2018 Book FashionInTheFairyTaleTradition PDF

Fashion in the Fairy Tale Tradition
Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario
Fashion in the Fairy

Tale Tradition
What Cinderella Wore
Rebecca-Anne C. Do Rozario
School of Languages, Literatures,
Cultures and Linguistics
Monash University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
ISBN 978-3-319-91100-7 ISBN 978-3-319-91101-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941874
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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To Papa, a debonair dresser and benevolent king of our small family, much
missed.
To Popie, who didn’t read the kind of rubbish I write (but was still proud).
Acknowledgements
Books are difficult to write, even when they give you moments of great
joy. It is much easier to write a book when you have wonderful people to
help you.
My thanks to Professor Peter Fitzpatrick, who supervised my Ph.D.
on Disney musicals. His humour and empathy have been an exam-
ple to me in my career. I’ve also been lucky in having some tremen-
dous students, from the first-year undergraduates to my brilliant band
of Doctors, whose enthusiasm has compelled me to continue to learn,
investigate, and discover. I’d like to acknowledge those who joined
us in the Monash Fairy Tale Salon, who were there when this project
was taking its first steps. Their camaraderie and insight has been much
appreciated. I would also like to acknowledge the Australian Fairy Tale
Society, which has given me so many opportunities to reach out to other
scholars, writers, storytellers, and artists who delight and inspire me. My
thanks to Dr. Michelle J. Smith, Hilary Davidson, Dr. Victoria Tedeschi,
Dr. Lenise Prater, Dr. Laura-Jane Maher, Lorena Carrington, Elisabeth
Skoda, Wiebke Eikholt, my editors, Ben Doyle and Camille Davies, and
reader for their expertise, patience, encouragement, and contributions of
all shapes and sizes. Mistakes are, of course, all my own.
I come from a long line of amazing women—my own fairy godmoth-
ers—and my gratitude to them is boundless. My profuse thanks and love
to my mother, who is the smartest person I know and who taught me
how to harness a stubborn streak for good. Much gratitude and love to
vii
viii Acknowledgements
Papa, too, who was here when the project began. Holding this book in
my hands won’t be at all the same without his proud smile.
Also my thanks to my small scottie, Wee Davie, who always reminds
me when I’ve been sitting too long at the computer. He’s a good boy.
Contents
1 Introduction: The Rise of Fashionable Fairy Tales,

a Noble Fabrication 1
2 Fashion Felons I: Leading La Mode 47
3 Fashion Felons II: Breaking All the Fashion Rules 91
4 Skills with Threads: Heroes Who Make Fashion 129
5 Shoes, the Sole of Fairy Tale: Stepping Between Desire

and Damnation 179
6 What the Fairies Wore: Sartorial Means and Darkest

Villainies 225
7 Conclusion: The Fairy Tale Undressed 273
References 285
Index 307
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 Finette Cendron rides to the palace. Illustration by Gordon

Browne. Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne
d’Aulnoy, Fairy Tales by the Countess d’Aulnoy, trans. J. R.
Planché (London: George Routledge, 1888) 72
Fig. 3.1 The Beast from The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast. Malcolm
Douglas, The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast (suggested by
Klaw & Erlanger’s Production) (New York: Towers
& Curran, 1901) 107
Fig. 5.1 The old shoemaker’s widow makes a pair of red shoes. Hans
Christian Andersen, Andersen’s Tales for Children,
trans. Alfred Wehnert and Caroline Peachey (London:
George Bell & Sons, 1874) 190
Fig. 5.2 Puss is fitted for boots. Illustration by Otto Speckter. Puss
in Boots (London: John Murray, 1844) 208
Fig. 6.1 The Prince is dressed in the château of the White Cat.
Contes de Fées (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1875) 228
Fig. 6.2 Gammer Grethel. Illustration by George Cruikshank.
Edgar Taylor, German Popular Stories and Fairy Tales, as Told
by Gammer Grethel, from the Collection
of MM. Grimm (London: Bell & Daldy, 1872) 236
xi
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Rise of Fashionable Fairy

Tales, a Noble Fabrication
A glass slipper clatters down the palace steps, a scrap of red cloth falls
from the jaws of a wolf, the stiff new leather of a small pair of boots
repulses brambles as a cat stalks his prey, a donkey’s pelt lies discarded
upon the floor of a scullery maid’s room, and the severed feet of a child,
shod in red shoes, dance through a deep forest. These are just some of
the objects of clothing and footwear woven through the most famous
fairy tales. The items of the fairy tale wardrobe exist within changing
economies of consumption and luxury, evolving textile and clothing
industries, and discourses of fashion that shape the fate of fairy tale’s
divers protagonists. We’re dealing with what is worn, what meanings can
be understood from sartorial gestures, and the skill, economics, and even
political powers that drive sartorial choices.
Fairy tale is fashion. For a long time, fairy tale has been treated as an
ancient legacy, a universal compendium of symbols, a guide to the inner
psyche. More recently, there has been increased focus on fairy-tale his-
tory, on the waves of retellings and adaptations. Still, very frequently,
objects of fashion are treated chiefly as symbol or metaphor, rather than
as the representation of dress on trend or otherwise at the time. The
words themselves, rather than the fashions represented, become critical.
Scholars such as Marina Warner and Elizabeth Wanning Harries have
scoured print histories and redeemed authors from the timeless haze of
the fairy-tale miasma, and others such as Holly Tucker and Jo Eldridge
Carney have embedded key topics of fairy tale—fertility and queenship,
© The Author(s) 2018 1

R.-A. C. Do Rozario, Fashion in the Fairy Tale Tradition,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4_1
2 R.-A. C. DO ROZARIO
respectively—in their historical contexts. Still, a great part of the history

of fairy tale is actively stimulated by sartorial practices. Colleen Hill’s
Fairy Tale Fashion (2016), based upon the 2016 Fashion Institute of
Technology’s exhibition of the same name, traces fairy tale’s influence
upon high fashion, smartly relating the fashions evoked in fairy tales
themselves. Other scholars have written about the items of fashion that
have found fame as iconic sartorial gestures; Kathryn A. Hoffmann,
for instance, writing on the glass that went into the slipper, and Hilary
Davidson exploring the redoubtable red shoe. The key is bringing these
threads together—exploring how the fashion system and material cul-
tures have influenced the way fairy tales have evolved—to find out why
those glass slippers, red capes, and feline boots exist not simply as iconic
symbols, but also as active components of fairy tale.
“Fashion” itself is a slippery term, referring to trends in clothing
and also fields such as music, literature, and interior design. Fashion
has a broad reach, but at its core is sartorial display and temporality.
As Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil describe fashion, it “is the result of
a historical process: fashion as a flux in time.”1 It is a mercurial phenom-
enon in motion. It both reinvents and scorns the past, gripped by aspi-
ration for the new and original, yet embracing the ideal of the timeless,
organised to evolve into the conventional. It has both the authority to
impose rules of dress and the freedom to break the rules. Fashion is but
an aspect of the material cultures of dress, including, for instance, the tex-
tile industries that create and generate clothing and, ultimately, the stuff
of fashion. Understanding fashion and material cultures in relation to
fairy tale is not a straightforward undertaking. Storytellers, from authors
and sources to illustrators and costume designers, do not necessarily accu-
rately reproduce fashion in their tales; indeed, many attempt to evoke the
timeless or archaic in order to present a tale as authentic, ancient, or as a
figment of imagination, rather than a tale inspired by a particular point
in time and place.2 In this respect, it would seem that fairy tales oper-
ate counter to fashion. Yet, that perception is as skewed as an argument
that the little black dress is timeless, when clearly, the precise concept is
a twentieth-century invention. The evocation of timelessness, nostalgia,
and antiquity reveals how fairy tales themselves exist in the same kind
of temporal flux as fashion. The symbols, the metaphors that scholars
have long interpreted, take on fresh meaning when understood within
the temporal flux, and even the key fairy-tale identities become more
obviously creatures of their time, rather than simply timeless.
1 INTRODUCTION: THE RISE OF FASHIONABLE FAIRY TALES … 3
John Styles observes that the most influential delineation of fashion in

recent scholarship is “as identity embodied in clothing.”3 This seems an
ideal lens through which to view how fashion has influenced fairy tale,
since fairy-tale identities are so frequently constructed and deconstructed
through clothing. Indeed, it is a useful and productive lens. Yet, as Styles
points out, by solely fixating on identity, one ignores that fashion relies
upon cycles and change.4 The very temporality of fashion shapes how
identity is embodied. This complicates how fairy-tale identities are elab-
orated in their early modern literary origins, leading to more revealing
histories than otherwise assumed. Through the tales, a deserving girl
with the de rigueur dress and the fairy who can conjure that dress are
key players, but they must negotiate laws and social protocols, too, not
to mention trade and consumption practices, revealing just how cunning
and frequently transgressive they are. A slip of the dress, or the fall of a
shoe is fraught with dangers and opportunities. With each new iteration
of the fairy-tale cycle, too, innovation and change can be understood, as
new tales render previous tales hopelessly old-fashioned. Harries uses a
helpful analogy of old wine and new bottles to articulate the history of
literary fairy tale but, for the purposes of this book, it is perhaps more
apt to think of old protagonists and new threads.5
Enchanted (2007), for instance, initially operates as nostalgia for
classic Disney animation. Giselle, the hero played by Amy Adams,
begins the film as an animated character. She wears a diaphanous pink
dress with Regency notes, then changing into a full, “poufy” wedding
gown any nineteenth-century bride—or 1980s bride, for that matter—
might desire.6 The eclectic-nigh-anachronistic representation of fashion
in Disney animation—aimed at achieving an impression of timeless-
ness through vague historical reference—is traced in Giselle’s clothing.
Tricked into falling through a kind of interdimensional wormhole
in a wishing well, though, she arrives in contemporary, “live-action”
Manhattan via a manhole. Mona May, the costume designer, was
charged with realising the two-dimensional, animated gown in fabric and
thread … and metal hoops. May explains that as she emerges from the
Times Square manhole, “that dress explodes in layers in contrast with
her flat two-dimensional world.”7 The physical materiality of Disney
princess dress is thus elaborated and Amy Adams, as Giselle, is compelled
to wrangle her gown as she moves through crowded Manhattan streets
and subways. The dislocation of gown with time and place ably high-
lights the perception of the moribund nature of princess dress and, in
fact, the fairy-tale princess herself. When Giselle is discovered by Robert
Philip and his young daughter, Morgan, the latter nonetheless read-
ily identifies Giselle as a princess by her attire. Enchanted is a film about
2007, renegotiating Disney fairy tale with fashionably feminist nods to
marriage and career. Morgan has, for example, wanted a fairy-tale book,
but Robert presents her with a book on important historic women,
similar to the later Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls (2016), as a bet-
ter option. Robert’s fiancée, Nancy Tremaine, is a fashion designer who
wears blazers and appears to produce business wear in a workroom of
aggressive neutrals. Giselle herself must learn to sew and procure cloth-
ing suited to Manhattan in 2007, just as she learns to reassess her convic-
tions regarding true love. The film negotiates the agency of women just
as it negotiates between iconic fairy-tale costume and New York fashion.
When the Cinderella narrative ultimately plays out between Robert
and Giselle, they attend a masquerade ball called the King and Queen’s
Costume Ball at which the guests are dressed in period costume, evoking
the regal, sartorial splendour of the fairy-tale past. Giselle, however, has
purchased a fashionable gown to wear. It is Giselle’s halter-neck, lavender
gown that is novel, producing a high-fashion moment at the masquerade
ball. For Giselle, a fairy-tale princess, high fashion is masquerade and she
loses not a glass slipper, but a clear plastic and suede pump that matches
her dress. Giselle consequently picking up a sword and going to the res-
cue of Robert-in-distress cements the idea that Enchanted is not simply
a parody of past Disney fairy tale, but a fashionable innovation of that
past.8 The film navigates between the fairy tale of the past and what is
new and on trend. It operates within the flux in time.
Why Cinderella?
In fashion terms, Cinderella is the fairy-tale hero. Her tale is all about
the power of clothing to redefine identity. From the moment her step-
mother reduces her to rags, her public identity vanishes. She is a domes-
tic slave, forced into unpaid service through the stripping of her material
conditions. Even her name is erased by a slur and smut. Clothing that is
unfashionable, old, and worn makes it impossible for her to appear and
claim her rightful status. The lack of access to suitable clothing ensures
her anonymity and regulates her actions. To achieve agency, to re-enter
public life and have the opportunity to marry and regain status, she
needs the right dress. The ball is simply the required public setting at
which to be seen. When the prince meets her at the ball, she is already in
full princess dress, and that’s the point. To marry a prince, she must look
like a princess. In cinematic versions such as The Glass Slipper (1955) and
Disney’s Cinderella (2015), where Cinderella and her prince meet before
the ball, Cinderella cannot claim to be a princess and the narratives
require the prince’s deceit as he claims—correctly, but deceptively—to
only work at the palace. The prince must go in disguise so as to enter the
space in which Cinderella is sequestered from society—and this is often
prompted by disenchantment with his own status. In Ever After (1998),
Danielle is already assuming higher status prior to the ball by wearing
the dress of a noble woman in order to negotiate for the purchase of
a servant her stepmother has sold. In the dress of a noble woman, she
may spend a day in the company of the prince. It is the ability to obtain
the right clothing, by whatever means possible—stealing, magical trees,
birds, or fairy godmothers all work—that gives Cinderella the opportu-
nity to re-enter public society, to reclaim status and authority, creating a
spectacle of self and, in more urbane versions of the tale, sex. The history
of dress, of fashion, plays out as Cinderella is retold across the centu-
ries. The specifics of her shoes, her dress, her coiffure, and her skills with
fashion, reveal the changing nature of female agency and hierarchical
structures.
Today, Cinderella is very much regarded as a rags-to-riches tale that
pivots upon the life-changing impact of obtaining the right dress. Yet,
this simplification elides complex fashion history. Juliette Peers asks,
“has not the story of ‘the dress’ as agent of female empowerment, by
revealing the ‘real’ character underneath the erroneous, dowdy disguise,
been a fantasy as long ago as Perrault’s Cinderella?”9 While ostensibly
the fantasy seems just that—fantasy—the historical reality is that dress
was one of the more obvious means open to women looking to restore
and improve their fortunes and status. The dress really does become an
object of female empowerment, particularly since it is often gifted to
Cinderella by a female benefactor comfortably situated beyond patriar-
chal control. Even today, having access to the right clothing for the right
public situation provides one with authority and agency. The dress is
critical to Cinderella’s public identity, ambitions, and fortunes.
The object of Cinderella’s story is not simply bridal. Most tales do
not place the prince at the centre of her ambitions: she actually wants
to leave the kitchen hearth and join the pageant of public display.
In doing so, she enters the flux of fashion and, usually with sartorial
assistance from a fairy godmother, she becomes its leader, a role more
usually ascribed to royalty. However many shoes she may lose, she is
thereby positioned for a royal role, her status renegotiated and cemented
through marriage. The popularity of the Cinderella tale, though, perhaps
accounts for why the contemporary bridal gown now carries metaphoric
weight as a fairy-tale accoutrement.
The power of the dress is that it is often seen to completely make over
the image of Cinderella. Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell
identify the Cinderella tale as the “important, ancient origin for all make-
over plots,” claiming the tale establishes “transformation as an integral
part of a central female character’s quest.”10 Actually, Cinderellas are
always beautiful, even in their soot and rags; dress is a statement of status
in the public world, whereby Cinderella’s status, not her appearance, is
transformed. Yet, the perception that the Cinderella story feeds into a
makeover fantasy around appearances with royal conclusions is power-
ful and fuels much criticism. Angela Carter, in Angela Carter’s Book of
Fairy Tales (2005), writes “[w]e are dealing with imaginary royalty and
an imaginary style, with creations of fantasy and wish-fulfilment, which
is why the loose symbolic structure of fairy tales leaves them so open to
psychoanalytic interpretation.”11 Yet, exploring the Cinderella tales, we
become aware that they are not simply creations of fantasy and wish—
the details provided point beyond simplistic symbols to the material real-
ity of fashion—but, rather, tales of powerful political forces that have
bound the status of women within layers of fabric, under the weight of
gemstones, and upon teetering heels. In the tales, Cinderella learns to
negotiate the fashion system, applying her natural-born skills to restore
and increase her own status through innovation in dress.
Fashionably Told: Understanding the Relationship

