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'How good was the touch of the raw silk to her flesh!' Mrs Sommers senses in 'A Pair of Silk Stockings' (502). The mature mother, full of the fastidious demands of culture, responds with natural animal joy to the leisure and luxury that fifteen dollars can buy, purchasing along with the sleek stockings a pair of 'polished, pointed-tipped boots' and a symmetrical pair of soft kid gloves. The visceral comfort of silk and leather against skin stimulates a craving for 'a nice and tasty bite' of food and entering a restaurant, amid the damask and crystal, she orders 'a half dozen blue-points, a plump chop with cress, a something sweet - a crème-frappée' with a glass of Rhine wine and a cup of black coffee (503). Utterly contented, she wiggles her toes in the silk stockings. Chopin's naturalist story, published in Vogue in 1897, depicts fashion as the border between culture and nature. Beyond the mundane necessities of dress demanded by climate and geography, fashion signals gender, social class and economic status and marks supposed civilisation and intellectual range, as well as ethnicity and the subtle nuances of ideology, morality, idealism and aesthetics. Fashion theorists Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro in their study Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body trace the complex and often conflicting semiotics of sartorial meaning. Dress functions as hieroglyph, its material presence drapes the body, revealing and concealing in intricate patterns easily read by members of a society and clearly setting limits on who is included and who excluded from its web of meaning. On a more playful psychological level, fashion is the site of the drama between fabric and flesh, especially for a woman who announces her availability and receptivity to the gaze of others and sets limits on the possibilities of approach and interaction. How much of a woman's body will she reveal and to whom are questions that theorists and critics interpret and debate.
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