‘All right, I'll do anything for good clothes’: Jean Rhys and Fashion

Abstract

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 Rhys
• sartorial fashion
• Chanel
• Paris
• mannequin
• masquerade
• Virginia Woolf
• Walter 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).

Notes

¹Feminist antipathy to fashion is associated with second-wave rather than first-wave feminism. Many suffrage leaders, including Emmeline Pankhurst, were always fashionably dressed.

²The career of the screen scar Greta Garbo was launched after she was discovered modelling hats for the Stockholm department store where she worked as a sales assistant in the 1920s.

³The Loie Fuller materials that Sasha's American Express customers demand to be shown are the iridescent silks worn onstage by the dancer Loie Fuller, whose name was a byword for the art nouveau style.

⁴In 1930, a sensation was caused in New York by Cynthia, a lifelike mannequin (cigarette in hand) which appeared in fashionable venues and was frequently mistaken for a real person.