Between Fashion and Fairy Tale
Fashion is driven by innovation, novelty, and change, complicating any
understanding of its origins. When searching for the beginnings of fash-
ion, Sarah-Grace Heller suggests tracing “when the cultural value placed
on novelty becomes prominent, and when the desire for innovation and
the capacity for the production of innovation reach a critical point of
becoming a constant and organising presence.”12 John Styles likewise
observes that fashion is inexorably tied to innovation, being “at least
as much about the material sequencing of change” as about identity.13
Christopher Breward, too, writes of “the impact of cultural and societal
changes on the cycle of innovation and obsolescence which characterizes

the creation of modes and trends in clothing.”14 In discussing how fash-
ion transfers between the elite and other classes, Joanne Entwistle also
notes the “oscillating rhythm” that “produces fashion with its logic of
constant innovation.”15 The conceptualisation of change and innova-
tion is a useful approach in fairy-tale studies, too. Jack Zipes argues that
the failure to reach consensus on a definition of fairy tale “is predictable
because the genre is so volatile and fluid.”16 Warner follows the habit
of referencing constant characteristics including fairies, happy endings,
and morality, but concludes that metamorphosis is the defining feature
of fairy tale.17 Metamorphosis is itself an outcome of change. In many
respects, the impulses of fashion and those of fairy tale are alike; yet,
while we recognise a changing genre, we don’t fully explore innovation
and novelty as the driving principle of fairy tale itself.
Much fairy-tale debate still turns to questions of authenticity and
origin; the latter leads to lively discussions about oral and literary tradi-
tions of fairy tale. Ruth B. Bottigheimer’s volley—that fairy tales more
properly emerged not from oral storytelling, but from literary endeav-
our, for instance—is a thesis drawn from her study of Giovan Francesco
Straparola, the author of Le Piacevoli Notti (The Pleasant Nights,
1550–1553), a collection including a number of fairy tales in print
for the first time.18 Her argument was roundly disputed by scholars
including Lewis Seifert and Zipes, who favoured the cause of the oral
tradition.19 The point, here, is not to engage in the debate itself, but
to acknowledge the vehemence stirred in scholarly debate around fairy-
tale origins. Fairy tale’s origins are complex, particularly when account-
ing for the variety of operas, comedies, myths, romances, pastorals,
novels, fairyland fictions, and fairy legends that emerge parallel with, or
even before fairy tales; styles, plots, themes, and characters are frequently
borrowed or shared. Fairy tale certainly didn’t evolve in a vacuum.
Giambattista Basile’s fairy-tale collection, Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale
of Tales, 1634–1636), includes the first Cinderella in print. Basile’s sister,
Adriana, was a famous singer, and his tales include references to popu-
lar songs and performers, as well as the tales themselves showing influ-
ences from Italian theatre. Nancy Canepa advises examining “the birth of
the literary fairy tale in the context of the many shifts in literary culture”
taking place as the new genre emerged, while at the same time recog-
nising that “as a narrative form it was, of course, anything but new.”20
The innovations were new, though, Canepa describing “the figural and
ideological interpolations, the references to diverse social orders and nar-

rative traditions” as “[t]he true novelty” of Basile’s The Tale of Tales.21
While it is useful to acknowledge indicators of an oral tradition, it is
perhaps more productive to look for the critical points in evolution.
The novelty offered by both Basile and Straparola’s work inspired one of
those critical points, but their own works stand alone. Fairy tale didn’t
have a truly fashionable moment until the 1690s in France.
There were earlier “quakes” that set up that fashionable moment.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, the French aristo-
crat who achieved lasting fame for her correspondence, notes in a let-
ter of August 6, 1677, that Mme de Coulanges tells her the women at
Versailles are enjoying stories, such as one about a princess raised on a
green island, the princess and her lover travelling in a crystal ball to the
court of the King of Delights.22 Bottigheimer distinguishes fairy tales
from fairyland fictions such as the tale of the green island.23 Allison
Stedman also notes the story described by Sévigné, but refers to it as a
fairy tale, identifying it as “one of the earliest accounts of the oral fairy-
tale tradition taking place in the context of elite, aristocratic, salon con-
versation.”24 Harries likewise treats the story as fairy tale, noting the oral
performance at court and influences from the opera, indicating that the
women regard the tales as part of life at Versailles, rather than as part of
a folk tradition.25 Patricia Hannon also suggests the story is evidence of
the genesis of French fairy tale through oral performance in the salons,
but acknowledges the evidence is scant.26 Indeed, Sévigné provides
only a brief description; the tale occurring in the middle of the ocean
and not the Mediterranean, she doesn’t regard it as near her concerns.
The pastime of telling such tales doesn’t appear to have reached a nec-
essarily critical point to evince ground-breaking fashion. Nadine Jasmin
does indicate, intriguingly, that Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville,
Baronne d’Aulnoy, one of the great fairy-tale authors, may have been in
Paris at the time,27 so it possible that, like the tales of Straparola, these
tales, only referenced in novels and letters, nonetheless provided essential
inspiration to fairy tale’s future fashion leaders.
It is at the end of the seventeenth century that desire and capacity
for innovation culminate in a French fairy-tale vogue led by d’Aulnoy.
Having enthusiastically entered salon culture, with her own success-
ful salon to boot, d’Aulnoy published her first novel, Histoire d’Hypo-
lite, comte de Duglas (1690). The novel includes pirates, disguises, and
amatory intrigue, all of which would appear in her fairy tales. Moreover,
the novel also includes an actual fairy tale, “L’Île de la Félicité”

(The Island of Happiness). Featuring the idyllic island of Princess Felicity,
the narrative follows such feminocentric utopias as those offered by
Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchesse de Montpensier, in her corre-
spondence with Françoise Bertaut de Motteville (published by Motteville
as Recueil de quelques pièces nouvelles et galantes, tant en prose qu’en vers
in 1667), and by Margaret Cavendish in The Description of a New World,
Called the Blazing World (1666).28 It is here, following the ascendance of
French fashion under Louis XIV (1643–1715), that the female authors of
the salons give the fairy tale innovative momentum and launch a verita-
ble fairy-tale vogue: in d’Aulnoy’s “Le Pigeon et la Colombe” (The Pigeon
and the Dove, 1698), she writes of the fairy reading the stars as easily as
d’Aulnoy’s contemporaries read the fairy tales daily printed, the tale itself
referencing the vogue for tales. As Heller suggests, for fashion to exist,
clothing must become outmoded; so, too, did these new tales rewrite
what was “old” and “outmoded” in previous iterations.
The French vogue for fairy tale captured lightning in a bottle.
By publishing during the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, d’Aulnoy,
Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Comtesse de Murat, Charles Perrault and
their peers drew immediately upon French fashion even as French fash-
ion became the Western exemplar. Clare Haru Crowston details the
flow of fashion: “From Louis XIV on, the French set clothing styles for
all the courts of Europe and even the American elite, first through the
dispatch of fashion dolls dressed in the latest styles and later through a
commercialized fashion press.”29 Valerie Steele highlights the combina-
tion of political power at the court, focused upon sartorial splendor, and
the growing fashion industry in Paris, focused upon innovation: “more
genuinely modern fashion was beginning to emerge – in Paris.”30 Styles
echoes Steele’s assessment by arguing that the movement towards the
modern fashion cycle was based in the “mercantilist political economy
and the ceremonial projection of royal power.”31 It is that very power
that authors such as d’Aulnoy, Murat and their female peers critiqued
and celebrated, moving between the salons of Paris and the court,
drawing upon the politics of fashion itself.
For fairy tale began, in nomenclature, as a fashionable thing. Fairy
tale, or the contes de fées, is the term conceived by the authors d’Aul-
noy and Murat for their first collections in 1697 and 1698, respectively.
D’Aulnoy’s second four-volume collection, Contes nouveaux ou Les Fées
à la Mode (New Tales or Fashionable Fairies, 1698) refers to fairies of
fashion in the title, establishing her tales as new against those which were
already old. In her preface to Histoires sublimes et allégoriques (1699),
Murat makes reference to the fashionable dress of the fairies, includ-
ing her own peers, celebrating their power, elegance, and wit. She had
already published Les Nouveaux Contes des Fées (1698), thus, like d’Aul-
noy, embodying the “new” in the title. It was not, however, uncontested
fashion. Perrault, one of the few men participating in the vogue and
himself a proponent of the modern, quite deliberately titled his little col-
lection of tales—published in the same year as d’Aulnoy’s Les Contes des
Fées (1697)—Histoires ou Contes du temps passé and notions of times past,
of authenticity and folk simplicity would obscure the eloquent engage-
ment of fairies, princesses, and beasts in fashion.32
Harries suggests that two strands of fairy tale emerged—one complex,
one compact—of which Perrault represented the latter.33 “Their carefully
constructed simplicity works as an implicit guarantee of their traditional
and authentic status,” argues Harries of compact tales, where the more
complex “work to reveal the stories behind other stories, the unvoiced
possibilities.”34 Innovation inspires and generates complex tales.
Christine A. Jones, for example, argues that where Perrault “preserved,”
the female authors “innovated.”35 Perrault’s tales do have an underlying
sense of the complex tales, particularly in their detailed negotiations of
material and economic practices, but written into the model of the com-
pact tale. It was Perrault who would dominate, too, with most scholars
suggesting that his female peers followed his lead, despite their ultimately
very different approaches to the genre. The Brothers Grimm even went
so far as to denigrate the female authors in their 1812 preface, referring
to Perrault’s “inferior imitators Aulnoy and Murat.”36 Evelyne Sullerot
is one of the few actively asserting that Perrault “often merely copied”
d’Aulnoy.37 The topsy-turvy situation is reflective of the historical and
cultural fortunes of fashion and female authorship, and the continuing
trivialisation of interests designated as feminine.
D’Aulnoy is the key figure of the French vogue, Nadine Jasmin
describing her thus: “With an obvious literary and business flair, d’Aul-
noy exploited the fashionability of literary vogues among highly
placed book buyers of her day.”38 D’Aulnoy and her peers, including
Murat, Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, Catherine Bernard, and
Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force, were active in Paris’s salon
culture, where literature and fashion were vital topics. Elizabeth Davis,
for instance, locates “the exchange of information regarding fashionable
dress” in salon culture, and such exchanges influenced the descriptions of

fashion in the tales that were likewise discussed.39 L’Héritier likely inher-
ited Madeleine de Scudéry’s famed salon, suggesting her high regard in
the community of female authors. The authors, like Murat in her pref-
ace, make reference to each other in the paratexts of their tale collections
and novels—and even within their tales—suggesting a close commu-
nity of women supporting and celebrating each other. A near relative
of Perrault’s, L’Héritier’s prefaces suggest that their works were shared
in this environment prior to publication; Sullerot pointedly privileging
L’Héritier, like d’Aulnoy, when she maintains that she had “the plot of
‘The Fairies,’ before Perrault.”40 Perrault’s place in this female literary
environment is hardly pre-eminent. L’Héritier prefaces “Marmoisan” not
to Perrault himself, for example, but to Mademoiselle Perrault. The pref-
ace describes the telling of tales in literary company and praises Perrault’s
works, but the address to Mademoiselle Perrault is curious, since there
is no apparent record of a daughter. Sophie Raynard and Bottigheimer
suggest she may have been a useful literary invention.41 The choice to
address a female relative rather than Perrault himself is, however, tell-
ing in terms of the attitude female authors took in a deeply entrenched,
patriarchal society.
What the women of the salons of Paris did together was to
reconceptualise fairy tale as a fashion, within a context of ballets, theatre,
fashion dolls, masked balls, and, not least, the French court itself, cele-
brating the use of clothing to forge or disguise identities and, with a swish
of a cloak or the heel of a falling slipper, fracturing the edifice of patriar-
chal authority—if only for the length of the tale. Their tales are cast in
“conversational frame[s]”—as in novels or frame tales—as Harries sug-
gests, also noting that Perrault did not follow this form.42 Their writing
itself was depicted in nonchalant fashion, causing them little trouble as
they dashed off their tales.43 In the preface to “L’Adroite Princesse, ou
les aventures de Finette” (The Discreet Princess, or the Adventures of
Finette, 1696), for example, L’Héritier writes, “No great words, no spar-
kling vocabulary, no rhymes: a simple stroll suits me better.”44 The simple
stroll emphasises ease. D’Aulnoy’s Saint-Cloud tale in Les Contes des Fées
likewise describes a group of witty individuals promenading the grounds
of Saint-Cloud, when Madam D… chooses to sit for a spell and is visited
by Saint-Cloud’s nymph. She later reads to the group from a manuscript
she happens to have upon her. The authors do not portray solitary labour
at a writing desk, but a pleasant, social engagement, tales unfolding from
a literary compendium of available, evolving genres. They reproduced

fashionable talk, from which the fairy tales bubbled over.
That fashionable talk was not entirely disinterested in the past, either,
particularly in the history of the genre. Murat herself acknowledges her
debt to Straparola, even providing bibliographic information in a notice
in Histoires sublimes et allégoriques. She further notes that other female
authors had been making use of Straparola’s Les Facetieuses Nuictz (The
Pleasant Nights). They simply cut that old cloth in new and fashionable
ways. L’Héritier is notable for a particular interest in the Middle Ages.
She appears to be one of the less fashionably inclined of the female
authors, using her position as a woman of letters to make her way in the
world. Indeed, her tale “The Discreet Princess” was often mistakenly
attributed to Perrault although, in style and content, it is much closer
to that of her female peers. She is more moralistic, perhaps a reflec-
tion of her independent status and, in her preface to “The Discreet
Princess,” she addresses Murat, praising her writing and charm, and
suggesting she will appreciate the moral of the story, which, with the
benefit of hindsight, has a certain irony since Murat would be banished
from Paris within a decade for scandalous affairs.45 L’Héritier’s father,
Nicholas L’Héritier, was one of the king’s historians, perhaps supporting
L’Héritier’s interest in Medieval history and scholarly ambition. Her La
Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux (The Dark Tower and Bright Days,
1705) includes the twelfth-century protagonists Richard the Lionheart
and his minstrel, Blondel. Her interest in the Medieval, however, gave
her an opportunity to innovate.
The fairy tales L’Héritier includes in her work offer her an opportu-
nity to embed female-centric stories into a male-focused history. “The
Discreet Princess” opens with a king leaving for the First Crusade and
turns almost immediately to his youngest daughter, Finette. She is so
clever that she has been managing the king’s household and advising him
on state matters, even saving him from making bad political decisions.
Finette’s active role in politics places her in the context of Medieval fig-
ures including Eleanor of Aquitaine and Blanche of France. The king’s
actions of locking up his daughters recall Henry II’s act of imprisoning
Eleanor—albeit not to protect her virtue, but because she was encourag-
ing his sons, including Richard, to rebel against him. Finette’s own tem-
per recalls the red-haired queen’s, her face red as she threatens Prince
Riche-cautèle, who has attempted to seduce her.46 Stories about Richard
the Lionheart and Blondel themselves have a fairy-tale quality, David
Boyle noting the story “has been relegated by historians to the nurs-
ery” and “[s]o Blondel seems destined to join Cinderella, Snow White
and Little Red Riding Hood in the realm of fairy tale.”47 In the pref-
ace to “Les Enchantements de l’Éloquence; ou, Les effets de la douceur”
(The Enchantments of Eloquence; or, the Effects of Sweetness, 1695),
L’Héritier also relates her tale as “one of those Gallic Fables (fables gau-
loises) that apparently come straight from the once famous storytellers
and troubadours of Provence.”48 While it may appear that L’Héritier
is playing fast and loose with historical evidence, the Middle Ages was
treated as a narrative tradition that could be sustained in the ancien
régime, Alicia Montoya referring to it as “a floating rhetorical cate-
gory.”49 The medieval tradition was particularly useful to female authors,
including as it did the works of Marie de France, Héloïse d’Argenteuil,
and Christine de Pizan.
The lays of Marie de France, in particular, with their separated lovers,
misused courtly heroines and magical transformations, perhaps inspired
d’Aulnoy’s “L’Oiseau Bleu” (The Blue Bird, 1697) with its melancholy
marital arrangments, a prince changed into a blue bird, and a princess,
stripped of her wardrobe and jewels, and placed in a tower.50 Writing in
the twelfth century, Marie de France is historically linked with Henry II
and possibly his illegitimate son, William, from his affair with Rosamund
Clifford.51 Harold Neemann observes: “While situated in the realm of
medieval court society, her lays preserve the enchantment and magic of
the original folk narratives.”52 What is notable is that Marie de France’s
lays, the works of troubadours, and the later French fairy tales exhibit
qualities of courtly love and, moreover, are largely composed within the
context of their respective, actual courts. Thus, represented feminine
desire is to a large extent aristocratic, right up and into the French vogue.
While Montoya remarks that “the genealogy of the fairy tale also gave
women a literary tradition of their own,”53 it is essentially a courtly gene-
alogy. Montoya notes that the female authors did not simply recall the
past they drew upon, however, but “engaged in a direct dialogue with
the past and attempted to perpetuate its heritage by resetting it in a mod-
ern context.”54 Thus, L’Héritier’s “Marmoisan ou l’innocente tromperie”
(Marmoisan or the Innocent Deception, 1695), although indicating a
medieval origin, features an extravagant daughter who invents new fash-
ions, including the falbalas (pleated edgings/ruffles) of her time, falbalas
fashionable in L’Héritier’s own lifetime.55 She thus places fashion trends
of her own time in direct conversation with the medieval past.
The fairy tales offer female authors opportunities to celebrate prin-

cesses and queens of renown, female heroes who are clever, outspoken,
politically savvy, able to hunt and to fight as easily as embroider and
spin, and who, not so infrequently, rule kingdoms in their own rights.
Of course, the authors did have examples of ruling women upon which
to draw, but the key thing fairy tales offer is a world in which female
characters are not exclusively defined against a masculine standard. In the
tales, masculinity is not treated as the default: the heroes certainly have
to negotiate patriarchal restriction, but being female or displaying fem-
ininity is not a defining impediment to success. Fairy tale at its modish
prime features a galaxy of chic and politically savvy fairies, too, organis-
ing the affairs of kingdoms, competing with each other for power and,
sometimes, love. The fairies, overwhelmingly female, rewrite court cus-
tom and make it possible for queens and princesses to free themselves
from autocratic oppression in an era of one of the most famous absolute
monarchies. D’Aulnoy’s Cinderella, Finette Cendron, even appropriates
the symbolic sun of Louis XIV to wear. The authors cast themselves as
fairies, too, and performed the role in salons. They lived the fiction they
invented.
Such invention was hardly surprising. D’Aulnoy had already pub-
lished volumes on her adventures in Spain and England, but their
veracity has been debated. She cannily addresses the reader of Relation
du voyage d’Espagne (Travels into Spain, 1691), “It is not sufficient to
write things true, but they must likewise seem probable, to gain belief,”
before asserting the truth of her “strange stories.”56 She was contriving
her status as an author even as she was composing her literary works.
Her Saint-Cloud tale in Les Contes des Fées features herself in the char-
acter of author. When Madame D… first confesses to fatigue, her friend
suggests she read Les Contes des Fées to amuse herself. “That would be
entertaining if I hadn’t written them,” Madame D… quips.57 Thus, she
renders herself part of the fictional experiment with a self-congratulatory
flourish, just as Cavendish had earlier done in representing herself and
congratulating her own wit in The Description of a New World, Called
The Blazing-World.58 In referencing her own work in such a setting, too,
d’Aulnoy attests to its fashionability in aristocratic society.
Even aside from a little hyperbole and shrewd self-promotion,
the female authors had extraordinary lives. D’Aulnoy’s mother went
into exile after being implicated in a plot to have her daughter’s hus-
band, Baron d’Aulnoy, executed for a fabricated plot of lese-majesty;
d’Aulnoy, imprisoned for a time, apparently went on to travel through

