This research project investigates the cultural work of “fashion literatures,”i.e. narrative texts, fashion-oriented periodicals and women’s magazines in the United States. The overarching goal is to examine how various literary communities both negotiate and navigate diverging ideologies of fashion across different textual and visual media while competing, both rhetorically and economically, for their own ‘fashionability.’ Within this conceptual framework, the project examines how notions of literature and fashion have often mutually constituted one another.

In turning to various forms of fashion and dress, the project studies how various literary ensembles emerge, communicate, and compete along the lines of “fashionable discourse” (Silverman) in late nineteenth-century US culture. In general, the period under investigation was shaped by socio-political developments such as industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of corporate capitalism. With nascent consumer culture and attendant increased accessibility to middle- and lower-class levels, the social significance of clothing and fashion would be transformed in this context as well, particularly in the steadily growing metropolitan centers. At the same time, the rise of periodicals and magazines accessible to a wider public changed established print culture practices influencing daily life and affecting political discourse and rhetoric on nation, race, and gender. In analyzing a corpus of both canonized and less readily available narrative texts and other documents, the project examines how these texts both communicate and mediate various notions of fashion, ranging from representations of dress to the ways these texts navigate their own ‘fashionability’ in the literary market.

The project thus analyzes the cultural work (Tompkins) of fashion in and as literature and it stresses rhetorical and praxeological aspects of aesthetic self-performance and aesthetic self-historicization. In this context, it takes special interest in the ways fashion(able) texts both create and consolidate specific versions of white femininity. In this way, the project further seeks to contribute to recent debates on fashion’s long-standing colonial, imperial underpinnings (e.g. Baxter, Pham).

The initial stages of the project have been developed at the Cluster of Excellence EXC2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective” at Freie Universität Berlin. The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC has also generously supported the project.