Fashion in Northanger Abbey

I’ve just finished reading all of Jane Austen’s novels.

I’d never read them before (shocking really; me, with a degree in English and History, never reading Austen!) and felt a gaping hole in my education because of it. I attempted to get a book club together a la the movie, The Jane Austen Book Club, but that fell apart quickly due to alcohol. (Note to self – do not try to start a ‘pub book club’.) So I read them on my own.

As you may know, during this hiatus of mine, I've tried to examine how clothes and clothes shopping impact feelings. I've discovered it goes even further than that. Wearing certain types of clothes, being "in fashion," and having an accepted style, all impact our feelings. The interesting part of this examination for me is that much of how we feel when we wear certain clothes depends on how we are perceived by other people.

Austen brings that out in her novels. While she doesn’t spend a lot of time on fashion in her stories, she does use fashion to better explain her characters. [That became clearest to me in Northanger Abbey, where the preoccupation of fashion by two characters shows their false natures, and the comment of another shows her (and Austen’s) views on fashion - “Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.”]

Things haven’t changed much. From the kids needing to wear certain brands and labels or risk mockery at school to the adults attending fashion shows to the popularity of certain television shows to the multitude of blogs picturing what the blogsters are wearing today, we all spend too much time fretting about what we wear.

And why does what we wear make us feel one way or another? Why aren’t we taught to be more confident and aware of whom we are through what we do and not what we wear? Are we truly all a bunch of unaware Neanderthals in need of therapy?

If the Manolo Blahnik fits...