Satires of fashionable clothing and literature in nineteenth-century Russia

In early nineteenth-century Russia the categories of fashionable clothing and fashionable literature emerged side by side, which gave critics of the corresponding industries a convenient discourse for satirizing the latter in terms of the former. The writings and drawings this article examines show that the enmeshment of these two feminine economies endured for decades as a productive trope despite changes in the gendering of the garment industry around mid-century. Just as Roland Barthes asserted the legibility of fashion as a semiotic system, this study treats verbal and visual representations of clothing as legible texts that are open to interpretation. It also probes the problematic relationship among body, text and clothing in representations where the clothing is not worn on the body but rather becomes a body through the literary device of personification.