Europe. She appears to have hated her husband, a much older philan-
derer who was fiscally irresponsible and did not include her in his will.
Murat was a young beauty who consequently, allegedly, embarked upon
a slew of affairs with both men and women before her exile from the
court and Paris itself. La Force was accused, among other things, of
having a pornographic novel,59 before retiring to a convent. On the
other hand, authors such as L’Héritier and Bernard were single women
who apparently kept their reputations spotless, adopting dry—verging
on dystopic—wit in recounting matters of love. All the female authors
were familiar with the court and its personalities, and sharply aware of
the limited agency permitted to a woman of good birth. The love sto-
ries in their fairy tales seek to reorganise and expand a woman’s options.
Perrault’s biography, on the other hand, presents him as “a progenitor
of bourgeois values who promoted patriarchal heteronormativity.”60
Trained in the law, he worked as a clerk, rose in the government to
become the controller of buildings, married in his forties, had three sons,
and was subsequently widowed, and all the while he wrote and moved
in literary circles, including the French Academy. He was a great advo-
cate for the position of the modern in the quarrel of the ancients and
the moderns, having written, for instance, Parallèle des Anciens et des
Modernes (1688–1697). Perrault was not like his peers. He was, obvi-
ously, a man, and one who held paid positions. Unlike the majority of
the women, who were aristocratic, he was from respectable, though
bourgeois family. In light of consequent revolutionary and patriarchal
politics, however, it is unsurprising that Perrault’s tales received greater
acclaim in the long term.
There was some play between Perrault and his peers, between “old
tales” and “modern fairies.”61 Perrault was himself more than twenty
years older than any of his female peers, perhaps in itself exasperating the
division. Certainly, although his championship of the modern resonated
with the work of fairy-tale authors, his approach in fairy tale was itself
old-world, appealing to the past, rather than making something new of
it. Patricia Hannon refers to Murat’s dedication to the “modern fairies”
in Histoires sublimes et allégoriques in which she “disdains Perrault’s fre-
quently misogynist tales by ridiculing the outmoded ‘art’ of these ancient
fairies together with their ‘Contes de ma Mère l’Oye’.”62 Holly Tucker
and Melanie R. Siemens also discuss the to-and-fro between Perrault and
Murat, in which Murat’s preface “becomes a sort of response to Perrault
in which she establishes herself as more modern than the Modern top
gun.”63 Although a modern, his tales are atypical of the fashion that
was coalescing around the female authors. Yves Citton declares the fairy
tale “the only true generic innovation of the early modern period” as it
quickly “became not only a most fashionable art of writing […] but also
the object of heated theoretical debates.”64 Women were, to a significant
extent, excluded from the Academies—the Académie Française and the
Académie des Sciences being open only to men—and so faced restrictions
on their participation in the debate. Their works made their case, even
so. Although authors such as d’Aulnoy did not consider their tales their
major legacy, they embraced the fashion and, importantly, used the past
tradition to craft something new. Citton actually remarks upon their
effort as shocking “by pretending to draw its inspiration from ignorant
wet nurses instead of Aristotle.”65 The female authors certainly make ref-
erence to tales they heard in childhood. As discussed, L’Héritier makes
reference not only to tales from her childhood, but also to the trouba-
dours of medieval Provence, and Murat baldly tells her readers that she
took ideas from Straparola’s tales.66 The authors may reference oral sto-
rytelling, but they are verbose on literary and historical sources, too,
creating something new and vibrant from an old tradition. They were
creatures of the court of the Sun King, sophisticated and well-read, and
they turned that to their advantage. Where Perrault’s tales, embedded
in the world of the wet nurse and peasant, are promoted as an authentic
realisation of folk tale, these fashion icons took a fledging literary tradi-
tion and made it explicitly modern—and, moreover, splendid.
In the long term, however, being so fashionable worked against
authors such as d’Aulnoy and Murat. Anne E. Duggan notes that their
works were regarded as having “expressed the ‘spirit of the time’ and
thus belonged to the realm of the particular. As such they denied their
texts the universality attributed to” others.67 In essence, Perrault’s claim
to Mother Goose, first in the 1695 manuscript Contes de ma mère Loye
(Tales of Mother Goose) and then upon the frontispiece of Histoires ou
contes du temps passé, avec des moralités, safely lodged his tales in the
paradigm of timelessness that has, for a long time, dominated the tradi-
tion, while “fashion” came… and went.
It is reductive to reduce the tales of female authors to fashion, but
it is also worth noting that the first literary fairy tales in Europe were
authored by men who likewise articulate a nuanced and detailed aware-
ness of fashion, demarcating a specific time and place for their tales.
The particular is, in fact, not limited to the female tellers but, rather,
is an aspect of the genre’s early literary evolution. Straparola and
Basile wrote in the context of Renaissance high society in the Italian
states; Basile, in particular, takes delight in fashion that leads natu-
rally to Baroque statements in clothing and language. However, it is
worth acknowledging that both authors also provide insight into the
fashionable styles and ambitions of the working, artisanal, and mer-
chant classes—demonstrating that fashion was not simply the preserve
of the nobility. The value of their inclusiveness is borne out by schol-
arship today, Paula Hohti indicating, “[b]y drawing on high fashion in
multiple ways and by repurposing innovative goods, ordinary men and
women were engaged with much more creative practices” than often
presumed.68 In fact, literary fairy tale began in context as fashionable
diversion and dissemination.69 The frame tales of these Italian collections
establish scenes of festivity, performance, and gaming in which the tales
are told. The extent to which Straparola and Basile show themselves will-
ing to indulge in the complexities of clothing design and beauty practices
bears out their familiar relationship with fashion. The preference that
has developed over time for Perrault is, despite his literate, modish refer-
ences, rooted in his claim of the tales as “old,” existing within a simple,
oral, folk tradition, rather than in the mercurial, urban present in which
Straparola, Basile, d’Aulnoy and others located their heroes as shrewd
fashion aficionados. The particulars of pearls, diamonds, silk, and thread
reveal a far more nuanced backcloth to the generic hoods and slippers
that became normalised as fairy tale shifted from its origins in the prom-
iscuity of fashion to a more fixed allegiance to the morals of the nursery.
So Why Did Perrault’s Tales Take the Lead?:

A Question of Identity
In examining the history of fairy tale, then, it is ironic that many of the
most famous sartorial statements—including the red hood, the glass
slipper, and the cat’s boots—nonetheless occur in the tales of Perrault.
Indeed, many Perraultian heroes become synonymous with their cloth-
ing, and the item of clothing or the accessory is advanced in the title.
Clothing had itself become an everyday instrument of creating iden-
tity and establishing status. People understood the power of sartorial
gestures to attract attention, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet remarking that
French citizens of the seventeenth century, utilising dress, “attached
great importance to the first impression; it was important to harness

the gaze.”70 By protagonists making a sartorial impression, authors also
captured the interest of readers who understood the fashionable state-
ment. Likewise, the dynamic between clothing and identity had roots
in portraiture, where the artists’ deliberate focus on representing cloth-
ing defined the status and character of the sitter; Ann Rosalind Jones
and Peter Stallybrass’s elaboration that “[o]ne function of clothes was
to name, unname, rename”71 can perfectly articulate Perrault’s strat-
egy with titles. Many ancien régime tales, particularly d’Aulnoy’s,
include plot dynamics around portraiture, since a royal portrait fre-
quently accompanied marital negotiations. In d’Aulnoy’s “La Biche au
Bois” (The Doe in the Woods, 1698) the prince’s portrait even delivers
speeches and replies—more or less—to what is said to it, predating film
or FaceTime by a considerable stretch. It was not uncommon for heroes
to fall in love based upon a portrait and, since clothing is a key focus in
portraiture and a key to first impressions, Perrault’s rationale for repre-
senting clothing so generously is clear.
In Perrault’s “La Belle au bois dormant” (The Sleeping Beauty in the
Wood, 1697), for instance, the subtle—or even not so subtle—awareness
of fashion is comprehensible. The princess has been asleep for 100
years when woken by her prince. Almost immediately, he avoids telling
her that she is dressed just like his grandmother in her youth, wearing
a collet monté72 that was, indeed, fashionable in the 1590s, 100 years
before Perrault’s tale is published. The prince’s concern, ostensibly friv-
olous, underscores the actual importance attributed to fashionable attire,
frankly recognising that fashion changes and a princess’s attire, while
magnificent, may also comically date her if she happens to be cursed to
sleep for a 100 years. While Perrault’s tales are, indeed, steeped in fash-
ion-consciousness and he is evidentially not unsympathetic to an inter-
est in female fashion, he is an uncertain ally to his modern, fashionable
female peers, as he plays both sides by also masquerading as old Mother
Goose, the peasant storyteller.
The masquerade has an impact on how sartorial display in his tales is
consequently interpreted—items of clothing treated as primarily symbolic
or metaphoric. The fairy godmother whips up a glass slipper requiring
an excellent pedicure and nimble dancing technique, popularly inter-
preted as a sexual metaphor for the perfect, passive bride.73 A young
girl becomes known by her red chaperon, a gift sewn by her grand-
mother, which becomes a symbol for sexual awakening, and even rape.74
A cat requests boots to protect his paws from dirt before he embarks
on a long con, his footwear representing his veneer of respectability.75
Such interpretations of clothing are perfectly apt, but largely rely upon
a timeless understanding of basic wardrobe items that are described and
utilised quite specifically within their material cultures. Cinderellas have
worn golden, silver, and red slippers, and even early incarnations of the
platform shoe, but Cinderella, now synonymous with glass slippers, is
more often understood in terms of her fragile virginity in a patriarchal
world, while earlier shoes associate her with the wiles of the courtesan
and political cunning. Early audiences of the tale would have understood
the sexy and illicit potential in her choice of footwear. Indeed, an under-
standing of the innovative appearance of glass at the court of Louis XIV,
something with which Perrault would have been most familiar, lends
fresh insight into the fairy godmother’s choice in his tale. However, it is
a fanciful innovation that is perhaps its strength; since the wearing of a
glass slipper is impossible—Disney fell back upon CGI in their 2015 live-
action Cinderella when the actor was required to wear the unwearable
shoe—the slipper becomes simply magical and endures outside fashion.
The impression that Perrault achieves authenticity in folktale remains—
and it is all his own long con. When Carter tells us he “resisted all
temptations to the affectation that misses the point of the fairy tale,”76
yet rightly acknowledges that the details—that very affectation—are
entirely of Versailles, she inadvertently articulates paradox that fuels the
deception. Harries ably argues he maintained his privilege with the court,
paying homage to Mademoiselle, producing an initial fairy-tale manu-
script in red morocco, while then producing cheap chapbooks to exploit
the larger market for folk tales.77 The very fashionable nature of his tales
is thus concealed within its own donkey skin—or, in this case, goose
feathers. He played both sides of the fairy-tale fence, his call back to an
oral tradition embodied in Mother Goose ultimately overshadowing the
innovation igniting the popularity of the glass slipper and the vogue for
fairy tale itself.
The Consumer at the Root of Fairy Tale

Understanding the relationship of fashion to fairy tale, it becomes clear
that fairy tale has always been a vehicle of fashion and sartorial mean-
ing. Heller argues that “expressions of desire for distinction, uniqueness
and admiration”78 can provide more information about fashion than
simply a visual image. Those expressions of desire populate fairy tales

ancient, modern, and contemporary. Understanding the history of fash-
ion provides insight into how those expressions have been shaped by
the cultures within which they are uttered. Cinderella is nothing with-
out her shoes, without her desire for a dress for the ball. Styles observes
that clothing “work[s] to project, represent, categorize, and identify
the individual.”79 The specious silence of the female body in fairy tale is
foiled by its verbosity in dress.
Conspicuous consumption manifestly fuelled early literary fairy tale,
emerging as it did from a Europe in which dress was regulated by sump-
tuary laws. Straparola and Basile juxtapose the classes and describe in
detail the jostling of nobles, merchants, and the poor in urban land-
scapes. Indeed, Susan Mosher Stuard observes that fashion didn’t imme-
diately disrupt class divisions, but its “potential threat to the social order
was anticipated, criticized roundly, and sumptuary laws were enacted
to foil that outcome,”80 and Straparola and Basile embraced this trans-
formative characteristic of fashion culture in the teeth of such responses.
Sumptuary laws were designed to control consumer consumption of
goods including fabrics, threads, gemstones, and pearls according to
political and class exigencies, although actual enforcement of the laws
varied. Regulation consequently heightened the values attributed to fash-
ion simply by constraining the content and extent of a person’s ward-
robe, dependent upon their class and gender. In fact, by sumptuary laws
regulating clothing, fashion itself became a social and temporal concept
of what could or could not be worn. What could not be worn, likewise,
carried a suggestion of additional desirability and risk. Stuard, discussing
the sumptuary laws in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, notes that love
narratives and sumptuary laws both elaborate terms of desire: “Yearning
for the beloved was expressed through reference to apparel, and if, in
Elizabeth Gross’s understanding of the social body, dress itself becomes
an integral part of the body that it covers, then, like the love lyrics of the
day, sumptuary laws that fixed distinctions by gender and age may reveal
values formulated about bodies, their consequence, and even their sexual
allure.”81 In Basile’s “La Gatta Cenerentola” (The Cinderella Cat), the
first literary Cinderella narrative in Europe, Zezolla flees the king, who
obtains her lost chianiello, an early slipper or chopine,82 and proceeds
to rhapsodise over it, holding it against his heart and disclaiming it as
the roots, the base, the candlestick of the absent plant, capital, candle.
The king articulately links the literally pedestrian object to its wearer’s
body, outrageous desire for the hero readily enumerated through poetic
pyrotechnics about her chianiello. Zezolla’s tale is replete with hints as to
how fashion evokes sexual desire and social status, the hero described as
prostitute and queen as the narrative progresses. The synthesis of body
and clothing is essential to fairy tale, even where, as in Hans Christian
Andersen’s “Kejserens nye Klæder” (The Emperor’s New Clothes, 1837),
there are no material clothes at all.
Andersen’s gullible emperor is fixated on commissioning and wearing
new clothes, but exhibits poor judgement in giving funds to swindlers
who promise to weave a splendid cloth that people who are stupid or
unfit for their office cannot see. Of course, the emperor and the pop-
ulation pretend to see magnificent clothing made up from the fabric
where there is nothing at all, right up until a little child plainly states that
the emperor is wearing no clothes. However, in a sense, the emperor is
dressed: the statements about his magnificent apparel effectively clothe
him until the child interrupts with a literal interpretation. Maria Tatar
notes of the emperor’s portrayal that “excessive attachment to dress
appears particularly absurd in a monarch” who “allows it to interfere
with his royal duties.”83 However, a monarch such as Louis XIV would
laugh at such accusations and concerns, knowing how vital luxurious
attire is to the image of sovereignty itself. Andersen has no sympathy for
fashion, borne out by his persecution of young girls who like red shoes.
Actual monarchs were frequently well-versed in the intricacies of fashion,
and knew how to manipulate desire and authority through their own
dress, that of their court and of the general population. Louis XIV even
brought into vogue the red heel.
Stuard notes the particularly public nature of the early days of fashion:
Fashion obliterated local costume, replacing it with fashions that spread

like lightning from town to town. Extreme fashion could stun and awe
the crowd because of its great expense. But fashion was also small novel-
ties and was dynamic, fickle, and volatile; it flourished where townspeople
could not stand to be left out of the new, riveting parade in the streets.84
Consumption was driven by the desire to be part of the great pub-

