“Costumes can be read as easily as any text.”
This assertion by fashion historian Leigh Summers (in Bound to Please, 2001) captures a truth long understood by artists, writers, and wearers alike: clothing is never just clothing. And yet, fashion is often dismissed, especially in everyday, media, or political discourse. Fashion is perceived as inherently feminine, frivolous, or superficial — something that connotes lesser cultural value. Like many domains historically associated with women, fashion has suffered the fate of being admired, but is rarely taken seriously.
This dismissal, however, overlooks a fundamental truth: fashion is one of the most accessible and powerful tools for shaping identity. The fascination with self-image and its relationship to social belonging is an innate human concern, played out daily in the way we dress. Clothing becomes both a canvas and a language that expresses who we are, who we want to be, or even who we want others to believe we are. Whether revealing or concealing, fashion allows us to manipulate perception, claim space, and articulate personal, political, and cultural values.
Throughout history, particularly for women, dress has offered one of the few tools for self-expression and social navigation. In literature, art, and public life, fashion becomes a site of agency where appearances are crafted, identities are staged, and power is quietly negotiated. To dismiss it as shallow is to overlook its function as an essential form of self-fashioning.
Frivolity and Femininity: The Gendered Dismissal of Fashion
Despite its deep cultural roots and expressive power, fashion has long been dismissed as frivolous. Its enduring association with women (for the last few centuries) is definitely largely to blame for this. Like other traditionally feminine domains such as romance novels, needlework, or beauty and cosmetics, clothing has been trivialised and excluded from “serious” historical, social, or literary discourse. As history has largely been written by men, forms of female expression were either sidelined or reduced to decorative detail. But when we take a closer look, fashion reveals itself not just as adornment, but as a crucial medium of communication, self-expression, and social strategy.
Fashion through the male gaze: How dress is written off in art and literature
Despite the role of fashion in self-expression and identity, it is often treated as ornamental rather than integral. For example, William Powell Frith’s 1872 painting The Fair Toxophilites renders an astoundingly detailed depiction of Victorian women’s dress: light shimmers off silks, folds drape with near-photographic realism, and each garment captures the era’s stylistic nuances.
And yet, Frith himself dismissed the painting as “trifling, totally devoid of character interest,” even as he acknowledged its value as a “record of the female habiliments of the time.” His reluctance to see the sartorial subject as serious mirrors a wider cultural discomfort with taking fashion — and by extension, women’s lives and concerns — seriously.
This discomfort appears across the literary canon, particularly in Victorian fiction. In Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe, Junior, a male character trivialises a young woman’s duties by making the assumption:
“Oh, yes, one knows the sort of things young ladies have to do, […] look up pretty dresses for their parties […] and consult the fashion-books. Oh, of course you will deny it; but […] I know that’s what you all do.”
— Margaret Oliphant, Phoebe Junior
The tone is unmistakably patronising and dismisses women’s interests in dress as idle distractions rather than meaningful acts of self-definition.
Likewise, in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Taken at the Flood, male characters consistently portray clothing as either purely functional or absurdly indulgent. Sir Aubrey brags, “I have worn this coat nearly eighteen months,” and his brother Mordred appears in clothes so outdated they are described as “antique” and “ancient.” These characters wear their neglect of fashion like a badge of honour and a sign of masculine rationality, while dismissing the female characters’ sartorial interest as “silly finery.” Such moments offer revealing insights into 19th-century gender norms: while men’s clothing signals practicality and permanence, women’s fashion is associated with transience, emotion, and vanity. Something that can still be traced in contemporary discourse. But, this binary fails to account for how clothing functions as a form of communication — how these women, albeit they be fictional, are fashioning the self.
It’s always practical or pretty, but never practical and pretty
Women’s magazines of the Victorian era further illuminate this divide. Publications like The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper treated fashion as a legitimate topic of study and concern. Between 1869 and 1874, each issue featured a Dress and Fashion column with detailed descriptions of the latest Paris styles, seasonal changes, reader-submitted questions about fabric care, and even instructions for embroidery or DIY garment-making. These pages reveal the enormous intellectual and practical labour involved in staying fashionable.
Illustrations from The Queen, The Lady’s Newspaper, 1870s
In contrast, general newspapers addressed fashion rarely, and when they did, it was in the context of advertisements, emphasising the utilitarian perception of garments, to be valued for cost and durability rather than expression. This reflects a broader cultural schism between male-coded ‘practicality’ and female-coded ‘aestheticism’ — a binary that helped entrench the idea that fashion is not only feminine, but therefore unserious.
But clothing has always done more than protect the body; it prepares it for social interaction, modifies how the wearer is read, and projects meaning onto the physical form. In this light, the art of self-fashioning becomes a highly skilled and strategic practice. One that was available to women when other avenues of agency were closed off. Through fabric and silhouette, women crafted identities, aligned themselves with movements or classes, and resisted or conformed to social norms. Fashion was, and continues to be, not a passive mirror of culture but an active agent within it.
Fabricating the Self: Fashion as Strategy and Power
The notion that fashion is frivolous collapses under the weight of its actual social function. Far from being mere ornament, clothing operates as a powerful language through which individuals signal belonging, aspiration, resistance, and transformation. Through the art of self-fashioning, people use garments not only to reflect identity but also to shape how they are perceived and treated. In this way, clothing becomes a mechanism of both self-expression and social navigation.
Dress to impress — or deceive
The way we dress has a tangible impact on how others perceive us. Clothing, accessories, hairstyles, and even bodily adornments like tattoos act as immediate visual cues that can evoke assumptions about personality, background, and intent. This is what makes clothing as communication so potent: it allows individuals to construct identities or deliberately subvert expectations. But it also means that appearances can be strategically misleading, allowing the wearer to manipulate the observer’s perception.
