Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes.

Theatre as social text is still underworked by social historians, but they can find an exemplary model in this collaboration by two scholars in English and Drama who combine the interpretive range of cultural studies with close attention to historical context and specificity. Moving beyond the words on the page, their particular focus is the dynamic function of dress in productions of both mainstream and 'progressive' or 'problem' dramas of the period. They show how manipulations of dress variously served or subverted an aggressive new fashion industry for whom the stage was a vital site in the promotion of images of an ideal yet deftly eroticised 'ladyhood' for an audience of avid consumers, both men and women. From their close attention to production notes, reviews and the complementary press copy and illustrations that reported on stage costume, the authors reveal various overlapping sight lines of self-display, envy and desire - the 'voyeuristic triangle' of the stage, the fashionable stalls and the rest of the house, and the similarly electric configuration of the modiste, the mannequin and the male consumer whose patriarchy and purse power did much to define the shifting contours and lush elaborations of women's bodies in this age of conspicuous excess.

But as Kaplan and Stowell emphasise, the multiple articulations inherent in such a plastic commodity could well be deployed to critical ends. Wilde scrambled conventional visual codes to indict the moral ambiguities of high society. Henry Arthur Jones used costume to deliver a similar charge that his producer would not allow in words. In another triangular force field it was through performance allied to dress that the star actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell confounded the textual intent of Pinero and the commercial agenda of her dressmakers, capturing public and critical attention in a sympathetic reworking of otherwise hostile representations of the New Woman. Feminist writers joined in 'the clothes wars,' attacking the many levels of exploitation: the sweated labour of women millinery workers; the 'living in' regimes of women retail shop staff; the genteel fictions that cloaked the industry's general enthrallment of their sex. The most telling indictment in its effective meld of the aesthetic and the didactic was Granville Barker's Madras House of 1910 which used the broad metaphor of prostitution to link fashion and contemporary courtship rituals. (A commercial failure in its day, the play's critical message has now been more fully realised, both in the book at hand and a recent stage revival in Britain.)

Another, more material and sustained retort to the glamorous conspiracy of fashion and stage came from the suffragettes who mounted their own 'theatrical proselytising' on stage and in the movement's press, promoting a political modishness of smart but sexually muted dress that challenged gender stereotypes and caricatures of the 'unnatural' New Woman. But if this suggested how the transformative potential of dress might liberate rather than enthrall its bearers, it showed too how readily the market learned to capitalise on the initiatives of its dissident subjects, for the big London stores did a thriving trade in suffragette outfits in the approved semi-official style. In return the movement benefited financially from the advertising copy placed in the suffragette press, an astonishing ideological mesalliance that survived the women's smashing of the shop windows of the same big stores in 1912. The eminence grosse, as it were, of this ambiguous exchange was Gordon Selfridge who brought the American style department store to London where he combined spectacular display techniques with a patronising rhetoric of the efficient shopper as the true free woman. It was, Kaplan and Stowell conclude wryly, Selfridge who won the day, as the prozac of a benign consumerism ultimately prevailed over the fitful critiques of the progressive stage and a sartorially militant feminism.

Extensive illustrations and nicely judged writing - theoretically informed, but jargon-free and appropriately descriptive - make dress itself an almost palpable leading character in the book's dramatis personae, not least in the creations of Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon). Self-proclaimed inventor of the mannequin parade, the flamboyant Lucile specialised in adventurous underwear and 'personality gowns' named after gourmet dishes; she declared the suffrage movement 'a huge joke.' Even so, it is the complexity of relationships between fashion and its different constituencies - the complicities and accommodations as much as the oppositions - that make this such a suggestive treatment for historians engaged with the 'struggle for the sign' in other contexts.

Less extravagant than feminine fashion but still complexly coded in its minute specificities was male dress, mostly unexamined here, its secondary significance explained away in Wilde's complaint that contemporary male costume was no more than a 'frame' or dark border used to isolate and separate woman's dresses. Wilde did his best to break such restraint with his refulgent buttonholes, but stage historians attracted to this new mode of enquiry could well find it fruitful to track the gender as well as the class dialogue of dress in a fully worked account of male fashion, looking also to popular forms such as music hall and musical comedy (a neglected genre to which Kaplan and Stowell give some welcome attention). If female fashion was exercised by the New Woman's alleged mannishness, was there a perceptible reaction in male dress (and stage performance) to the spectre of effeminacy foregrounded by Wilde's delinquencies but a matter of mounting anxiety over several decades?

If in poster terms this book might be announced as "Theatre History Looks at Culture and Society!," it might encourage another new opening, down the street: "Social History Goes to the Theatre!" There should be plenty to talk about after the show.(1)

Peter Bailey University of Manitoba 

ENDNOTE 

1. The seductions of metaphor invariably distort. For a helpful account of some other (few) new titles that work at integrating the disciplines, see Tracy C. Davis, "Riot, Subversion and Discontent in New Victorian Theatre Scholarship," Victorian Studies, XXXVII, 2 (Winter 1994): 307-16.