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In 1882 a passenger ship, packed with immigrants, arrived in New York harbor carrying the Romanian Michael Orange, a Jewish tailor, along with his family of twelve children including Paul, then only ten years old, and his brothers who would later distinguish themselves in American fashion. The family's costume company, Orange Brothers, began by outfitting Broadway stars and movie actors, rose to attract the business of wealthy New Yorkers—Astors and Vanderbilts and Whitneys—and even caught the eye of clients in the Place Vendôme in Paris. First Lady Edith Wilson once wore a ball gown designed by Paul Orange, which you can see displayed at the Smithsonian Institute. Also mindful of the fashion needs of immigrant women who had come to New York to work, the brothers developed a line of ready-to-wear clothing, Orange Frocks, that met the desires and means of middle-class and working women. The Orange family rose to prominence and wealth in the garment industry. We discover in Fashion and Fiction that Paul Orange was Lauren S. Cardon's great-great uncle.The story of garment design and production in the United States serves as the cultural frame of the book that Professor Cardon has written about fashion and fiction. Although her study grew out of a family story, it is not personal history, per se, that she means to give her readers. As a scholar, she brings to the book a “broad-spectrum” understanding of literary theory, social and labor history, and especially American fiction that allows her to weave a pattern of narrative and analysis. To that discussion, she adds elements of popular culture, specifically fashion magazines, beginning with Harper's Bazaar (1867), clothing catalogs, paper patterns, sewing machines, and department stores, which brought international fashion into ordinary American homes. She employs the term “democratic fashion” to describe an evolution in accessible clothing that allowed individual expression of style as well as considerable freedom of movement. For Cardon, “clothing surfaces as a skeleton key to enter alternate social spheres, allowing the individual to transcend barriers of class, race, ethnicity, and even gender” (4). The book traces the movement from constricting fashions, meant to mark a leisure class, toward an aesthetic of comfort and affordability, a sign of social mobility.American fiction provides many such journeys of upward striving, marked by a hero's discerning selection of dress as a social signifier. The book takes readers through well-known American novels, offering fresh ways of reading fiction embedded in the story of fashion production and reform. Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) provide a starting point by allowing Cardon to focus on the allure of the Parisian haute couture industry, specifically the houses of Charles Frederick Worth and the more daring Jacques Doucet, in the rue de la Paix. Both Lily Bart and Ellen Olenska admire French design, and the selection of their dresses is a key to reading both novels. The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s and moving across decades, brings the reader to the brink of “democratic fashion” reform. Turn-of-the-century female clothing, popularized by Charles Dana Gibson's famous “Gibson Girl,” gave women shirtwaist styles that allowed more freedom of physical movement and, in the ready-to-wear variants, more power to move socially. From that perspective, Cardon reads the end of The Age of Innocence as more hopeful for women because May Welland and her children adopt freer modes of dress. Newland Archer observes the social significance of how the next generation looked and acted: “The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn't” (49). A sign of Lily Bart's doom is her attachment to the elaborately corseted styles of couture France, even as she is unable to afford such luxury and is not nimble and skilled enough even to earn a meager income by sewing fashionable hats. The Wharton novels serve as an opening onto the complicated world of twentieth-century fashion production and reform in New York City.Cardon turns to the sort of social climbing made available to the working class by ready-made clothes, and measures the cost of social mobility in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900) and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1920). Both novels illustrate the deleterious effects of capitalism and industrialization on heroes who have a personal sense of style and a strong work ethic but find, at the end of a supposedly upward journey, a keen sense of loneliness and discontent. David comes to realize that in pursuing material success, he has sacrificed an intellectual and aesthetic life, marked by knowledge of science, music, and art. Likewise Ames lectures Carrie on the promise of her talents in urging her to take on more series acting roles. Social mobility, that is to say, may inhibit a more intellectually and aesthetically satisfying life.It is in the third chapter that we learn the story of the Orange Brothers, who begin by following Parisian couture styles, fitted to actors and movie stars, and then enter the ready-made market for working people in New York. To illustrate the relationship between social mobility and fashion ideas, Cardon considers novels by Anzia Yezierska and what they have to tell us about the possibility of assimilation into American society. Sonya in Salome of the Tenements and Sara in Bread Givers study ready-to-wear American dress and come to admire the “key values of affordability, fit, and style,” the very values that Orange Frocks offered real shoppers of the period. Such frocks are plain, simple, neat, well fitted, and restrained, all marks of true character in Yezierska's novels, in contrast to other gaudy, embellished, and cheap styles available on Essex Street. Sonya herself becomes a fashion designer in the Orange tradition. In Bread Givers, Sara Smolinsky learns the same lesson about buying the right suit to showcase her taste: “Finally, I decided on a dark blue. Plain serge only! Yes. But more style in its plainness than the richest velvet” (106). In such frocks, an immigrant woman may gracefully assimilate.The fourth chapter focuses on the loose and freer styles of female clothing first made popular by Paul Poiret before and, especially, after the First World War. Female couturiers in the 1920s designed “straight, slender, elongated” styles that stressed the male lines of a female body. Coco Chanel's little black dress was so versatile that it was called “the Ford.” Madeleine Vionnet, Nina Ricci, and Jeanne Lanvin made movement and comfort central to a woman's style. To illustrate the New Woman, Cardon looks closely at Jordan Baker in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), Pat Robyn in Faulkner's Mosquitoes (1927), and Catherine Bourne in Hemingway's The Garden of Eden (begun in 1946). Moving through a series of novels, all written by men, Cardon considers the transformative meanings of dress in the blending of male and female, masculine and feminine, as well as straight and lesbian.The book ends with a consideration of fashion and race that begins with Josephine Baker who wore bold colors, dazzling jewels, and exotic textiles to stun audiences in Paris. The 1 June 1927 issue of Vogue described her graceful body, clad in blue snakeskin and diamonds: “This woman is like a living drawing of Aubrey Beardsley or Picasso” (138). The 1925 Paris Exposition, with its emphasis on art deco designs, influenced ready-to-wear styles that made it affordable for women to buy garments styled in pleats, gores, and yokes, and fabrics printed with patterns of flora and fauna. Cardon uses such avant-garde fashions to read Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928), Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Jessie Redmon Fauset's Comedy, American Style (1933).Fashion and Fiction is packed with details about clothing design and manufacture in New York City. The prose is lively, and there is much for readers to learn. Cardon blends fashion history and literary interpretation to give us new ways of thinking about familiar novels and, at times, about novels we may not know well. It is a good book for Wharton scholars and aficionados, especially those looking for links between her novels and those of other writers in the period. Cardon's framing of fashion and her selection of fiction would work well in undergraduate and graduate classes on novels in a cultural context.
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