ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the fashion of animals in the wake of Charles Darwin's publications on evolution. It considers "design" both as fashion and as agency to think about how the dovetailing of animals and women in Sambourne's drawings and in the popular sensation novels of the 1860s opened up representational spaces to explore femininity. If Sambourne's drawings and magazine columns transport animal designs into the world of women's fashions, Darwin brings human design into play in his discussion of sexual selection in the realm of animals in The Origin of Species. "Designs After Nature" is part of a cultural preoccupation with taxonomies of nature, and with speculating—in this instance, capriciously—about the margins between humans and other animals. The fashion parade of novelty captures not only the logic of capitalism but also the pattern of natural selection, where both simultaneously try to set gender distinctions at the expense of other categorical differences.
