Fashioning Alice

150 years after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first published, Lewis Carroll's eponymous heroine has become one of the most familiar figures in the cultural landscape. The enduringly iconic figure of the Victorian child, Alice has inspired countless fashion designers, illustrators and stylists. The 'Alice Look' has been embraced across the world, by young and old alike, and by both the feted and the forgotten. Fashioning Alice is the first book to chart the emergence of Alice as a style icon. Kiera Vaclavik traces the evolution of Alice's visual identity in the nineteenth century and explores the myriad ways in which she was dressed – on the page, on the stage, and in the home. The book also draws on historical sources to examine amateur performance and play not just in the UK but in the USA, Japan and Australia. Illustrated throughout, Fashioning Alice is a ground-breaking exploration of Alice's visual career that offers a compelling case study of the intersections between fashion and fiction.

150 years after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was first published, Lewis Carroll's eponymous heroine has become one of the most familiar figures in the cultural landscape. The enduringly iconic figure of the Victorian child, Alice has inspired countless fashion designers, illustrators and stylists. The 'Alice Look' has been embraced across the world, by young and old alike, and by both the feted and the forgotten. Fashioning Alice is the first book to chart the emergence of Alice as a style icon. Kiera Vaclavik traces the evolution of Alice's visual identity in the nineteenth century and explores the myriad ways in which she was dressed – on the page, on the stage, and in the home. The book also draws on historical sources to examine amateur performance and play not just in the UK but in the USA, Japan and Australia. Illustrated throughout, Fashioning Alice is a ground-breaking exploration of Alice's visual career that offers a compelling case study of the intersections between fashion and fiction.

"The Alice Look is the first book to chart the emergence of Lewis Carroll's Alice as a style icon during the Victorian period and her contemporary legacies. Kiera Vaclavik here traces the evolution of Alice's visual identity and the ways in which Alice has been dressed in print, visual culture and performance back to Carroll's own day. The book also draws on historical sources to examine non-professional performance and play in the UK, USA, Japan and Australia. Illustrated throughout with 90 images of Alice in fashion, The Alice Look is a ground-breaking study of the character's visual legacy"--

The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday - but never jam to-day. Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There was first published in December 1871 (dated 1872). Although Carroll intended Looking-Glass to be a follow-up piece to the immediately successful Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), he created an entirely new fantasy world with a revised narrative structure. The twelve-chapter format was retained, but Looking-Glass is significantly longer than Wonderland (224 compared to 192 pages in the first editions), and introduces a range of new characters, and is framed by Alice's progression across a chess board to become queen. This new edition focuses solely on Through the Looking-Glass, with a penetrating and informative introduction by Zoe Jaques, including the most recent research and critical opinion on the subject matter.

"Takes a detailed look at the flow of ideas between the twin worlds of art and fashion, chronicling their close relationship. It charts a history of ideas highlighting key moments, from the Renaissance to the present day, when art and fashion interacted and influenced each other... This close synergy between art and fashion has continued into the 21st century, with artists working with themes that explore clothes and the body, and top fashion designers feted in lavish museum exhibitions."-- Back cover.

We dress to communicate who we are, or who we would like others to think we are, telling seductive fashion narratives through our adornment. Yet, today, fashion has been democratized through high-low collaborations, social media and real-time fashion mediation, complicating the basic dynamic of identity displays, and creating tension between personal statements and social performances. Fashioning Identity explores how this tension is performed through fashion production and consumption,by examining a diverse series of case studies - from ninety-year old fashion icons to the paradoxical rebellion in 'normcore', and from soccer jerseys in Kenya to heavy metal band T-shirts in Europe. Through these cases, the role of time, gender, age memory, novelty, copying, the body and resistance are considered within the context of the contemporary fashion scene. Offering a fresh approach to the subject by readdressing Fred Davis' seminal concept of 'identity ambivalence' in Fashion, Culture and Identity (1992), Mackinney-Valentin argues that we are in an epoch of 'status ambivalence', in which fashioning one's own identity has become increasingly complicated.

Traces the evolution of men's clothes from the conventions laid down by the Victorians to the textile developments that determine fashion today.