Theatre and Fashion Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes [Paperback]

This is the first book to explore the fascinating relationship between theatre, fashion, and society in the period from the 1890s to the Great War.The first book to explore the complex relationship among theater, fashion, and society in the late Victorian and early modern eras. It provides a new context for assessing plays by Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Pinero, and Harley Granville Barker, as well as lesser known writers.The first book to explore the complex relationship among theater, fashion, and society in the late Victorian and early modern eras. It provides a new context for assessing plays by Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Pinero, and Harley Granville Barker, as well as lesser known writers.This is the first book to explore the complex relationship among theater, fashion, and society in the late Victorian and early modern eras. Examining such diverse topics as the emergence of the society playhouse, fashion journalism, the role of the couturier-costumier, department store marketing, and the establishment of dress codes by militant suffragettes, Kaplan and Stowell provide a new context for assessing plays by established writers such as Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Arthur Pinero, and Harley Granville Barker, as well as lesser know figures such as Edith Lyttelton, Emily Symonds, and Cicely Hamilton.List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. The glass of fashion; 2. Dressing Mrs. Pat; 3. The ghost in the looking-glass; 4. Millinery stages; 5. The suffrage response; Notes; Works cited; Index. A wonderfully stimulating book...not only for theatre historians, but for anyone interested in the larger questions of cultural production and the fashion industry, feminism and the body. It demonstrates very clearly and with many new insights, the complexity and interrelatedness of theatre and other forms of cultural expression at the fin de siecle. New Theatre Quarterly A book whose writing is every bit as good as its scholarship, lucid, stylisl¤