lic spectacle, to show off new styles of dress. In d’Aulnoy’s “Finette
Cendron” (1697), the sisters purloin wonderful clothes and insist
they must go to the closest city in order to show them off. The show
was a means of arresting attention—and sometimes being arrested.
Basile’s Cinderella, Zezolla, heading out to the feast in her carriage and
wearing her finery, looks, the unfortunately dribbling Antonella bluntly
informs her listeners, like a prostitute being publicly arrested. Indeed, as
the next chapters will show, early modern Cinderellas risk much in their
sartorial display. These are tales set in public spaces: in the dark woods
later popularised by the Brothers Grimm, is a gown as fashionable if no
one sees it? It is unsurprising to find the early literary tales are urban and
that tales themselves could so quickly obliterate their competition with a
more fashionable twist.
Generally speaking, however, while fairy tale is seen as originating in
antiquity, its source to this day debated, it is quite common for people
to believe that fashion is a mostly contemporary phenomenon, measured
by seasonal trends and fashion lines that simply did not exist in the ages
before mass consumerism and globalisation. Styles argues that the fash-
ion cycle “leads back to the fine silks that began to be made in Italy in
the later Middle Ages under the influence of imports from the Byzantine
Empire and the Muslim Mediterranean,” noting that competition in
trading markets, including that of Venice, led to volatility in fashion.85
It’s no surprise, therefore, that a fashion cycle makes an appearance in
Straparola’s Venetian tale collection. Straparola’s tale of the Devil’s mar-
riage to a woman called Silvia Ballastro reveals how the latter’s desire for
the latest fashions—annually generated—drives her satanic husband to
despair.
While the tale’s introduction derides women for their frivolity, sug-
gesting women should not annoy their husbands, the tale itself treats
fashion as an already powerful and vital force.86 Straparola gives Silvia’s
tale to one of the male storytellers, Benedetto of Treviso, judging it an
unfit tale for a female to recount, presumably on the basis of its neg-
ative portrayal of feminine fashion.87 Hearing the complaints of men
concerning their wives, the Devil takes physical, male form to determine
their truth. He chooses Silvia as a bride. She is allowed to make just one
demand of her husband. As female heroes always seek out a powerful
female patron, often in the form of a fairy godmother or nurse, Silvia
seeks out her shrewd mother for advice and consequently requests
everything she requires in terms of wardrobe. A wardrobe is thus a wife’s
priority. Straparola provides extensive, even exhaustive, detail, including
“headdresses and girdles embroidered with pearls,” the latter of which
have a long history of governance in sumptuary laws.88 Catherine Kovesi
Killerby, for example, references a chronicle of 1439 from Brescia in
which the misfortunes of the city are blamed upon the fashions sported
by tradesmen’s wives, including their use of pearls.89 Silvia’s display of
pearls will blight the existence of even the Devil himself. Nonetheless,
Silvia’s passion for fashion is driven by her delight in being considered a
well-dressed woman, providing her with consummate social status.
The women of the city consequently and spitefully contrive a new
fashion. The tale articulates the process by which women generate fash-
ion, changing old into new for the festival, which, being a public occa-
sion, encourages display. Without new fashions of her own, Silvia worries
that she won’t be able to appear at the festival. Just like Cinderella,
she cannot participate in public life unless fashionably attired. Donald
Beecher observes, “Silvia’s compelling need to participate in the game
of sartorial fitness and social survival, which includes its own ante-rais-
ing mechanisms in the periodic alteration of styles […] the story pro-
files the psychology that drives the fashion trade as an arms race among
women.”90 These cycles of fashion, led by the women, drive the story,
Silvia constantly begging her husband for a new wardrobe. “No other
lady could boast of jewels so costly or of robes of such rich and sumptu-
ous a weave,” but repeatedly Silvia finds herself in the position of having
“no clothes in the new fashion.”91 Prompted to marry in order to dis-
cover the truth behind the accusations men level against their wives—
apparently these husbands wound up in the Devil’s purview, which is
apt—the Devil’s ignorance of, and impatience with, fashion is his undo-
ing. Required to constantly update Silvia’s wardrobe, he consequently
runs away, presumably with his tail between his legs. Fashion overcomes
the Devil himself. The female tale-tellers turn on Benedetto at the tale’s
end: Vicenza is particularly angry and condemns Benedetto’s accusa-
tions against women. Fashion is already a point of contention between
men and women. Scholars such as Heller roll the starting date for fash-
ion back further, to the Middle Ages, identifying in the period’s litera-
ture references to changing ideas of what is or is not fashionable.
Medieval storytelling, upon which authors such as L’Héritier osten-
sibly draw, actually played its part in articulating how fashion was gen-
erated and understood. Heller argues that medieval fashion should be
studied side by side with written texts, maintaining that fashion “relies
on communication for its existence.”92 The symbiotic relationship of
narratives and fashion actually promoted values of feminine desire.
Medieval narratives expounded upon courtly love, E. Jane Burns argu-
ing that “reading courtly love stories through the clothes of their
protagonists [helps] us see that gender in courtly love scenarios is often

configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally
derived categories of woman and man” wherein “the deployment of rich
clothes can also enable, symbolically, an increase in the social status of
women in love.”93 Courtly heroines, for example, give small items of
clothing or accessories as parts of themselves, articulating and exploiting
the connection between clothing and body to materially manifest femi-
nine desire and mark intended lovers. Such small items echo in the lost
slippers and rings that fairy tale heroes leave lying about for their princes
to find.
Notions of courtly love and chivalric conduct were, in particular,
taken up by the female fairy-tale authors who elaborated these ideas in
order to liberate female desire and create autonomy, while at the same
time securing their aristocratic birthright. Sullerot describes courtly love:
For women believed that they were queens in the era of courtly love. To
confirm the truth of this, one need only carefully analyze the language that
they use: There is not a single passive turn of phrase, not the slightest trace
of the concept of woman as an object. They are subjects, they “give” the
kiss of love, they “have the right” to enjoy the body of the man.94
Courtly love presented a forum in which a culture of erotic love could

thrive, despite the pragmatic, patriarchal arrangement of marriage and
its attendant affairs. Court life could likewise be interrogated and trans-
formed. Sarah Kay posits courtly love “as a series of questions which are
debated across large numbers of texts, and which can be traced back to
the tensions within medieval court life.”95 Such a debate was perpetuated
in the French fairy-tale vogue, reflecting tensions within Versailles itself.
While this book is essentially European in its focus, Europe did not
exist in a vacuum, certainly not in the Middle Ages. Giorgio Riello, for
example, notes, “Crusaders and Mediterranean merchants from the
twelfth century brought back to Europe not just Middle Eastern silks,
but also a keen taste for such commodities that quickly spread at court
and in urban society.”96 Burns points out the influx of Eastern fabrics
and fashion inspiration at medieval courts,97 and it is more than likely
the tales of the East, including the loose collection that would become
the One Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights, also flowed
into Europe, even though Antoine Galland’s first European translation
was not published till the early eighteenth century, at the same time
that other fairy-tale authors including Louise de Bossigny, Comtesse

d’Auneuil and Jean-Paul Bignon adopted Oriental influences. There
are clear lines of influence. Thomas Keightley, for example, in the nine-
teenth century, asserts the direct influence of One Thousand and One
Nights upon French medieval narrative and, indeed, upon Straparola:
“The romance of Cleomades and Claremonde, which was written in
the thirteenth century, not merely resembles, but actually is the story of
the Enchanted Horse in the Thousand and One Nights. Another tale in
the same collection, ‘The two Sisters who envied their younger Sister,’
may be found in Strapparola, and is also a popular story in Germany.”98
Keightley suspects that the romance, written for Blanche of France, came
from “the Moors,” noting that Straparola and Basile lived on the trade
route from the East.99 Indeed, the taste for Middle Eastern textiles and
consumer goods is evident in their fairy tales.
The eventual translation of Middle Eastern tales into French by
Antoine Galland in 1704–1717, is perhaps paradoxically prompted by
the influence of The Thousand and One Nights and other tales from the
Middle East and Asia upon European fairy tales. Nancy Canepa suggests
that the framing device, itself a fairy tale, used by Basile is more reflective
of the traditions of Eastern works such as The Arabian Nights than the
more “realist” frame tales evident in Europe at the time.100 The tales very
plausibly travelled into Europe, along with the silks and dyes that would
go into the making of the fashionable attire that would in turn create
the sartorial spectacle of European fairy tale. J. R. Planché, in his edi-
tion of French tales, notes, “those Oriental stories which were circulated
in manuscript long before their publication by Galland, or picked up by
[d’Aulnoy] herself during her residence in Spain from the Moorish and
Turkish slaves around her, nay, from her own little servant Zayde.”101
Thus, it is not surprising that once The Arabian Nights “officially”
passed into the European fairy-tale tradition, the synergy between tra-
ditions was immensely popular. Citton observes, “If fairy powers, met-
amorphosed pumpkins, and magic wands took everyone by surprise
during the last decade of the seventeenth century, this purely modern
innovation really took off only when writers came to hybridize it with
another most heated fashion of the period, the Oriental tale,” indicating
the hybridization of the tales of women authors and Eastern-influenced
tales “proved unstoppable” for well into the eighteenth century.102
As for fashion, Adam Geczy suggests Galland’s work “provided the
narrative pretext for masquerade.”103 Although Madeleine Delpierre
asserts that oriental dress was largely still a matter of fancy dress in
Europe and didn’t fully enter fashion till later in the eighteenth century,
around 1775,104 items such as the banyan certainly had been adopted in
French dress by the late seventeenth century.105 Indeed, Beverly Lemire
and Riello note that “[t]he influence of Asian commodities on the gen-
esis of fashion in Europe was wide ranging” and “the material substance
of this trade acted within social and cultural realms, as a stimulus of
desires.”106 The dialogue between the East and West on fashion and fairy
tale was complex and extensive.
The Fashionable Bourgeoisie (Contains Some Aristocrats)

While the French fairy-tale vogue had focused on the world of aristo-
crats—and, indeed, early modern fairy tale was orientated around the
courts and court patronage—as the eighteenth century progressed, there
was more focus upon bourgeois characters and fashions. This is evident
in the evolution of Beauty, the hero of Beauty and the Beast tales. The
tale has ancient roots and does appear in the French vogue. D’Aulnoy’s
“Serpentin Vert” (The Green Serpent, 1697) is a striking instance, for
the hero is an ugly, intelligent princess courted by a prince who has
been transformed into a monstrous serpent.107 The princess’s stay at the
beast’s wondrous palace, waited upon by small, porcelain figurines called
the pagodes, and entertained by plays, musical performances, and balls,
lays the groundwork for the later versions featuring such marvellous pal-
aces offering entertainment and extensive wardrobes to their Beauties.
Laideronnette, cruelly named for her ugliness, attends her sister’s wed-
ding early in the tale, but is presented with old ribbon from her sister
and a purplish taffeta for a skirt from her brother-in-law. Her physical
appearance is slighted through the bestowal of old and unfashionable
sartorial trinkets. In the beast’s palace, on the other hand, she is lavished
with fashionable, luxurious items of apparel, the attention providing her
with self-esteem and status, and, through her adventures, she is finally
transformed into a beauty, becoming la reine Discrète, her name echoing
L’Héritier’s Discreet Princess, published two years earlier.108 D’Aulnoy’s
“Le Mouton” (The Sheep or The Ram, 1697) also features an exiled
princess introduced to the wonders of the beast’s—in this case a ram’s—
domain, including streams of wine, trees bearing perfectly cooked and
dressed poultry, and rains of lobster and soup. Like Laideronnette, she
is able to visit her family but, on one such visit, she is made queen, her
father abdicating as amends for his bad behaviour. In the joy and bustle
of becoming queen, she forgets about the ram, who perishes from heart-
break. The ram’s backstory, involving a jealous fairy, is also echoed in the
Beauty and the Beast tales in which the prince is similarly transformed for
spurning a fairy’s love or for a simple lack of hospitality. As in later tales,
d’Aulnoy presents the foremost aspect of her heroes, Laideronnette and
Merveilleuse, as intelligence, though she does not place them in a hos-
tage relationship with the Beast, the predicament that underscores the
tale’s later iterations.
Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “La Belle et la Bête”
(Beauty and the Beast) was published in 1740 in La Jeune Amériquaine
ou les contes marins and is frequently regarded as the first version, cer-
tainly the first of that title. In the tale, Beauty is the daughter of a mer-
chant, but it later transpires that she was born a princess. The tale has
much in common with the style of the female authors of the previous
century, and Villeneuve herself had aristocratic and official family con-
nections. She was widowed when young and, having spent her fortune,
had to earn a living. She lived with Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon, a play-
wright, in Paris, outside the court of Louis XV, yet in close proximity.
The tale appears again in 1756, written by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de
Beaumont for Magasin des enfants. Beaumont was the daughter of art-
ist Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Leprince, and, upon her mother’s death, was
sent to a convent where she was trained to be a teacher and, for a time,
thought of taking orders herself. Her first husband was a dance master
and she appears to have led a rather scandalous youth before settling into
the authorship of pedagogical and moral works.109 Her version of Beauty
and the Beast removes the subplot by which Beauty is revealed to be a
princess in her own right: Beaumont’s Beauty is the daughter of a mer-
chant. The shorter, simpler tale became the most popular and contains
little fashionable detail.
The shift towards a bourgeois focus, particularly in the nine-
teenth century, had profound consequences for fairy tale. Laurence
Talairach-Vielmas argues that “the role that clothes play in the adap-
tation and rewriting of folktales into literary fairy tales is revealing of
the way in which bourgeois mores and norms redefined the feminine
ideal according to the demands of patriarchal ideology.”110 Talairach-
Vielmas interprets this in part as encouraging women to shop, “obses-
sionally fashioning an artificial appearance.”111 Of course, women’s
shopping being presented as a patriarchal and capitalist inducement
to consumerism is nothing new, neither is the notion of women look-

ing artificial. From the very start, fairy tales were based on the culture
of consumption and obsessed with changing and enhancing appearance.
Only, in the early modern tales, fashion was often a means to provide
women with agency, actually challenging patriarchal ideologies. In La
Force’s “Plus Belle que Fée” (Fairer Than a Fairy, 1697), for example,
the lovely princess Désirs is challenged to obtain the Rouge of Youth
from the Fair of Time, the latter being a building filled with shops “kept
by young and agreeable fairies, assisted by their favourite lovers.”112
The female fairies control commerce in the Fair of Time, the male lovers
acting as subordinates in the economy. The princess not only obtains the
rouge after some misadventures, but also freely uses it herself in order to
increase her already considerable beauty. There is no criticism or reper-
cussion for her use of cosmetics. Shops and cosmetics are a source of
female pleasure and power.
As revolution swept these tales away, the next fashion for fairy tale
coalesced around the tales of the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm,
bourgeois scholars of Hesse-Kassel, who undertook a scholarly project
to record folklore and discovered a market for the tales as children’s
literature, thereby embarking upon what would be an incredibly suc-
cessful commercial publishing venture. Today, their work is frequently
misrepresented as containing the “original tales.” Spare tales—even
sparer than Perrault’s—at first glance, they lack fashionable detail, but
their female sources, in particular, were often raised on French tales
and fashion is, nonetheless, discernable in their more popular tales,
such as “Aschenputtel” (Cinderella, 1812) and “Die zertanzten Schuhe”
(The Worn-out Dancing Shoes, 1815). The Brothers Grimm’s pre-
tence of drawing their tales from peasants, however, reinforced a per-
ception that fairy tales are told by poor, old women unfamiliar with
fashion. Tales from working-class storytellers, particularly from previ-
ous centuries, can generalise luxurious fashions, but details of dress are
often still apparent. Victoria Ivleva, for instance, looking at clothing in
Russian folktale, argues that “[p]oor country dress is usually more sug-
gestive of the character’s geographical origin than rich clothes. Being of
lower social standing, storytellers were more skilful and detail-oriented
in describing the dress of their own social group.”113 Nonetheless, the
Brothers Grimm actively simplified the excesses of fashion through the
editing process, Cinderella’s pearls and stockings disappearing between
the 1812 and 1857 versions. Whether or not it was part of a conscious
shift away from portraying feminine fashion, the effect has been to
further render the tales as ostensibly timeless and supports the conceptu-
alisation of the peasant storyteller as source.
Contemporaneous tales by German women, on the other hand, pro-
vide a wealth of sartorial detail. For female authors, fashion and textile
work, including sewing, remained an écriture féminine. These women
came from diverse social backgrounds and had varied authorial ambi-
tions, from those who wrote to instruct and amuse pupils to those
who had scholarly inclinations themselves. Amalie Von Helwig’s “Die
Symbole” (The Symbols, 1814) describes how a “brooch of brilliant
rubies fastened the shawl laced with gold before her breast and swirled
around her comely arm rising gracefully from its many folds,” effica-
ciously articulating the fashionable arrangement of a shawl.114 Agnes
Franz’s “Prinzessin Rosalieb. Ein Mährchen” (Princess Rosalieb, 1841)
stipulates that the princess wore “a dress of the most sumptuous silver
lamé,” providing more textile information than the Brothers Grimm in
their reference to Cinderella’s silver gown.115 Sophie von Baudissin’s
“Das Puppenstift” (The Doll Institute, 1849) features a child’s fashion
doll, Adelgunde. When the king threatens to confiscate all the dolls in
the kingdom because women are growing up to be “vain fiends of fash-
ion,” the dolls and their owners protest.116 The dolls become discontent,
however, and petition the king for their freedom, including Adelgunde,
who, like a Cinderella, has been left in cinders, her beautiful clothing
reduced to paint rags. The dolls eventually come to a toy warehouse,
where provided with new heads and clothing, they are sent out to new
little girls. While the tale ostensibly reinforces the importance of moth-
erhood and responds to the failed 1848 revolution, the details of doll’s
clothing and the dolls’ desire for new fashions is central to the plot.117
Like d’Aulnoy and her peers, later female authors articulated areas of
feminine expression, including the sartorial, in further elaborating female
desire.
Jeannine Blackwell, discussing this German “vogue” with its myriad
influences, notes “women often had more access than their male friends
and relatives to the Volk through the marketplace, the small shop, serv-
ants, and consumer providers such as tailors, shoemakers, and laun-
dresses.”118 In effect, shopping allowed women to engage with a more
heterogeneous population, allowing them to cross class boundaries even
as they participated in consumer culture, through which fairy tales them-
selves were exchanged and admired alongside fabrics and furbelows.
Erika Diane Rappaport, writing of the perceptions of the female

