Clothes and costume can tell a story. The style a person wears can tell you so much with just a glance and that is the goal of character and costume design. This is even used as a literary device in some cases, describing what a character looks like to imply their social standing or even their role in the text. This is an important factor in British literature post 1789. Class, gender, and societal roles become so intrinsic to the themes of the eras, and fashion can play a vital role in how characters fulfill those roles, at the very least letting the reader know what roles the character does fill. The evolution of this is shown predominantly in women and that is the current focus; Female character development and how fashion can be used to improve understanding as a literary and visual device.

  Women’s design flows almost perfectly beside political beliefs of whatever era it belongs to. In times of progressive politics, we get more avantgarde designs and a desire to push the lines of current fashion. Comparatively, in conservative times (the Victorian era), we get pulled back into modest, classic, and relatively non-scandalous designs. This can be seen mostly going from the gothic period, even with its unspecific time period, to the Victorian. Even with its medieval inspirations, the neckline is low compared to the day dress of the early Victorian. We also see it going from the late Victorian to the post war landscape. We get the era of flappers, even in England, straight out of the rationed and stilted fashion of the war. This is reflected in the design of Lenina, even though she is set in a dystopian future, she still reflects the more progressive styles of the time. These ebbs and flows follow all of fashion history, it just becomes ever more so evident in the 19th and 20th centuries, with fashion suddenly taking leaps and bounds in much less time. It will continue this and continue to be reflected in its literature parallels.

  Fashion as a literary device makes itself known, even when you are not looking for it. Whether it is intentional or not, choices regarding clothes can reflect a character’s roles, gender, class, and societal. While this is true in real life but can be so useful in character analysis. Taking a closer look at character and costume can clue the reader into so many different aspects of the reading.