In Taken at the Flood, Mary Elizabeth Braddon uses clothing to both reveal and obscure identity, particularly class and gender identity. Class and gender identity in general, are frequently coded through dress in Victorian literature. In those narratives, fabrics like white muslin evoke youth and purity, often associated with young, unmarried women. In contrast, rich materials such as silk and velvet, especially in deep, bold colours, suggest wealth, sensuality, or even moral ambiguity (depending on the context in which they are worn). Clothing in sensation fiction like Braddon’s becomes a layered semiotic system through which characters conceal or declare their social standing and intentions.
The performance of respectability, too, often hinges on precise choices of attire. A character may adopt a more conservative style to appear modest and proper, or may deliberately lean into excess to challenge moral norms. These manipulations highlight how fashion and identity are in constant negotiation.
In 2002 Winona Ryder appeared in court after shoplifting from Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills, wearing a black long-sleeve dress with a pink and white trompe l’oeil collar and an A-line skirt that fell below the knee from Marc Jacobs — very demure, very innocent. Except that she was not. She was found guilty of shoplifting items worth $5,500 (including Marc Jacobs pieces!!). This look serves as a perfect contemporary example of someone trying to convey a particular image that might be contrary to their inner thoughts.
Fashion as gender performance
Clothing is equally central to the construction of gender. As Judith Butler argued in her theory of gender performativity, gender is not something we are, but something we do — an ongoing performance shaped by social norms. Fashion plays a pivotal role in that performance. From fabrics to silhouettes, the choices individuals make in how they dress communicate and reinforce gendered expectations, or challenge them.
Historically, ‘women’s clothing’ has continuously borrowed from ‘masculine’ attire. 18th-century riding habits, for example, borrowed heavily from men’s tailoring (see image below). As physical exercise was male-dominated, it makes sense that women’s attire for this public space would be inspired by men’s clothing. This blending of gendered styles became even more prominent in the 1980s, when the power suit became a defining symbol of women entering the corporate world en masse, characterised by broad-shouldered, structured blazers. These garments projected authority and competence in male-dominated spaces, and literally took up space. This illustrates how gender and clothing intersect to negotiate power dynamics.
In this way, fashion offers tools not only for expressing one’s gender identity but also for reshaping it. The rise of gender-neutral fashion further emphasises how the boundaries between masculine and feminine dress are being reconsidered. The role of fashion in self-expression and identity thus becomes political, particularly when individuals use their clothing to resist binary categories or to assert visibility in a world that often seeks to erase them.
Spectacle and Scorn on the Red Carpet: The Met Gala
The tension between admiration and ridicule in fashion remains steadfast. Fashion Week, the Met Gala, the Eras Tour, and other cultural flashpoints offer a lens to examine how fashion serves as both an expression of identity and a lightning rod for criticism.
Who gets to wear history?
In 2022, Kim Kardashian attended the Met Gala wearing Marilyn Monroe’s iconic dress that she wore during her Happy Birthday serenade to President Kennedy in 1962.
The dress had been on display at Ripley’s Museum as a fragile relic of pop culture history. Kim’s choice to wear it sparked immediate controversy both before and after it went back on display after the event, showing signs of damage that had allegedly not been there before.
Critics accused Kim Kardashian of damaging an irreplaceable, historical artefact, with photographs of alleged rips and missing crystals circulating online. Ripley’s denied any harm, but the debate had already ignited.
What this moment revealed beyond the question of preservation is how fashion as history is still contested terrain. Some insisted that the dress deserved the same reverence as a painting or manuscript, while others dismissed the backlash as overblown. Beneath this divide lies a familiar narrative: that clothing is somehow less worthy of historical or intellectual regard because of its proximity to the feminine.
Yet, the fact that Kim Kardashian wore the dress highlights clothing as communication. Kim’s decision to wear Marilyn’s dress was more than a stylistic choice. It was a calculated act of fashioning the self, aligning herself with an iconic vision of sensuality, fame, and American mythology — whether you agree with this alignment or not is the subject of a separate discussion 🌚. In this light, fashion, again, becomes not just adornment but an active tool in identity construction and cultural storytelling.
Fringe, friendship, and the mocking of feminine expression
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour became a celebration of personal and collective identity, with fans devoting hours (and dollars) to crafting outfits. This visual homage, rooted in shared understanding and layered references, transformed concert venues into collaborative runways, each look a love letter to Swift’s discography and the emotional history fans attached to it.
And yet, when you scrolled social media, this deeply expressive form of self-fashioning was met with dismissal as well as admiration. The spectacle was trivialised, the enthusiasm of primarily female fans mocked, and elaborate costumes were reduced to mere fangirl excess rather than admired for their artistic feat and craftsmanship. The implicit message: fashion, especially when tied to femininity, is inherently unserious.
Frivolous? Think Again.
Fiction exhibits how dress and its meanings are used to successfully navigate social situations and circles that would otherwise be inaccessible to certain characters. Their ability to manipulate perception and assert agency through clothing demonstrates that dress is not merely a frivolous pastime for idle women, but a powerful form of communication, a means of fashioning the self, and an indispensable tool in crafting one’s narrative, emphasising that in fiction as in reality, fashion has historically been women’s quiet power.
If clothing can be used to communicate, to manipulate, and to empower, then how can it be considered frivolous? Dismissal of fashion often masks a deeper discomfort with its alignment with femininity, and has long been undervalued in dominant cultural narratives. But as we’ve seen in both Victorian fiction and contemporary culture, the role of fashion in self-expression and identity is far from superficial. Identity and dress are thus inextricably intertwined in fiction, art, and society alike.
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