Wahl, Kimberly. Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform. University of New England Press, 2013.
Dr. Wahl’s first book provides a lucid exploration of the interrelations between fashion, art, and Aestheticism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Although artistic forms of dress have been the subject of short studies before, no book has focused exclusively on Aesthetic dress and its various expressions in the visual cultures of Victorian Britain. This text investigates the gap between the material facts of artistic clothing as it was embodied on the wearer, and its presence as an idealized sartorial trope in the visual and textual print culture of the period. By comparing both the material and visual histories of Aesthetic dress, this book provides a more nuanced account of the importance of clothing and fashion as embodied and negotiated forms of artistic culture.