Kiera Vaclavik: Through the Looking Glass & What Fashion Found There: Lewis Carroll’s Literary Heroine as Style Icon

Lewis Carroll writes virtually nothing about the physical appearance and clothing of his most famous protagonist and both he and Sir John Tenniel – the illustrator whose influential images first brought Alice to life in the public imaginary – were temperamentally and ideologically opposed to fashion and its strictures. It is difficult to imagine a less promising start for a style icon, and yet this is precisely what Alice has become.

In this lecture I will examine how attendance to dress contributes to our understanding of Carroll, Tenniel and Alice, before moving on to consider the reasons why Alice has emerged not merely as a follower of fashion but as a trendsetter in her own right.

With close reference to an American Vogue photoshoot by Annie Liebowitz in particular, it dwells on issues of age and experience, nostalgia and knowingness. Ultimately it argues that if attendance to literary fashioning enhances our ‘understanding of texts, their contexts and their innovations’ (Kuhn and Carlson, 2007) attendance to literature-inspired fashion also constitutes a precious and as yet underexploited resource in the study of the reception, circulation and transmission of literary works.