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This book investigates the functioning of Gothic clothing as a discursive mechanism in the production of Gothic bodies. It presents the debates surrounding the fashion for decolletage during and immediately following the French Revolution, linking these discourses with the exposure of women's bodies in Gothic fiction. The popularisation of the chemise-dress by Marie Antoinette, and the subsequent revival of the classical shift by the women of the Directory, inflected the representation of female Gothic bodies in this period with political rhetoric. The book examines the function of clothing in early to mid-Victorian Gothic. It suggests that the Gothic trappings of veil and disguise take on new resonance in the literature of the period, acquiring a material specificity and an association with discourses of secrecy and madness. The book also investigates a nexus of connections between dandies, female-to-male crossdressing, and monstrosity. It then traces the development of the female doppelganger in the twentieth century, according to the ideologies of femininity implicated in contemporary women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan. In a world where women are encouraged to aspire towards an ideal version of themselves, articulated through fashion and lifestyle choices, the 'single' girl is represented as a problematically double entity in Gothic texts. The book examines the revival of Gothic style in the fashions of the 1990s. Gothic fashion is constantly revisited by the trope of the undead, and is continually undergoing a 'revival', despite the fact that according to popular perception it has never really died in the first place.
in the early 1990s, back when the decade was young and had yet to locate its own texture . . . People seemed unsure that the 1990s were even going to be capable of generating their own mood’ (PD, p. 1). The collection begins with an evocation of nostalgia, 1990s style, for the dream of unity imagined by 1960s radicals, the last American countercultural moment characterized by optimism: a cycle of overlapping short stories, set at the Grateful Dead’s December 1991 Californian festival, explore the sensation – ‘an essence of purity’ – of experiencing a moment that
appeared on billboards and in other publications at around the same period, this chapter will use its particular context in the pages of The Face to illustrate the relationship between Goth and 1990s’ style. The woman seen through the distorting lens of the Smirnoff bottle is dressed with more sophistication than the others and – significantly – casts no reflection. The copy reads, ‘Pure Smirnoff – The
against ‘Another clumsy, ill-informed American intervention’ in the country (Guardian, 13 December). Although there was some support for Blair’s attempt to cast the crisis in Afghanistan in the mould of 1990s-style humanitarianism, then, past examples of interventionism could just as easily be mobilised by those critical of the current war. A clash of civilisations and a