ABSTRACT
As clothing (and by extension, the purchase of clothing) was explicitly linked to an attention to the body, the shops where clothing and related items were sold emerge as ambiguous locations in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century fiction. These spaces registered the explicit relationship between women, fashion and social mobility; as the previous chapters have shown, this relationship was constantly being renegotiated and challenged. Just as fashionable garments registered the moral and social complexities inherent in the wearer, the location where these garments were sold pointed to similar concerns. This was due in part to the anxieties surrounding the public position of working women, concerns that clearly draw on an older literary and visual tradition that positioned working-class women in the clothing trades as sexually available to the middle and upper class male observer. This chapter explores the manifestation of this tradition in midnineteenth-century works, arguing that the predominantly female dressmaking trades in the first half of the nineteenth century set the parameters for the cultural perception of women working in clothing retail in the late nineteenth century. Whilst the boom in the retailing industry offered employment opportunities to men and women, women were the focus in literary and visual representations of the draper’s shop.
