Thackeray’s Persistent Fashion

This chapter analyzes Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), focusing on the novel’s representations of fashionable clothing and high-society life. It argues that Thackeray uses the temporal multiplicity and ambiguity of fashion to depict time as striated and multidimensional. In so doing, the chapter challenges the critical paradigm that has long maligned attention-grabbing clothing in historical fiction as a kind of facile historicism. In dramatizing the persistence of older styles, offering multiple interpretations of apparently fashionable garments, and depicting the unsynchronized life cycles of clothes, Vanity Fair undermines the idea that to be historically situated is to keep pace with a rapid linear narrative. In a reading that draws upon the novel’s interest in intergenerational power and aristocratic privilege as embodied by older men, the chapter considers the overlaps, repetitions, and redundancies of temporal continuity.