Fashion in the Fairy Tale Tradition

This book is a journey through the fairy-tale wardrobe, explaining how the mercurial nature of fashion has shaped and transformed the Western fairy-tale tradition. Many of fairy tale's most iconic images are items of dress: the glass slippers, the red capes, the gowns shining like the sun, and the red shoes. The material cultures from which these items have been conjured reveal the histories of patronage, political intrigue, class privilege, and sexual politics behind the most famous fairy tales. The book not only reveals the sartorial truths behind Cinderella's lost slippers, but reveals the networks of female power woven into fairy tale itself.

Examines well-known fairy tales from the Grimm brothers and Perrault Reveals a critical nexus of fairy tale and fashion that sheds light upon constructs of privilege with ramifications for class and gender studies of the genre Covers early modern tales and the gradual decline of fashion-orientated fairy tales as well as identifing a resurgence in the twentieth century, when the stage and screen revived the glamour of fairy tale to appeal to the masses, culminating in the phenomenon of Disney princesses

Autorentext

Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario is an adjunct research fellow in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia.

Inhalt

1. The Rise of Fashionable Fairy Tales: A Noble Fabrication.- 2. Fashion Felons I: Leading La Mode.- 3. Fashion Felons II: Breaking All the Fashion Rules.- 4. Skills with Threads: Heroes who Make Fashion.- 5. Shoes, the Sole of Fairy Tale: Stepping Between Desire and Damnation.- 6. What the Fairies Wore: Sartorial Means and Blackest Villains.- 7. Conclusion: The Fairy Tale Undressed.