Victorian shopper, observes that she “was designated as a pleasure seeker,
defined by her longing for goods, sights, and public life. At times her
desires were understood as sexual, but the Victorians also believed that
shopping afforded many bodily and intellectual pleasures.”119 Fairy-tale
princesses and other heroes happily took up the pleasures of shopping
and its sartorial fruits in tales of the period. Anne Isabella Ritchie’s
“Cinderella,” for example, features shopping on the Brompton Road,
Lady Jane purchasing a white bonnet for Ella. The excursion is sum-
marised: “What a fairy tale it was!”120 Detailed descriptions of dress—
obtaining clothing, making or mending clothing—provided not simply
pleasure, but precise narrative information that could be understood by
the women who shopped.
The wide variety of fairy tales that were published in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries was a particular testament to the rapidly
increasing commercial demand for children’s literature. Collections
of old tales, new translations, rewritten tales, and new tales emerged,
with female authors especially active in the genre. In Britain, foreign
fairy tales, in particular, had made an impact, filling the absence of
a comprehensive local tradition. Indeed, Britain had never had a fash-
ion for fairy tales until the publishing industry took up the cause and,
as Harries indicates, translation played a major role in English fairy-tale
history.121 Andrew Lang published the famous coloured fairy books
(1889–1910)—The Blue Fairy Book (1889) through to The Lilac
Fairy Book (1910)—working with his wife, Leonora Alleyne, along-
side a female team of editors, translators, and transcribers. For The Blue
Fairy Book, for instance, Minnie Wright translated and adapted tales
from d’Aulnoy and the Cabinet des Fées; May Sellar and Sylvia Hunt,
the Brothers Grimm and other German tales; with other tales reprints
adapted by Lang himself, or by Mrs. Alfred Hunt, Violet Hunt, and
May Kendall. With the exception of Mrs. Alfred Hunt, the women were
apparently all single. With all the single ladies assisting the Brothers
Grimm, too, it appears that unmarried women were particularly diligent
in doing the work of spreading fairy tales. The Blue Fairy Book includes
a mix of tales, including those of the Brothers Grimm, Perrault, d’Aul-
noy, and Beaumont. The tales of the French vogue were evidently
still popular. J. R. Planché published Fairy Tales by the Countess d’Aul-
noy (1855) and Four and twenty fairy tales (1858), later titled Fairy
Tales, by Perrault, de Villeneuve, de Caylus, de Lubert, de Beaumont, and
Others (1869). Laura Valentine published various versions of The Old Old
Fairy Tales in the late Victorian period, including various combinations
of tales by Perrault, d’Aulnoy, La Force, and other authors and sources.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie provided the introduction to The Fairy Tales of
Madame d’Aulnoy (1892), translated by Annie Macdonell and Elizabeth
Lee. However, Perrault, and even more so Andersen and the Brothers
Grimm, were now dominating the fairy-tale field.
The fashionable fairy tale had, in many ways, removed to the theatre.
In France, spectacular fairy comedies—folie féeries—were popular in the
early nineteenth century. Planché, who published his own translations of
French tales and was himself of Huguenot descent, was inspired by these
productions, particularly Riquet à la Houpe, which he saw in 1821.122
Back in London, he created over twenty fairy extravaganzas in the next
decades, drawing upon French tales, particularly those of his favourite
author, d’Aulnoy. The extravaganzas influenced the pantomime fashion
that flourished on British stages and, to lesser extents, through the colo-
nies and even on Broadway. Planché’s extravaganzas, like the later panto-
mimes, made frequent, topical references to contemporary fashions and
issues. In The Bee and the Orange Tree; or, The Four Wishes (1845), for
example, an ogre consults his recipes, a gooseberry fool requiring one
to “Take a green-horn, whom fortune has heaped cash on, And mix him
with the cream of London fashion, Stir him well round till drained of
every penny.”123 The tales of the old vogue were firmly replanted in the
fashionable, consumerist milieu of London itself.
Cinderella was herself a popular subject for theatrical performance,
the hero appearing in operas, pantomimes, and musicals. These perfor-
mances were accessible to a diverse audience, including working women
who had opportunities to purchase cheap, fashionable apparel for them-
selves. Maya Cantu notes that musicals based on the Cinderella tale
were popular on Broadway in the early twentieth century, describing
“the professional and romantic conflicts of women in the work force,
of whom the shop girls of the Cinderella musical served as mod-
els and reflections.”124 Theatrical productions particularly capitalised
upon the fashionable appearances of their young actresses, as evident
in the abundance of photo postcards of actresses produced. Rappaport
describes how “theatrical reviews encouraged female playgoers to con-
centrate on the fashions paraded onstage.”125 She describes a review of
one Cinderella in a Lyceum pantomime (1894), noting: “The string of
adjectives – glittering, filmy, exquisite, graceful – the paragraph-length
sentences, and the references to ‘fairyland’ replicated the abundant

style of commodity culture on sale elsewhere. This was the prose of the
fashion world, the advertisement, and the shop window.”126 Such pro-
ductions, along with new published tales, enhanced the retail reputation
of fairy tale in fashion.
A Girl in a Dress: In Disney Fashion

Today, Disney dominates the fairy tale. A multinational conglomer-
ate, the organisation is built upon its animated features and its theme
parks, both of which celebrate and capitalise upon fairy-tale princesses.
Indeed, since 2000, Disney has achieved remarkable success marketing
the Disney Princess line, a range of merchandise based on their animated
princesses. The fairy-tale princess, in the hands of Disney, has become a
global commercial phenomenon.
Early modern authors wrote to amuse and flatter the court; Disney’s
army of creative employees, hired artists, marketing executives, and
others, work to amuse and flatter a global audience. Zipes criticises
Disney for its commercial domination of fairy tale, claiming Walt Disney,
the founder, “cast a spell on the fairy tale.”127 It would appear to be
one that has grown ever stronger since his death. Zipes is not alone in
condemning Disney. Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, for exam-
ple, claim “Disney actively appeals to both conscientious parents and
youthful fantasies as it works hard to transform every child into a life-
time consumer of Disney products and ideas.”128 Janet Wasko writes that
Disney’s appeal “cannot simply be magic,” arguing “it is also necessary
to understand the process by which Disney’s magic and fantasy are delib-
erately manufactured – they are produced by one of the largest media
and entertainment corporations in the world.”129 Disney was not always
the huge corporation known today. It was once a studio that produced
animated shorts featuring the now ubiquitous Mickey Mouse, and the
success of its first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), an
incredibly innovative feat at the time, really launched the success of the
fairy-tale animated feature. Criticism tends to foreground corporate and
economic structures, but the features themselves are made not by a sin-
gle, monolithic corporate entity, but by individuals in a range of roles.
Disney storytelling is a collaborative effort within the context of a cor-
poration, one that involves roles as varied as animators and engineers,
composers and baristas.130 Disney has been good at choosing outside
people to work with, too, whether that be award-winning theatre

director Julie Taymor, who took The Lion King to Broadway in 1997,
or Pulitzer-prize winning musical composer Lin-Manuel Miranda, who
composed for Moana (2016) alongside Mark Mancina and Opetaia
Foa’i.131 Understanding the potential this kind of collaboration creates
for narratives to exist as more complex ideological works is important,
just as it’s important to recognise that earlier fairy-tale figures such as
Perrault and the Brothers Grimm themselves took calculated commer-
cial decisions and capitalised upon publishing structures to achieve bet-
ter sales. The Brothers Grimm’s domination of fairy tale for over 200
years is as much about their creative and scholarly work, laced with patri-
archal and bourgeois ideologies, as it is about their canny commercial
judgement.
Disney is unquestionably good at creating fairy tales that appeal to
a diverse audience. Jack Zipes writes of “the false, rosy images that the
Disney Corporation and other popularizing artists and publishers have
disseminated.”132 There is no immediate elaboration of the nature of
that falseness, but Zipes has previously written to the notion that Disney
“animated the fairy tale only to transfix audiences and divert their poten-
tial utopian dreams and hopes through the false promises of the images
he cast upon the screen.”133 The problem is that Zipes’ continuing the-
sis regarding Disney, in particular, relies upon a construction of falsity
and duplicity that has, in fact, been levelled at the fairy-tale genre for
centuries and is one that is an essential element of the genre. Marina
Warner, for instance, observes the condemnation of Disney and notes
that critics still disapprove “the easy lies, the crass materialism, the false
hopes”134 offered by fairy tales, but that those same characteristics offer
not merely pleasure, but a means of challenging and reimagining domi-
nant discourses. The Disney princesses’ “I wish” songs, in particular, call
for something beyond their circumscribed social conditions, propelling
them towards revolutionary acts.135
Tracey Mollet counsels: “The problem with Disney appears to be the
paradoxical underlying notion that populist sentiment cannot be viewed
in unison with cultural importance. As such, many current critical works
on Disney are deductive in nature, analysing any Disney animated pro-
duction in exclusive, not inclusive, terms.”136 Disney’s work can be
understood in terms of feminist and fashion contexts, for instance.
In Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), Belle is living in a small vil-
lage with her father, an eccentric inventor. Where earlier Beauties were
princesses or the daughters of wealthy merchants now in financial straits,

Belle’s circumstances are clearly lower-middle-class and she chafes against
the restrictions of life in a small community and the pestering of misog-
ynist Gaston in a way that her predecessors did not. Belle was designed
in 1991 to capitalise upon the representation of strong-willed, outspo-
ken princesses, arriving at the start of the 1990s “girl power” movement.
Disney’s 2017 live action version features Emma Watson, famous for her
previous role as the bookworm Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter
films (2001–2011). Watson was eager to shift the feminist tilt of Beauty
and the Beast further, having spoken on feminism as the United Nations
Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women (September 2014), so launching
the HeForShe campaign for gender equality. Watson took an active role
in designing her costumes and, once again, worked to distinguish her
Belle from those who had gone before: to create a new, feminist Belle.
Her Belle wears drawers, is an amateur inventor, and most certainly does
not wear a corset. Jacqueline Durran, the costume designer who worked
on the iconic ballgown with Watson, said: “It was certain it shouldn’t
have a corset.”137 The costumes were consequently representative of the
particular feminist and sartorial image represented by Watson herself,
who at the time was often seen in high fashion trousers, which she also
wore during the Beauty and the Beast press tour. The new Belle was very
much designed around the actor, drawing upon, but not limited to, the
tradition of the Disney princess.138
Disney presents varied images of princesshood, though packaged
consistently through the Disney brand. While there are ostensible simi-
larities between the princesses, different ethnicities, body types, and con-
structions of beauty are evident. These continue to be—healthily and
correctly—debated. What is of note here is that Disney merchandising of
the princesses is driven in no small part by their sartorial spectacle, with
the princesses in their iconic clothing appearing on products and those
products, in turn, including costumes and various items of clothing. The
Victorian-inspired ballgown, as worn by Belle, Cinderella, and Tiana,
continues to dominate princess fashion, but alternative sartorial state-
ments are offered, Ariel, Merida, Leia, Mulan, Pocahontas, Moana, and
Elsa providing diversity. Today’s Disney princesses entice their audience
into a contained, pink-hued, sorority-styled world, where money is the
only requirement for access and thrones are shared between an infinite
parade of princesses. Girls are encouraged not simply to watch stories
of princesses, but to become princesses themselves. In d’Aulnoy’s day,
writers and readers became fairies. The princess was a role reserved for
those with royal blood in their veins. Disney has created an avenue of
commercial access to the role, for better or for worse.
The success of the princess model is evident in its proliferation
throughout Western and even global popular culture. Amy Odell, for
example, observes that “it is true that posts about Disney princesses are
extremely – almost bizarrely – viral. Of all the Internet’s most popular
subjects, from the Kardashians to real-life duchesses, to first dogs who
take selfies, Disney princesses routinely prove superiorly captivating,
whether the posts are shallow, analytical, disturbing, or hilarious.”139
Such posts frequently feature fan art of Disney princesses as hipsters,
mermaids, superheroes, high school students, cross-dressed and more.
The ubiquity of the princesses is based both upon their individuality and
their homogeneity. Individual characteristics, including personal style and
colour palettes, are maintained within broader trends, in much the way
that fashion itself operates through the populace, ostensibly providing
scope for individual expression, but within prescribed trends. Malcolm
Barnard observes, “fashionable clothing is used in western capitalist soci-
eties to affirm both membership of various social and cultural groups and
individual, personal identity.”140 While Disney princess fashion is rather
unique—Disney’s control over the dress of its princesses does distantly
echo that of Louis XIV—as a phenomenon, it manages to appeal both to
the individual and the wider audience.
Where the French fairies of the ancien régime claimed power over the
kingdoms of the world, however, today it’s the Disney princesses setting
new fashions for pastels and sparkles. The status of the princess itself has
changed. Princesses of the ancien régime lived in great luxury, repre-
senting the wealth and power of their families, but having little personal
autonomy. A merchant’s daughter or serving girl could certainly not
become a princess, no matter what certain fairy tales may suggest. In the
last few decades, however, royal families have welcomed new prin-
cesses from all classes. Rainier III, Prince of Monaco, married the
Hollywood actress, Grace Kelly, and, more recently, Britain’s Prince
William wed Catherine Middleton, Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon
wed Mette-Marit Tjessem Høiby, Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik
married Mary Donaldson, and Britain’s Prince Harry married Meghan
Markle, an American actress. Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria,
in turn, wed the gym owner and personal trainer, Daniel Westling.
As the role of princess has transformed, it is worth noting that it is
not unusual to see photographs of small girls dressed as Disney prin-

cesses meeting “real-life” princesses. Princess Madeleine of Sweden, for
example, hosted a 2016 party at the palace for a group of children as
part of Min Stora Dag, the charity granting seriously ill children their
wish. Among the party outfits worn by the children were Disney prin-
cess dresses. What is notable about these instances is that girls appear to
dress as princesses themselves in order to meet official princesses, sug-
gesting that the fairy-tale role, at least, has become much more flexible.
After all, a hard-working waitress and chef (Tiana, The Princess and the
Frog, 2009) and a woman who disguised herself as a man to join the
Chinese army (Mulan, Mulan, 1998) have been included in the Disney
princess line. Princess criteria have become socially elastic and the 2016
feature Moana articulates this fundamental redefinition of princess: when
Moana points out that she’s no princess, simply the chief’s daughter, the
demi-god Maui informs her that having a dress and an animal sidekick
makes you a princess.
Moana is not, in fact, wearing a dress. She is wearing an orange top
made from tapa and an embroidered skirt of woven pandanus, cloth-
ing representing a historic Polynesian culture far removed from that of
Cinderella or Belle. The dress is itself a powerful symbol, rather than
a scrupulous sartorial reality, the one form of clothing still regarded as
primarily feminine. It is no wonder that boys in Disney princess dresses
have become such a vexed issue in contemporary culture, or that rel-
atively economic costumes of satin and tulle can readily substitute for
the magical, luxurious dresses on screen. The idea, the impression of
the dress, gives every peasant, every bourgeoisie, every islander, every
gender an opportunity to reflect back the sartorial spectacle that is
the princess. However, it is worth noting that d’Aulnoy and her peers
would be on the side of the princesses of the blood, not the “common”
interlopers.
Conclusion: Fashion in Fairy Tale Matters

