The shy heroine could wear it to show her newly found confidence, which the best friend-turned-lover hero has been helping her build up - or a brash no-nonsense heroine could wear it because she knows she looks awesome and she wants to show the enemy-but-not-for-long hero what he’s missing, the jerk. The debutante’s pristine gloves are there to be slowly undone, one pearl button at a time.īut this meaning is as slippery as the rules: take, for instance, a red dress. The billionaire’s meticulously tailored suit advertises his power and wealth. Fashion in fiction is even more fraught, because it’s never an accident: it’s chosen (by the author, if not always by the characters), so it can only add meaning. Anyone who has ever overdressed for a party knows how nebulous the rules are, and yet how painful it is when you fail to follow them. It is classed as neither a science nor an art at best it’s a hobby, harmless but ultimately unimportant.Īnd we will ban you from school if you do it wrong.Įven the definition of “wrong” depends on so many different factors: geography, audience, time of day, social group, gender, race, religion, body shape, ability. It marks you as shallow and materialistic (if you’re read as female) and potentially queer (if you’re read as male). But every time I reached into the froth I found a chunk of solid substance underneath that brought me up short.įashion, we tell our youth, is a frivolous matter. About the linen and muslin and silk of historicals, the wool suits and high heels of contemporaries, the uniforms of sports romances, the dragon-scarred leathers of fantasy romance, or the nano-regulated synthetic fabrics of the future in SFR (sci-fi romance, for those in the know).
This month I intended to write something frothy about clothing in romance. Won't you take it? And if you're still not sated, there's always the archives.
Every month, Olivia Waite pulls back the covers, revealing the very best in new, and classic, romance.
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