“Have You any Tudor Underwear?” Punch on the Perils of Historically Accurate Fancy Dress

Abstract

ABSTRACT The British humor magazine Punch skewered many fashions during its long history, but in the first decades of the twentieth century, fancy dress costumes were a repeated target of its satire. The magazine particularly deflated attempts at historical accuracy in fancy dress even though some contemporaries, like Virginia Woolf, recorded that historical costumes enabled a kind of embodied cognition. After providing a brief account of period interest in historically-accurate fancy dress, this article examines a range of Punch cartoons published between 1913 and 1939. I argue that cartoonists used satire to position the costuming trend as rooted in self-aggrandizement. Instead of depicting characters that learn about the past by wearing historical garb, Punch represents them attempting to transcend their social class or to assume hyperbolic gender roles through costume. While skeptical of the value of wearing historical fancy dress, the accuracy with which Punch cartoonists represent period costumes indicates that they too saw fashion as offering a mediated form of historical knowledge. Collectively, the magazine presented a visual guide to the styles of the past while suggesting that readers can avoid embarrassing themselves by reading about, rather than wearing, historical garb.