Despite the pivotal role clothing and fashion itself plays in fairy tale, little
has been done to properly understand its history in that context. This
book seeks to investigate how fashion has actively shaped our fairy-tale
traditions, revealing the material cultures behind the most famous sar-
torial gestures. Chapters 2 and 3 follow the adventures of the fashion
felons, the Cinderellas who risk all to reclaim their status, and their near
cousins, the Donkey Skins who use abjection to rebel against patriarchy
and regain sovereignty. These chapters articulate how the conceptualis-
ation of sartorial violation frames the most famous fashion spectacles in
fairy tale, establishing the political nature of dress in the tales. Chapter 4
turns to the production of fashion, to the spindles, distaffs, needles, and
fibre that create clothing. The chapter elaborates the skills that ultimately
generate female agency, reassessing the textile wonders of fairy tales in
line with the histories of women’s work, drawing a line from the queens
who spin for pleasure to the most lowly of seamstresses, and, in so doing,
explains the class and economic hierarchies that bend even a needle to
their command.
Of course, any book about the sartorial flair of fairy tales must exam-
ine shoes. Chapter 5 picks up those lost slippers, reclaims the red shoes,
and admires the cat’s boots, revealing how desire and damnation are
embodied in footwear. Shoes are the necessary vehicle for social mobil-
ity and, as such, play a significant role in fairy tales. The history of shoes
also sheds light upon the many secrets Cinderella conceals beneath her
gowns. Chapter 6 then turns to the custodians of sartorial power, the
fairies. The fairies have the power to bestow the most wonderful cloth-
ing on those they judge worthy, but what do the fairies themselves wear?
The sartorial cunning of the fairies has, over the centuries, been muted,
as the clothing of poor, working women has been used to camouflage
the wise women, uniting the witch, Mother Goose, and the fairy god-
mother through their taste in millinery. The wicked fairies, however, have
become increasingly sublime, figures of terrible glamour and sexual con-
fidence, threatening the status quo with their loud make-up and their
black and purple ensembles. The book’s conclusion sums up the argu-
ment for taking fashion in fairy tales seriously by looking at how under-
wear has become outerwear in a somewhat misguided attempt to free the
princess of her restrictive clothing. Such gestures misread the histories of
high heels and elaborate gowns, overlooking the political power that has
been wielded by princesses through dress.
Fairy tales are not, of course, simply about dresses and shoes, but the
habit of treating an interest in fashion as trivial is itself mirrored in fairy
tale’s history of being treated as inconsequential. It is no coincidence,
either, that both fashion and fairy tales are viewed as feminine spheres of
concern. This book sets out why fashion and the fairy tale are inexora-
bly linked, and how their relationship articulates centuries of debate over
female agency and autonomy.
Notes
1. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, “Introduction: The Fashion History
Reader: Global Perspectives,” in The Fashion History Reader: Global
Perspectives, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (London: Routledge,
2010), 1.
2. It is a fraught endeavour to seek fashionable detail in fairy tale; how-
ever, writers and artists were surrounded by fashion and were frequently
knowledgeable about trends. George Cruikshank, a popular fairy tale
illustrator of the nineteenth century for example, produced Monstrosities
(1816–1826), a series of cartoons that parodied each year’s fash-
ions. Cruikshank’s father also regularly parodied the day’s fashions in
caricatures.
3. John Styles, “Fashion and Innovation in Early Modern Europe,” in
Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe,
1500–1800, ed. Evelyn Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017), 33.
4. Styles, “Fashion,” 55.
5. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the
History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18.
6. Although undoubtedly inspired by the crinoline concoctions of the
Victorian era, it would be wrong to entirely dismiss the influence of the
1980s fashion for “poufy” wedding dresses, as so aptly worn by the then
Lady Diana Spencer on her wedding to the Prince of Wales in 1981 and
by Ariel on her wedding to Prince Eric in The Little Mermaid (1989).
7. Nadine Kam, “Pouf! Costume Magic,” Star Bulletin, November 15,
2007, http://archives.starbulletin.com/2007/11/15/features/story01.
html.
8. Giselle is not the first princess to pick up a sword and rescue her true
love, of course. The trope is evident even in early modern fairy tales.
However, it is a particular trend of the early twenty-first century.
9. Juliette Peers, The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie (Oxford:
Berg, 2004), 39.
10. Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell, The Makeover in Movies:
Before and After in Hollywood Films, 1941–2002 (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Company, 2004), 30.
11. Angela Carter, ed., Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (London: Virago,
2005), xxii.
12. Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge:
D.S. Brewer, 2007), 46.
14. Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2003), 21.
15. Joanne Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress & Modern Social
Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015), 62. Entwistle embeds this
statement in a discussion of the theories striving to account for fashions
changing.
16. Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of
a Genre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 22.
17. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their
Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), xv–xvi.
18. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy
Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
19. The debate played out in part in the “Critical Exchanges” in Marvels
and Tales. Lewis C. Seifert, Catherine Velay-Vallantin, and Ruth
B. Bottigheimer, “Comments on Fairy Tales and Oral Tradition,”
Marvels & Tales 20, no. 2 (2006): 276–280, Project MUSE. Zipes
(Irresistible, 2012) also dedicates an appendix, “Sensationalist
Scholarship,” to discussing Bottigheimer’s claims and the debate.
20. Nancy Canepa, From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de
li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1999), 16.
21. Canepa, From Court to Forest, 22.
22. Allison Stedman, Rococo Fiction in France, 1600–1715: Seditious Frivolity
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 130. In D’Aulnoy’s Fairy
Tales, Planché writes of “a demand for what the Spaniards called an
Entreteniamento, a narrative occupying not more than ten or a dozen
pages instead of as many volumes. Fashion is always running into
extremes. The extent of a Fairy Tale satisfied this new caprice.” Marie-
Catherine d’Aulnoy, D’Aulnoy’s Fairy Tales, ed. and trans. J. R. Planché
(London: George Routledge & Sons, 1888), x. Here, Planché finds
precedent in a Spanish example, too, and highlights the fashionability of
the evolving literature.
23. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ed., Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords,
Afterwords, and Critical Words (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2012), 101–102.
24. Stedman, Rococo Fiction in France, 130.
25. Harries, Twice, 61.
26. Patricia Hannon, Fabulous Identities: Women’s Fairy Tales in Seventeenth-
Century France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 11–12.
27. Nadine Jasmin, “Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aul-
noy: 1650/51?–1705,” trans. Sophie Raynard, in Sophie Raynard, ed.,
The Teller’s Tale: Lives of the Classic Fairy Tale Writers (Albany: State
University of New York, 2012), 62.
28. These works were published just before d’Aulnoy left Paris and the close
connections of the authors with the French court are notable. While
d’Aulnoy’s tale is an unhappy one, the island itself is certainly utopic
until a man arrives.
29. Clara Hahu Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime
France, 1675–1791 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 29–30.
30. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford
32. Christine A. Jones contends that Perrault’s title is an effort “to update
inherited wisdom” for the more youthful members of court. Mother
Goose Refigured: A Critical Translation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 63. He is not, however,
candid about this project in the title and plays it both ways.
35. Jones, Refigured, 42.
36. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, The Original Folk & Fairy Tales
of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, trans. and ed. Jack
Zipes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 8.
37. Evelyne Sullerot, Women on Love: Eight Centuries of Feminine Writing,
trans. Helen R. Lane (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979), 304.
38. Jasmin, Teller’s Tale, 64.
39. Elizabeth Davis, “Habit de qualité: Seventeenth-Century French
Fashion Prints as Sources for Dress History,” Dress 40, no. 2 (2014):
117–143, Taylor & Francis Online.
40. Sullerot, Women on Love, 302. Indeed, her version is published first.
41. Bottigheimer in Bottigheimer, ed., Fairy Tales Framed, 131.
44. Sophie Raynard in Bottigheimer, ed., Fairy Tales Framed, 142.
45. Raynard in Bottigheimer, ed., Fairy Tales Framed, 142.
46. L’Héritier may have also been subtly undermining the myth of Richard
the Lionheart. The villain of the tale, Riche-Cautèle, is named for his
guile, but the choice of “riche” does echo the name of Richard.
47. David Boyle, Blondel’s Song: The Capture, Imprisonment and Ransom of
Richard the Lionheart (London: Viking, 2005), xxviii.
48. Raynard in Bottigheimer, ed., Fairy Tales Framed, 134–135.
49. Alicia C. Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013), 17.
50. The inspiration is rather loose, but is noted in scholarship.
51. The affair of Rosamund itself became a folk tale in which the fair beauty
was concealed in a labyrinth by her lover, but was poisoned by Henry’s
wife, Eleanor.
52. Harold Neemann, “Marie de France (fl. 1160–1190),” in The Greenwood
Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales: Volume Two: G-P, ed. Donald
Haase (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008), 605.
53. Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment, 138.
54. Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment, 144.
55. Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton, eds. and trans., Enchanted
Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers
(Toronto: Iter Inc. & Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies,
2010), 70.
56. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, Travels into Spain: Being the Ingenious and
Diverting Letters of the Lady—Travels into Spain, trans. R. Foulché-
Delbosc (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930), 3.
57. Raynard in Bottigheimer, ed., Fairy Tales Framed, 171.
58. The empress, hero of the novel, desires a spiritual scribe and the spirit
currently advising her rejects the male writers suggested, advocat-
ing the Duchess of Newcastle, “although she is not one of the most
learned, eloquent, witty, and ingenious, yet is she a plain and rational
writer.” Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings,
ed. Kate Lilley (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 181. The empress
and the Duchess become firm friends, even though the Duchess con-
fesses her writing is virtually illegible. The epilogue of Cavendish’s play,
The Convent of Pleasure, also directly addresses her authorship: “I dare
not beg Applause, our Poetess then Will be enrage’d, and kill me with
her Pen; For she is careless, and is void of fear; If you dislike her Play
she doth not care.” Margaret Cavendish, The Convent of Pleasure and
Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1999), 247. The play itself, with its Lady Happy and cross-dress-
ing, amorous adventures, has much in common with the fairy tales that
would flourish in the French vogue.
59. Lewis C. Seifert, “Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force: 1650?–
1742,” in Raynard, Teller’s Tale, 89.
61. Planché claims “the real foundation” of Perrault’s works as “the old
Breton Contes de ma Mère l’Oye” that “he had heard in his own nurs-
ery, and with which Louis XIV had been rocked to sleep when a child.”
James Robinson Planché, trans., Fairy Tales, by Perrault, de Villeneuve,
de Caylus, de Lubert, de Beaumont, and Others (London: George
Routledge & Sons, 1869), 556.
62. Hannon, Fabulous Identities, 185.
63. Holly Tucker and Melanie Siemens, “Perrault’s Preface to Griselda and

Murat’s ‘To Modern Fairies’,” Marvels & Tales 19, no. 1 (2005): 125,
Project MUSE.
64. Yves Citton, “Specters of Multiplicity: Eighteenth-Century Literature
Revisited from the Outside In,” in French Global: A New Approach to
Literary History, ed. Christie McDonald and Susan Rubin Suleiman
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 374.
65. Citton, “Specters of Multiplicity,” 374.
66. L’Héritier’s understanding of her authorial heritage is not simply a his-
torical interest. Montoya notes “the medieval was not a fixed or dead
past, but the subject of recurring, daily rituals and sometimes elaborate
social performances” (Medievalist Enlightenment, 108).
67. Anne E. Duggan, Salonnières, Furies, and Fairies: The Politics of Gender
and Cultural Change in Absolutist France (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2005), 16.
68. Paula Hohti, “Dress, Dissemination, and Innovation: Artisan Fashions
in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in Fashioning the
Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800,
ed. Evelyn Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 148.
69. It does raise the interesting possibility that, as with sartorial fashion, the
“ordinary” people creatively adapted fashionable fairy tales through
their own oral practices.
70. Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katharine
H. Jewett (New York: Routledge, 2002), 146.
71. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the
Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 32.
72. It is a form of collar, sometimes later referred to as the Medici collar.
As Perrault writes, the term collet monté references something old-fash-
ioned, indicating another aspect to his humorous intent.
73. Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy
Tales: Revised and Expanded Edition (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2002), 195.
74. Jack Zipes, ed., The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood,
2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 13, 34.
75. Jack Zipes, “Of Cats and Men: Framing the Civilizing Discourse of the
Fairy Tale,” in Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary Fairy Tale in
Italy and France, ed. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1997), 188.
76. Angela Carter, ed. and trans., The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
(London: Penguin, 2008), 75.
77. Harries, Twice, 30–31.
78. Heller, Fashion in Medieval France, 10.

80. Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in
Fourteenth-Century Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2006), 2.
81. Stuard, Gilding the Market, 109. Grosz (earlier writing as Gross) writes
that “the body image is capable of accommodating and incorporating
an extremely wide range of objects” including clothing, and provides
the example that clothing changes posture and stride. Elizabeth Grosz,
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1994), 80. Thus, clothing and the body become one
physical unit.
82. A full discussion of Zezolla’s footwear appears in Chapter 5.
83. Maria Tatar, ed., The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, trans. Maria
Tatar and Julie K. Allen (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 5.
84. Stuard, Gilding the Market, 11.
86. Giovan Francesco Straparola, The Pleasant Nights, vol. 1, ed. Donald
Beecher, trans. W. G. Waters, rev. Donald Beecher (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2012), 331.
87. Ruth Bottigheimer asserts “Straparola’s frametale storytelling was not
completely automatic” and where a tale didn’t suit the teller, he would
change to an alternative storyteller (Fairy Godfather, 100). The incom-
patibility was based on gender, which, at least in the case of Silvia’s
story, as Bottigheimer notes, recognises that its sentiments are misogynist.
88. Straparola, The Pleasant Nights, 332.
89. Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 81.
92. Heller, Fashion in Medieval France, 7.
93. E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in
Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002), 3.
94. Sullerot, Women on Love, 17.
95. Sarah Kay, “Courts, Clerks, and Courtly Love,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81.
96. Giorgio Riello, “Fashion, Fabrics and the Orient,” in The Fashion
History Reader: Global Perspectives, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil
(London: Routledge, 2010), 41. Of course, trade existed prior to the
crusades, but the crusades did factor in no small way into the historical
understanding of authors such as L’Héritier.
97. Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 179–210.

98. Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (London:
William Harrison Ainsworth, 1828), 47.
99. Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, 47.
100. Giambattista Basile, Giambattista Basile’s the Tale of Tales, or
Entertainment for Little Ones, trans. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 2007), 17.
101. Planché, Fairy Tales, 556–557.
102. Citton, “Specters of Multiplicity,” 374.
103. Adam Geczy, Fashion and Orientalism: Dress, Textiles and Culture from
the 17th to the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 35.
104. Madeleine Delpierre, Dress in France in the Eighteenth Century, trans.
Caroline Beamish (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 67.
105. Olivier Raveux, “Fashion and Consumption of Painted and Printed
Calicoes in the Mediterranean During the Later Seventeenth Century:
The Case of Chintz Quilts and Banyans in Marseilles,” Textile History
45, no. 1 (May 2014): 54, Taylor & Francis Online.
106. Beverly Lemire and Giorgio Riello, “East & West: Textiles and Fashion
in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Social History 41, no. 4 (Summer
2008), 891, JSTOR.
107. The tale acknowledges its ancient roots, Laideronnette reading the tale
of Psyche and Cupid, written, so the tale notes, by a very fashionable
author (Jean de La Fontaine’s version had been published in 1669). She
knows she should follow its example, but is led astray by her family.
108. The discretion invoked in their names indicates their good judgment.
109. Elisa Biancardi, “Jeanne-Marie Leprince (or Le Prince) de Beaumont:
1711–1780?,” trans. Sophie Raynard in Raynard, The Teller’s Tale,
110–111.
110. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian
Culture (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 85.
111. Talairach-Vielmas, Fairy Tales, Natural History, 85.
112. Planché, Fairy Tales, 193.
113. Victoria Ivleva, “Functions of Textile and Sartorial Artifacts in Russian
Folktales,” Marvels & Tales 23, no. 2 (2009): 269–270, Project MUSE
114. Shawn C. Jarvis and Jeannine Blackwell, eds. and trans., The Queen’s
Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780–1900 (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2001), 124.
115. Jarvis and Blackwell, The Queen’s Mirror, 174.
119. Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of

London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5.
120. Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, Five Old Friends and a Young Prince
(London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1868), 56.
122. James Robinson Planché, The Recollections and Reflections of J. R.
Planché: A Professional Autobiography (London: Tinsley Brothers,
1872), 246.
123. James Robinson Planché, The Extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, Esq.
(Somerset Herald) 1825–1871: Vol. III, ed. T. F. Dillon Croker and
Stephen Tucker (London: Samuel French, 1879), 64.
124. Maya Cantu, “‘Clothes Make an Awful Difference in a Girl’: Mlle.
Modiste, Irene, and Funny Face as Cinderella Fashion Musicals,” Studies
in Musical Theatre 9, no. 1 (2015): 14, JSTOR
125. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 187.
126. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 186.
127. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (Lexington: University
Press of Kentucky, 1994), 72.
128. Henry A. Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and
the End of Innocence, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010),
xiv.
129. Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 1.
130. Carlos Benavides has been receiving credits on films including Frozen
(2013) and Moana (2016) for “caffeination,” a rather nice gesture to
inclusivity of roles in terms of collaboration.
131. Miranda’s Hamilton (2016) won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A musical
about the founding fathers, the cast is ethnically diverse with the only
part performed by a white actor being that of George III, the titular vil-
lain. Taymor’s production of The Lion King was also ground-breaking in
terms of its ethnically diverse cast, only the villain, Scar, and a handful of
other non-lion characters played by white actors.
132. Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale, 136.
133. Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale, 74.
134. Warner, Beast to the Blonde, 415.
135. As with most fairy tales, the revolutionary impulse is usually reintegrated
into the status quo at the conclusion, but the impulse is nonetheless
noteworthy. The “I wish” song is shorthand terminology for the solo
of the Disney princess, a song that encapsulates her desires. These are
songs in which a princess is literally able to articulate her desire.
136. Tracey Mollet, “‘With a Smile and a Song’: Disney and the Birth of the
American Fairy Tale,” in Debating Disney: Pedagogical Perspectives on
Commercial Cinema, ed. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode (Lanham:

Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 55.
137. Fawnia Soo Hoo, “How the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Costume Designer
Worked with Emma Watson to Bring a ‘Modern, Emancipated’
Belle to Life,” Fashionista, March 13, 2017, https://fashionista.
com/2017/03/beauty-and-the-beast-2017-dress-costumes.
138. The same dynamic is evident in Disney’s live-action Maleficent (2014),
as is discussed in Chapter 6, but not Cinderella (2015), in which Lily
James’ own sartorial style does not significantly inform that of the
character.
139. Amy Odell, “Why Are Adults on the Internet So Obsessed with
Disney Princesses?” Vanity Fair, August 30, 2013, http://www.van-
ityfair.com/online/daily/2013/08/why-are-adults-on-the-internet-
so-obsessed-with-disney-princesses.
140. Malcolm Barnard, Fashion as Communiciation, 2nd ed. (London:
Routledge, 2002), 12.
CHAPTER 2
Fashion Felons I: Leading La Mode
The Cinderella entering the European literary tradition is shrewd and

resourceful. Disenfranchised by her family and unmarried, her social sta-
tus is ambiguous. Yet, all she wants is the sartorial wherewithal to have a
good night out. The way she dresses is a crime.
As established, items of clothing exist in early modern Europe as
objects with socio-political and material value, subject to sumptuary
laws and social conventions. That value can nonetheless be worn fraud-
ulently, Jones and Stallybrass describing how “these worn things can be
transferred from body to body; they can be appropriated or stolen.”1
Cinderella’s stepfamily unlawfully seizes her wardrobe, forcing her out of
public life and into domestic obscurity. They, in turn, disport themselves
publicly, in some cases in her clothing, claiming status as prominent local
figures. Cinderella, longing for a return to the public spotlight, learns to
cultivate female patronage, circumventing paternal—and, by extension,
patriarchal—negligence. She doesn’t simply wear a stunning gown to a
ball.2 She becomes a fashionable spectacle, achieving retribution upon
her family and re-entering public life.
An understanding of early modern Cinderella tales requires knowl-
edge of how clothing circulated in Cinderella’s world, and the value
attached to it. Today, Cinderella is treated as the tale of an upwardly
mobile woman, who leaves behind poverty to marry a prince.
Cinderella’s final change of clothes is the focus of the tale, not her earlier
transformation from heiress to drudge. Early modern tales, on the other
hand, are closely concerned with the hero’s transformation into a kitchen

