1926), are predictable choices, she artfully manages to extract fresh imagery by utilising them as references for a fashion code that ultimately governs bodies (p. 7). For instance, her introductions of Daisy and Brett segue into provocative discussions of Jordan Baker’s ‘embodiment of modernity’ (p. 118) and Catherine Bourne’s homoeroticism in Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (1986). Cardon also unveils a queer reading of modern clothing design in Faulkner’s Mosquitos (1927), a novel which has received less attention than his other works. The methodology she pursues ultimately produces straightforward and comprehensible guidance to understanding fashion’s function in portraying social status and consumerism as American preoccupations.
In all, Cardon makes important contributions to literary fashion studies and material culture, areas often overlooked or erroneously dismissed as depthless. She distinctly pinpoints their relevancy to the neo-historical sense of independence Americans felt as they entered the innovative twentieth century. Finally, she convincingly demonstrates how clothing represented the struggles of career advancement, matrimonial security and societal acceptance during the early twentieth century while simultaneously symbolising the timeless allure of self-transformation.
Note
1. E. Wharton, The Age of Innocence (Hertfordshire, 1994), p. 125.