‘All right, I'll do anything for good clothes’: Jean Rhys and Fashion
2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09574042.2012.739849
ISSN1470-1367
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoAbstract This essay establishes the cultural, intellectual and historical contexts of Jean Rhys's engagement with sartorial fashion and addresses her characters' fascination with the sartorial in relation to modernism's refusal of the stable, unitary self. The author analyses the ways in which the thinking of the avant-garde in art and literature and the avant-garde in fashion converged in the 1920s and 1930s. Attention is paid to Virginia Woolf and to the fashion designer Coco Chanel and the ubiquitous 'little black dress' in Rhys's European fictions between The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Rhys's engagement with fashion is considered as a structuring absence in recent research on modernism and the city. Keywords: Jean Rhyssartorial fashionChanelParismannequinmasqueradeVirginia WoolfWalter Benjamin Acknowledgments I am indebted to Jeannette Baxter, Anna Snaith and Tory Young for their helpful comments, Anne Hicks for picture research and Claire Nicholson for the many insights gained from our pleasurable discussions in the course of my supervising her Ph.D. on Virginia Woolf and fashion at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. I thank Gill Frith for her excellent essay on Winifred Holtby and fashion that prompted my own research into fashion and Rhys (see Frith 2010 Frith , Gill 2010 , ' Her Bright Materials: Winifred Holtby's Utopian Realism ', in Lisa Regan , Winifred Holtby, 'A Woman in Her Time': Critical Essays , Cambridge : Cambridge Scholars , pp . 113 – 38 . [Google Scholar]).
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