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4_2
slut, delighting in murders of evil stepmothers and ogres that precipitate

betrayal, disenfranchisement, and removal from public life. Cinderella
is literally left in rags and ashes, motivating her consequent actions in
seeking escape from social oblivion through clothing.
Christine A. Jones explains, for instance, that Perrault provides a
guide to social restitution in his Cinderella: “find someone to lend you
rank-appropriate clothing and shoes so you can move back into soci-
ety and make your way to a good life.”3 Perrault’s tale is not unique.
In early modern fairy tales, the obliging “someone” would likely be a
fairy, a woman whose favour would be sought and whose advice would
be strictly followed. Marina Warner asserts that fairies could represent
“informal, aristocratic female power.”4 This is certainly borne out by the
strict observances and tributes paid to the fairies by the majority of early
modern heroes. Yet, this arrangement is not without danger, even with a
fairy godmother, for under the autocratic, narcissistic Louis XIV, in par-
ticular, Jones notes, “[f]ailing would likely mean exile or death,”5 as evi-
dent in the biographies of authors such as d’Aulnoy and Murat. Even in
the twentieth century, the biographies of these women have been sav-
aged. Joan DeJean rebuffs Antoine Adam’s assessments of the authors
as lesbians, attempted murderers, and reprobates in Histoire de la littéra-
ture française au XVIIe siècle (1948–1956): “In his eyes, these women
were dangerous acquaintances, not fit to keep company with the great
men who make seventeenth-century French literature an uplifting experi-
ence.”6 Nonetheless, their biographies offer an exciting insight into their
political attitudes, their rebellions, and those of their readers. A return
to the good life did not necessarily mean capitulation. Authors dressed
their Cinderellas in politically provocative ways, acknowledging the high
stakes of their sartorial gamble. Their clothing, its feminine source, and
its claim upon la mode constitute a direct assault upon patriarchal sov-
ereignty. Juliane Vogel argues that “fashion was a dangerous herald of
imperial glory,” because “[w]hile crowns and insignias announced the
ruler’s timeless glory, fashion was a protagonist of time and change.”7
In fairy tales, fashion’s sobriquet is Cinders.
To understand how fashion—illustriously manifest in Cinderella—
operates in the tales is to unpick how people think about clothing.
Stallybrass writes: “To think about cloth, about clothes, was to think
about memory, but also about power and possession.”8 Clothes become
a material representation of this thinking and the hero’s interactions with
clothing reveal her negotiation with social and political abstractions and
2 FASHION FELONS I: LEADING LA MODE 49
her eventual reintegration into public life. As Stallybrass further observes,

“cloth is both a currency and a means of incorporation. As it exchanges
hands, it binds people in networks of obligation” which are based on “its
ability to be permeated and transformed by maker and wearer alike.”9
In early modern tales, the fairy godmothers would not always trans-
form or magically conjure clothing, but would simply present the hero
with clothing from their own hoards, a gift in recognition of her solic-
itation and service. Cinderella’s endurance as fairy tale is all about the
clothes. By examining the tales in terms of fashion—by exploring the
exchanges and thefts of clothing, and how clothing itself is considered—
the nuances of obligation, of disenfranchisement, of the great sartorial
gambles become clear. Cinderella as cunning royal becomes visible.
For, ultimately, fashion is itself a form of magic that makes the invis-
ible visible; in fairy tales, a material form of magic wielded by the fair-
ies and their protégées to great effect. Elizabeth Wilson writes: “Any
attempt to explore the magical properties of dress may seem a puny and
even trivial commentary on the unnerving world of consumption with its
illusory and disorienting powers of enchantment.”10 Indeed, the study
of fairy tale itself has often been deemed trivial. Nevertheless, Wilson
observes, in anthropological terms, that fashion can be seen as “closely
related to magic and ritual.”11 Indeed, anthropologist Brian Moeran
locates magic at the heart of fashion: “fame and fashion are underpinned
by all kinds of magical practices.”12 Fairy tales articulate this dynamic in
a manner rarely closely examined: Cinderella’s transformation appears
magical where, really, it is primarily a process of trading, stealing, and
gifting clothing.
The Fashion Protagonists: The Impact of Sumptuary

Regulation and Social Practices on Class and Gender
Once upon a time, Cinderellas were born in the lap of royal luxury. The
first to carry Cinders in her name, Zezolla, Basile’s Cinderella Cat, is
the daughter of a prince. D’Aulnoy’s Cinderella, Finette, is the daugh-
ter of an exiled king and queen. Authors were familiar with court life.
D’Aulnoy was an aristocrat, familiar, if she be believed, with courts in
France, Spain and England at the very least. Basile was a court intellec-
tual whose sister was a famous singer and part of the court of the Prince
of Stigliano.13 While the sartorial priorities of their Cinderella tales may
appear trivial today, Jones observes that the tale is “neither particularly
oppressive nor out of step with seventeenth-century social sense” for a
powerless, young woman seeking a more pleasurable existence beyond
social obscurity.14 Indeed, Sarah-Grace Heller argues that in such sartori-
ally regulated societies “social mobility” was possible through “the skilful
manipulation of impressive appearances.”15 The status of the body within
the clothing remains largely unwritten, invisible, even irrelevant. In The
Slipper and the Rose (1976), a film based on Perrault’s tale, the fairy god-
mother instructs her charge before going to the ball: “No one will rec-
ognize you for what you are. People seldom do.”16 Perrault’s Cinderella
is actually born inferior to her peers, the daughter of a gentleman. Her
nobility is also erased, Perrault neglecting to provide her name before
the libellous epitaph. “Cendrillon” is the kinder of the names given to
her, the worst being “Cucendron,” which, depending upon the transla-
tor’s assessment of Perrault’s vulgarity, may be rendered in such ways as
“Cinderbum,”17 “Cinderslut,”18 or “Ashwipe.”19 The insulted hero has
to learn to orchestrate the sophisticated social codes that will ease her
way back into public life, her “natural,” high-born good taste and good
fortune in fairy godmothers assisting her. All these Cinderellas use a sar-
torial gesture to regain prosperity, position, and pleasure, securing their
happily ever after.
Fashion during this period is led by the court with sumptuary laws
ostensibly controlling what is and what isn’t worn by persons of every
status. Early modern Cinderellas exist in a world where what you wear
is a matter of legislation.20 The court of Versailles eventually lays down
the law and foundation for the contemporary concept of chic even as
Perrault and d’Aulnoy embody chic in their Cinderellas.21 The pressure
to maintain fashion, to keep up with the changes, fuels the emphasis
in tales of heroes not simply appearing once at the ball in an amazing
dress, but appearing multiple times in better dresses each time. Philip
Mansel explains: “Constantly demanding rich and fashionable new
clothes, Versailles was an insatiable system of conspicuous consumption,
on which thousands of livelihoods depended, like the annual fashion
shows in Paris and Milan today.”22 This environment gives significance
to the hero’s production of beautiful gowns and accessories at the cli-
max of fairy-tale activity. Philip Lewis, writing of Perrault’s Cinderella
and Donkey Skin, makes reference to this pivotal role, recalling Wilson’s
point about the magic of fashion:
The principal emblems of court society, the magnificent dresses and the
heroine’s glittering appearance, are indeed the exclusive locus of super-
natural effects, for the fairies’ artful deeds – as distinct from their words –
bear upon nothing else: the supernatural here lies in the costuming and
appointments of high society – in the embellishment of visible bodies and
objects and in the control of appearances.23
The magnificent dresses are, simply, essential to appearing at court, in

every sense of the word “appear.”
The focus on the magnificent dresses here, while important, does
detract somewhat from the broader interest with the movement of
clothing in early modern tales. D’Aulnoy, for instance, begins “Finette
Cendron” with the king and queen forced to sell their belongings,
prominent among these being their wardrobes. The royal family has lost
not simply the throne, but the very stuff of their royal status. The prin-
cesses, lacking rich garments, become useless and consequently readily
disposable, with only the youngest, eavesdropping sister, Finette, cun-
ning enough to seek a patron beyond the family circle who can restore
her status. She solicits her fairy godmother, who gifts her golden and
silver dresses, only for her sisters to appropriate them. The possession,
theft, and loss of clothing dominates the tale from the start, creating
Stallybrass’s “networks of obligation.”24 Clothing is not simply magicked
onto the body of the hero, allowing her to meet the dress code for the
ball, but is consistently and materially valued throughout her life.
While the hero’s gamble pays off and her marriage upholds expec-
tations of her fashionable appearance, the wealth spent on clothing by
women not of noble birth came to concern lawmakers, not least since
trade in silks, muslins, and other fabrics and embellishments was linked
to vested political and economic interests. Sumptuary laws were often
tailored to exert control over the population and the economy by dic-
tating what could—or, more significantly, could not—be worn by the
varied strata of society, including many of fairy tale’s wicked stepsisters
who, in stealing the rightful clothing of the hero, would contravene the
law. The laws would be used to restrain the overt show of wealth by the
merchant classes, who were themselves profitably engaged in trade of
the very stuff of fashion. It was not only the aristocratic who desired
fashion. Paula Hohti argues that, in the sixteenth century, “the work-
ing population was much more receptive to innovation than we tend to
assume” and embraced fashionable dress.25 Indeed, citing a number of
violent encounters between fashionable, non-noble women and officials,

she notes “the level of feeling associated with the use and display of fash-
ion accessories.”26
Merchants are conspicuous in fairy tales, allied with business-minded
kings and princes. Harries remarks that in the frame tale of d’Aulnoy’s
Contes nouveaux ou les fées à la mode, featuring a draper’s son, a “pun
on ‘conte’ and ‘compte’ suggests d’Aulnoy’s persistent play with the
tropes of the literary and the fashion marketplaces.”27 Going further
back in fairy tale history, Bottigheimer notes that “[t]he most detailed
of Straparola’s stories treat merchant households.”28 Even Straparola’s
tales of princesses often involve the participation of useful merchants.
In “Doralice and Her Incestuous Father, Tebaldo,” the hero, Doralice,
escapes her father’s lust by being shut into the very chest in which she
kept her most luxuriant clothing and jewels. The chest is carried by a
Genoese merchant to England, where it is sold to a king who falls in love
with the fine example of carpentry. The tale resonates with later tales of
Donkey Skin, the hero forced to escape her home and the incestuous
desire of her father. Where Donkey Skin is advised to request incredi-
ble dresses, however, Doralice is advised to ditch the dresses and take
refuge in the wardrobe or chest itself. Her father traces the sale of the
chest, makes his way to England after her, and poses as a merchant sell-
ing golden spindles and distaffs to draw out his daughter, now a queen.
The tale ends happily, but the movements of the royal protagonists
are managed by the very merchants who carry and trade their fashion-
able accruements. While frequently denied the right to wear the mate-
rials they profited from, merchants facilitated movement of textiles and
other such fashionable stuffs. By 1740 and Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de
Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast,” the hero is the (foster) daughter
of a merchant, and her social ups and downs are driven by her father’s
trade affairs. In Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont’s later version
(1756), she is by birth a merchant’s daughter and, as the tale progresses,
she becomes entrenched in trade, although Disney switches her father’s
trade to invention in their 1991 film. In Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella
(2015), Cinderella, too, becomes the daughter of a merchant, her step-
mother the widow, aptly, of the head of the Mercer’s Guild. The mer-
chants who trade in clothing continue, today, to play significant roles in
fairy tales concerning kings and queens.
While sumptuary laws and other forms of social regulation of fash-
ion were directed at managing and maintaining class distinctions, they
were also overwhelmingly directed at women’s fashion. Although male

dress was as elaborate as female dress at this time—Lynn Hunt, for
instance, argues that “visibility was a male as much as or even more
than a female attribute”29—it was not an “issue” as was female fashion.
In fairy tales, it is almost always the female hero who makes the fash-
ion statement and women who steal, conjure, and gift clothing.30 The
intense scrutiny of female dress in fairy tale corresponds with its scrutiny
in sumptuary law and other areas of social regulation and communica-
tion of fashion. Killerby’s study on the Italian sumptuary laws found that
especially by the end of the 1500s—therefore just preceding the literary
fairy tale in Venice and Naples—most laws detail women’s clothing. As
a consequence, “the regulation of women’s clothing is the most com-
plex, multi-layered, and, at times, puzzling aspect of the Italian sumptu-
ary ethos.”31 Peers, writing on eighteenth-century fashion dolls, likewise
notes that surviving male dolls are few, particularly in relation to female
dolls, due to “the cultural patterns and sentimentality that favour pre-
serving feminine rather than masculine relics of dress.”32 In fairy tale,
too, feminine dress is preserved in a detail not afforded male fashion.
Sumptuary laws and the attention given to female dress in part drove
the changeable, capricious nature of fashion. Sumptuary laws, being
made by men, were more likely to dictate and constrain female fashion,
with the ironic outcome being that, in keeping one step ahead of the law,
female fashion flourished as an ever-changing movement, constantly find-
ing new ways to incorporate luxury, in turn necessitating the constant
renewal of the laws to keep up with the latest trends. Killerby reflects
that “often a law’s success in restricting a particular fashion ensured its
overall failure to contain luxury” resulting in “the generative nature of
the interaction between the law and what it sought to contain.”33
The consequences are evinced in the quick transformations, jeal-
ousies, and acquisitive desires described in fairy tales; for example, for
Cinderella’s fashionable appearances. Zezolla’s sisters salivate34 at each
new ensemble she wears to the feast; the ladies of the court in Perrault’s
Cinderella are busy the next day trying to reproduce her dress, and the
clothes d’Aulnoy’s Finette arrays herself in are so fashionable the women
follow her sartorial lead. It becomes clear in the tales that Cinderella her-
self is fashion, leading women ahead of the law.35 While this may appear
trivial, women could, through desire for fashion, engineer the constant
disruption of the patriarchal body politic. The fate of an entire kingdom
can hinge upon the discovery of the wearer of a particularly unique shoe.
In Basile’s collection, men are intimately familiar with female fashion.

Since Basile is particularly, mordantly verbose regarding the suffering of
a king or prince in his desire for the hero, there are outlandish, usually
erotic, accolades to female dress—in particular, the king’s specific rhapso-
dies upon Zezolla’s chianiello, which will be discussed further in Chapter 5.
Dress, in fact, becomes an erotic fixation. Male interest in female fashion
is naturalised as erotic in fairy tale, for a prince will fall in love with a shoe,
a father will commission fantastical gowns in order to consummate a mar-
riage to his daughter, and more than one prince will leave his beloved in
order to fetch her more appropriate garments for a forthcoming public
appearance. Scholars such as James Laver have theorised:
The erogenous zone is always shifting and it is the business of fashion to

pursue it, without ever catching it up. It is obvious that if you really catch
it up you are immediately arrested for indecent exposure. If you almost
catch it up you are celebrated as a leader of fashion.36
Sumptuary laws were, in part, about ensuring the modesty of women’s

dress and blame for transgression was placed squarely upon the fashion-
able female body, rather than the male gaze. In the case of Straparola’s
tale of Silvia Ballastro, for example, men consider women’s interest in
fashion a sign of their insatiability, rendering males, including the prince
of degeneracy himself, helpless and even innocently complicit. Killerby
notes that men did write to this theme, although the responses cannot
be assumed as accurate in terms of wider social attitudes: “These laws
clearly argue that woman’s fallen nature disposed her towards unbridled
excess in apparel,” with men the “passive victims.”37 However, Steele
contends that the erotic element of fashion is much more generalised,
and female fashion is not simply dictated by the male gaze and its fetish-
ism of the female body.38 Indeed, in fairy tales, the female bodies of pro-
tagonists exist in a metonymic relationship with the fashions worn, and it
is fashion itself that inspires erotic fervour.
Despite social insistence upon female modesty and restraint, fashion
remained an avenue through which women continued to create public
spectacle and commanded consideration and even space. Stuard asserts of
the fourteenth century that, even without speaking, “fashionable wom-
en’s presence in the street drew attention and signalled playful intent,
parody, presumption to higher status, and boldness.”39 Early modern
heroes certainly had the skill to achieve such presence. When fashion
combined with words, in respect to both the fairy tales themselves and
the utterances of the heroes, women achieved an extraordinary presence.
It is no wonder that Perrault limited Cinderella’s words—her sartorial
splendour already threatened the patriarchal organisation of society.
Fairy tales, in fact, celebrate the intellect and virtue of the well-dressed
hero. The most wise, wily, and honourable heroes are granted the most
splendid adornment, with the teller’s eye for luxury detail. Nicolosa
Sanuti, a fifteenth-century Bolognese aristocrat, actually wrote a trea-
tise in response to sumptuary laws suggesting that luxurious fashions
were signs of both honour and “a well-instructed mind.”40 The attitude
would be represented in many a fairy tale. Fashion, on the other hand,
never does manage to make more beautiful or intelligent a wicked or dis-
solute protagonist. Basile’s “Le tre fate” (The Three Fairies) features an
evil stepmother and her ugly daughter who is much petted.41 Basile pro-
vides a gorgeously detailed account of dress, since much of the story, as
with the Cinderella tale, turns upon wardrobe choices, thefts, and ruses.
Cicella is a good and beautiful daughter of a wealthy farmer. Her step-
mother, Caradonia, shares her cue with many a fairy-tale stepmother and
dresses her own daughter in the most expensive and luxurious clothing
available, putting Cicella in miserable rags. Stepmothers frequently seek
to redress the fickleness of genetic and monetary inheritance, improving
the marital prospects of their own daughters by removing rich clothing
from the hero. The hero is consequently reduced to rags and, being in
rags, is demoted to the kitchen and away from public view. The hero can
only be restored to her social position or higher through restored access
to rich clothing.
Cicella stumbles upon female patronage when she visits the home of
three fairies. In return for her good services to them, they offer her a
choice from their wardrobe, Basile indulging in a most detailed descrip-
tion of her options, everything from velvets and taffetas to the puffed
cut of a sleeve and a profusion of accessories. Such clothing notably goes
beyond that appropriate even to a wealthy farmer’s daughter: the fair-
ies are wilfully breaking the tenor of law turning the farmer’s daugh-
ter into a princess through dress. Ostensibly being a humble girl, and
implicitly mindful of her status and the law, Cicella chooses only a very
cheap skirt. Her choice underscores her modest virtue; the fairies thus
determine that she is worthy of luxurious clothing and present her with
a gold embroidered gown. When Grannizia is despised by the fairies on
attempting a similar coup—the fairies determining that she is not worthy
of such clothing—Cicella is consequently stripped of her boon, “a filthy

