Dressed as in a painting

This book provides a lucid exploration of the interrelations between fashion, art, and aestheticism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although artistic forms of dress have been the subject of short studies before, no book has exclusively focused on aesthetic dress and its various expressions in the visual cultures of Victorian Britain. More importantly, no book has attempted to investigate the gap between the material facts of artistic clothing as it was embodied in the wearer, and its presence as an idealized sartorial trope in the visual and textual print culture of the period. This book will have broad appeal to scholars of art history, material culture, British studies, and beyond.