Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style, by Abigail Joseph

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style by Abigail Joseph Alison Matthews David (bio) Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style, by Abigail Joseph; pp. xiii + 308. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2019, $79.50, $39.50 paper. The first chapter of Abigail Joseph's book, "Dress and Drag Around 1870," conjured up a vivid personal encounter with Victorian fashion. The queer readings of high Victorian style for which Joseph convincingly argues help me retroactively to understand the 1873 fashion plate that sat, framed, on our bathroom counter during my early childhood a century later. On this plate, women and girls promenaded in a park dressed in attire that my equally flamboyantly clad orange-polyester-shirted and plaid-bellbottom-trousered self found both bizarre and enticing. This 1970s self would have looked boyish in the extreme by the standards of Victorian girlhood. Who were these doll-like people, dressed in layer after extravagant layer of blue and white fabric, ribbons, flounces and lace, with odd hats perched on their heads? Joseph singles out the 1870s as a decade known for its excessive ornamentation. It was also a decade known for the performative quality that it imparted to the wardrobes of both fashionable women and cross-dressers, like Ernest (Stella) Boulton and Frederick (Fanny) Park. As the owner of a magical childhood dress-up box, it is no wonder that I was entranced by the styles worn in a decade when fashion took on the quality of "costumes … for a 'fancydress ball,' a masquerade, outfits intended to transfigure their wearer into someone she (or he) is not, to serve as the visual and material apparatus enabling a material role to be played, the boundaries of identities to be blurred" (33). Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style does an excellent job of situating and queering some of the most exaggeratedly extreme decades in Victorian feminine style and silhouettes. Joseph's framework provides a welcome and sympathetic lens through which scholars across a range of disciplines can re-view queer affective networks and archives through things, with a focus on dress and ephemera in particular. This lens is welcome in the context of a pandemic-influenced style landscape that provoked a renewed interest in nonbinary forms of dress and expression. Through her nuanced exploration of the many lacunae and silences in the queer archives, as well as by reading the sometimes surprising presences, Joseph's book speaks to the sensual and [End Page 163] sensory importance of small objects, from pets to letters, as they circulated in queer networks, having profound impacts on the lives and experiences of all those who came into contact with them. As dress and gender have always been linked in the most visible and tangible ways, it is particularly pertinent to view the mid- and high Victorian periods, often seen as two of the most binary and polarized periods in fashion, through multiple queer and trans lenses. Though this was a period when young boys wore dresses until they were breeched, the author argues, it was also a historical moment when questions of sexuality were being reformulated. Dress was literally policed by the imposition of dress laws in many places worldwide, a process intimately linked with racism and colonization, as Clare Sears powerfully demonstrates in their groundbreaking book Arresting Dress: Cross-Dressing, Law, and Fascination in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (2014). My own field, fashion studies, has produced a wide range of texts, classic and contemporary, that focus on the ways in which dress has played with the gender binary. From Peter McNeil's Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World (2018) to Ben Barry and Andrew Reilly's edited volume Crossing Gender Boundaries: Fashion to Create, Disrupt and Transcend (2020), which examines male Victorian corset or belt wearing and early bifurcated skirts for women, scholars continue to be interested in how dress embodies and displays gender nonconformity. Exquisite Materials divides its subject matter into four chapters. Three focus on case studies where style, either literary or sartorial, was actually criminalized in a legal context because of its associations with queer sexualities. These...