rag on her bare ass,”42 and sent to mind the pigs. Grannizia is unlawfully
dressed in her confiscated attire.
Cuosema, a handsome lord, sees Cicella in the pigsty and immedi-
ately desires her—suggesting that perhaps the filthy rag isn’t covering a
great deal of her virtues—so her stepmother naturally seals her in a bar-
rel intending to boil her, and gives the lord Grannizia, wearing Cicella’s
golden clothing. Cuosema marries Grannizia, but he discovers the switch
and also Cicella’s likely fate, thanks to a propitiously talkative tabby cat
curled up in the ashes. He rescues Cicella and puts Grannizia into the
barrel instead. The stepmother stews her own daughter till the flesh falls
from her bones. In effect, her daughter is thoroughly stripped, a trick
that is earlier played in Basile’s “La Vecchia Scoperta” (The Old Woman
Who Was Skinned). The tale alternates between stripping down to bone
and rags and dressing up in sumptuous fabrics with metaphoric and lit-
eral implications. Value ultimately resides not simply in fabric, but also in
the character of the wearer.
The hearth cat who alerts Cuosema to the plot is one of a num-
ber of cats in Basile’s collection who appear at key sartorial moments,
appearing also in “Cagliuso” and “The Cinderella Cat.” A later, nine-
teenth-century variant of “The Three Fairies” by Pietro Pellizzari is, in
fact, “The Tale of the Cats,” retold by Calvino in his 1956 collection,
in which domestic cats even usurp the role of the fairies. Instead of the
fashion extravagance offered to Cicella, she encounters a room, “stacked
on one side with silk goods, from dresses to pumps, and on the other
side with homemade things like skirts, blouses, aprons, cotton handker-
chiefs, and cowhide shoes.”43 Luxury is reduced to a statement of “silk
goods,” value in the fabric itself, with homemade clothing of more com-
mon materials regarded as inferior. The tale ends with the good sister
wed to “a handsome youth”44 rather than a lord or prince. The hero
no longer seeks such dramatic feats of social mobility as her forebears.
Yet, the presence of sartorially versed cats, inexplicable as it seems, is a
continuing, curious motif in early modern fairy tales. It is worth remem-
bering that the first two cats to manipulate the fate of a foolish, igno-
rant peasant through fashion are female: Straparola’s “Costantino
Fortunato” features a fairy disguised as a cat, and Basile’s “Cagliuso,” an
articulate feline. When Perrault pens “Le maître chat; ou, Le chat botté”
(The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots), the cat finally demands her own
clothing, in the form of boots. She is, however, also given a sex change
and becomes male. Cats are more usually aligned with fairy godmothers
and female heroes and, at the heart of that alignment, is the cunning
magic of fashion.45
The Neapolitan Cinderella Cat

Basile’s “La gatta Cenerentola” (The Cinderella Cat) is the first glimpse
of Cinderella on the European literary scene and she is introduced in
the commission of a crime. Zezolla is unhappy with her stepmother.
With some encouragement, Zezolla’s affectionate sewing teacher pro-
vides instructions on how to murder the woman who is, according to
Basile, positively evil. As Canepa notes, the “dialogue has the tone of an
exchange between two hardened criminals,”46 rendering Zezolla as com-
plicit, rather than innocently coerced. The murder plot actually foreshad-
ows Zezolla’s own fate, hinging upon Zezolla having her stepmother
fetch her an old dress from a chest, just as Zezolla allows the lid to fall
and break her neck. Zezolla is ostensibly choosing an old dress to save
her good clothes, although it is noted that the stepmother, much like
other stepmothers, enjoys seeing Zezolla cheapened in worn and tat-
tered clothing. Yet, Babak Elahi also acknowledges “the motif of ‘death
by chest’ and the significance of old clothes,” clothes that “imply the
importance of a familial past in the material desires and fears of a present
generation.”47 The clothes in the chest suggest the unidentified, mate-
rial memory of the presumably dead mother, a loving mother Zezolla
longs to rediscover in her sewing teacher, Carmosina.48 Ironically, she
will shortly be reduced to rags by the duplicity of Carmosina, who is very
much a false benefactress.
Carmosina encourages her protégée to badger her father into mar-
riage, promising Zezolla all manner of maternal affection should she,
Carmosina, become his wife. Shortly after the marriage takes place, how-
ever, Carmosina fetches her own previously undisclosed daughters and
Zezolla is demoted to the kitchens, “from sumptuous silks and gold to
rags.”49 The disenfranchisement of the hero is written in the language
of clothing, where Carmosina’s presumably low-born daughters usurp
Zezolla’s dress in an act that once more defies the spirit of sumptuary
legislation. Zezolla is further humiliated with the name Cinderella Cat.
She is no longer even acknowledged as human: she is simply a domestic
animal loitering in the kitchens. Her social position and inheritance are
unlawfully denied her. Like a cat, however, she will fall on her feet.
The prince is propitiously called to Sardinia on business and Zezolla

requests that he send her regards to the dove of the fairies and ask her
for a gift. Her new stepsisters make demands of the prince himself,
requesting clothing, make-up, and other items of amusement, being
greedy and indiscriminate. Zezolla has no faith in her father’s generosity,
or hope that he will restore her wardrobe and standing within the fam-
ily. Indeed, she curses him so that, should he forget her request—and he
will—he will not be able to leave the island until he obliges her. Her faith
judiciously rests with her fairy godmothers. The tale does set women
against women within the immediate family circle, Warner observing that
Cinderella tales “bear witness against women.”50 However, Zezolla craft-
ily seeks female aid from beyond the domestic sphere. And aid comes in
the form of fashion, courtesy of foliage.
Zezolla’s father obtains for her a date tree from a grotto in Sardinia,
together with various objects for its care. The fairies provide her the tools
with which to nurture her own destiny and, incidentally, that of the king-
dom. Graham Anderson notes the similarities of Basile’s tale to that of
Inanna, a Sumerian goddess of sexual love, particularly her “presents of
jewels and clothes from the keeper of a date tree, to provide her wed-
ding trousseau.”51 Inanna is herself associated with the date tree, a sym-
bol of sex and fertility. Intriguingly, Johanna H. Stuckey writes that “the
Sumerians understood Inanna to be essential to the making of a mon-
arch,”52 and through sex, confirmed the man as king. The Cinderella tale
may, in fact, carry traces of the hero’s endorsement of the king’s rule, as
she is identified and made queen. The tree’s provision of suitably luxuri-
ous finery to inflame the desires of the king echoes the tales of Innana.
In Basile’s tale, too, Zezolla’s licentious behaviour is explicit.
The significance of the tree and its provision of finery, disappearing
in the French tales, become significant again in the Brothers Grimm’s
less regal tale. Aschenputtel’s wealthy, though common, father departs
on a journey to the fair, asking the girls what they wish him to bring
back. The stepsisters ask for beautiful dresses and jewels, continuing
the trend of assertive stepsisters clamouring for fashionable accoutre-
ments. Aschenputtel asks for a twig. It principally serves as a memory aid
to her father, a prosaic version of Zezolla’s curse. The twig also echoes
the Brothers Grimm’s earlier 1812 tale, which begins with the mother’s
instructions that Aschenputtel plant a tree at her grave, promising the
tree will grant her wishes. The Brothers Grimm take the twigs and the
tree and turn them specifically to the service of the grief theme: the twig
is planted at the mother’s grave and watered with Aschenputtel’s tears.

The twig grows into a tree which shelters a bird that provides her with
gowns and shoes. This is taken up in later adaptations, too, although the
focus switches to the father’s death. While Branagh’s Cinderella is osten-
sibly faithful to Perrault and Disney, the film also includes the Brothers
Grimm’s twig—only, this time, it is requested by Cinderella, but deliv-
ered after the father’s death on the road.53 The twig is no longer a
source of sartorial finery, but simply a token of paternal remembrance.
The Brothers Grimm’s focus on grief and the symbols of grief for the
good mother, in particular, are often read back into the older versions of
the tale.
What all Cinderellas have in common, however, is their desire to go
out. Hidden away in the kitchen, covered with soot, they long to par-
ticipate in public festivities. When Cinderella Cat, Zezolla, is asked her
desire, it is simply to occasionally escape the house without discovery.
A hero doesn’t simply go out as she is: she must prepare for herself a
fashionable appearance. Preparation is an essential element of the tale.
The fairies tell Zezolla to recite a rhyme, in which she affirms her care
of the tree, through weeding and watering, concluding: “Now strip
yourself and dress me!”54 Altering the last line accordingly to undress,
the references to stripping emphasise a titillating approach to her toi-
lette. The richness of gold and silk cited in the rhyme, too, will be rep-
resented in the richness of her consequent finery. The Brothers Grimm’s
Ashenputtel likewise sings to her tree, asking it to “shake and wobble,”55
in order that she may dress to go out. Ashenputtel’s grief clothes her
richly for, as her tears have fallen so, too, do gowns of silver and gold fall
upon her. She is left to conduct her toilette, washing and dressing her-
self, in solitude and privacy.
Zezolla’s toilette is not nearly so discreet and reflects fashionable prac-
tices of the time. Certainly, there are magical aspects to her toilette, but
it occurs amid very real and practical hustle and bustle, Zezolla tended as
carefully as she has tended her tree, women emerging from the tree, each
bearing toilette items, such as squash water, a curling iron or rouge.56
Zezolla’s complexion is thus tended with potions for the skin, ironi-
cally conjured from the same vegetative family as the coach in Perrault’s
tale, and coloured with rouge. Carmela Bernadetta Scala notes that the
squash water was oily and probably “a moisturizing cream to smooth
and lighten the skin,”57 reflecting attitudes to the fairness of a woman’s
skin being indicative of her beauty and social standing. Her hair is also
artificially curled. She is a natural beauty, but Basile allows that even a
natural beauty requires cosmetic assistance befitting such a public occa-
sion. Basile’s attitude makes cosmetics visible, where historically “[t]he
dominant discourse on cosmetics,” Kathy Peiss observes, “placed paint
outside the truthful representation of personal and social identity, identi-
fying cosmetics with disrepute and deceit.”58 It is worth bearing in mind
that such discourses tended to reflect more extreme patriarchal attitudes
that were not always evident in practice. Nonetheless, here, Basile flouts
the mythologising of the natural beauty by articulating the deceit, mak-
ing it visible. This may be in keeping with Basile’s exploitation of the vul-
gar, cementing Zezolla’s disreputable nature. In the seventeenth century,
though, cosmetics were well-utilised and the spectacle of dressing was of
voyeuristic interest, suggesting that, at best, attitudes to cosmetics and
the toilette were complex, and not so easily reduced to extreme points
of view.59
The stepsisters’ toilette as they prepare for the festivities is likewise
detailed, providing a sartorial counterpoint. They depart in a whirl of
flowers, furbelows, and perfumes. The stepsisters exhibit the kind of
excess that has rendered them fashion victims in the eyes of fairy-tale
posterity. Such excess is frequently evoked in later depictions of the step-
sisters, including pantomime drag performances, their taste in fashion
thoroughly lampooned. A 2011 internet meme even drew on the tra-
dition of the sisters’ bad taste, mocking the hats and dresses of the sis-
ters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie at the wedding of the Duke and
Duchess of Cambridge, by implying they were the stepsisters to the new
Duchess’s Cinderella.60
Once dressed, Zezolla’s role as a seventeenth-century precursor to the
contemporary sex kitten—or perhaps more aptly, femme fatale—becomes
clear. She flamboyantly draws attention to herself on public streets
as she travels to and from the festivities. When she escapes the king one
last time, between her impressive sartorial statement, her host of serv-
ants, and golden coach, “she looked like a whore arrested in the public
promenade and surrounded by police agents.”61 Canepa clarifies, refer-
ring to her earlier criminal activity, that “this comparison of Zezolla in
her regalia to a whore banishes any doubts the reader may have had as
to her intentions.”62 The comparison—which would presumably hor-
rify authors later promoting Cinderella’s virtue and purity—has its logic
in fashion, referencing the very public spectacle of these arrests, which
attracted large audiences at the time. Successful prostitutes wore the
height of luxurious fashion, obtaining exemptions to sumptuary laws by

claiming fine clothing as a professional necessity. In other words, sump-
tuous clothing such as that worn by Zezolla was required when seduc-
ing rich clients. Basile thus alludes, in his metaphor, to the attention that
sumptuous clothing and illicit female figures attracted.
Zezolla’s utilisation of the erotic potential in fashion is also evident
in her renaming as the Cinderella Cat. Victoria Kirkham, examining
Boccaccio’s Decameron, an Italian antecedent for Basile’s collection,
observes that “the cat, to whom Aristotle had imputed a libidinous
nature, could also be an emblem of sexual promiscuity.”63 Raynard, in
fact, says of the French translation of the title, “La Chatte des Cendres,”
that “[c]’est de ce titre franchement grivois”64 (it’s a title that’s frankly
salacious). Indeed, François Boucher’s portrait, “La Toilette” (or Lady
Fastening Her Garter, 1742), shows a cat frolicking between a wom-
an’s legs, Nancy K. Miller observing “the cat visually foregrounds the
pussy hidden behind layers of white petticoats.”65 Kimberly Chrisman-
Campbell further notes that “dogs and cats came with their own alle
gorical baggage, signifying sex rather than status.”66 Cats, in fact, have a
long history of representing female sexuality. Today, a loose translation of
Cinderella Pussy would capture the spirit of the original, implied sexual
accusation.67 Zezolla is sexual and regains her status by uninhibitedly
exploiting the erotic nature of clothing.
Zezolla is specifically engaging in a form of cross-class dressing, a vio-
lation of the very spirit of sumptuary law that attempted to prevent the
lower classes dressing like their “social superiors,” and to force the nobil-
ity to set an example of their nation’s luxury fashions. Susan Vincent
argues that “for those who were powerful enough, wearing another’s rai-
ment – whether they be from a different status group or different sex
– was an allowable strategy. For those without influence, it was dishon-
est and punishable.”68 Cross-dressing, as Vincent observes, is a matter of
class and privilege. While Canepa suggests Zezolla “rebels” against her
family “by assuming the role – figuratively, at least – of a streetwalker,”69
it is also possible to understand her actions as capitalising upon the lux-
urious fashions of the nobility, which she has been unlawfully denied by
her family, as a means of seduction. As a kitchen slut, however unfairly
she arrived at the position, she has no right to wear luxury garments,
but she embraces the transgression, continually returning to her posi-
tion in the kitchen. In England during the period leading up to Basile’s
composition, women dressing cross-class were associated with erotic
play. Christine M. Varholy observes: “When women acquired their own

clothing, when they circulated or translated clothing among themselves,
or when they used clothing to alter their identities through costume or
disguise unbeknownst to their sexual partners, their behavior was per-
ceived as threatening and was denounced.”70 Zezolla and her Cinderella
peers notably obtain their clothing from female sources and utilise cloth-
ing to alter their social identities, coincidentally arousing the desire of
princes and kings as they appear and disappear. Varholy argues that “the
practice of cross-class dressing opened up a wealth of erotic possibilities,”
that played into tensions over “transgressive sexuality and the manipula-
tion of identity.”71 Why do the heroes flee and return to the kitchen? In
part, transgression drives their behaviour.
It is little wonder, therefore, that versions of Cinderella include Pretty
Woman (1990), in which the working-class prostitute, Vivian, played
by Julia Roberts, is employed by a wealthy businessman. Pretty Woman
actually references itself as a Cinderella story. Vivian demands her friend
(Laura San Giacomo) give her the name of one instance where love
between a client and prostitute works. The pithy response is Cinderella.
In one of the film’s key scenes Vivian is rebuffed from a high-end bou-
tique, only to return with her wealthy “john,” played by Richard Gere.
He promises to spend an “obscene” amount of money, and so she is
fawned over and dressed to the tune of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty
Woman,” a celebration of the allure of expensive, socially transgressive
fashion upon her body. Luxurious clothing remakes the whore into a
high society siren, something already foreshadowed in Zezolla’s behav-
iour in the mid-seventeenth century. However, Zezolla controls her
own wardrobe, sexuality, and, ultimately, destiny. She has no need of a
wealthy client to provide her wardrobe, and is the more dangerous for
that.
Cinderella at Versailles
In ancien régime tales, reasonable female rebellion against inequitable
and patriarchal authority centred much of its energy upon Louis XIV,
who, as Gilles Lipovetsky writes, “used male fashion to create a particu-
lar image of his power. Fashion, unlike tradition, requires free individ-
ual intervention, a singular and capricious power to disrupt the order
of appearances.”72 Rather than celebrate male fashion as evident in the
dress of the autocratic sovereign, fairy tales of the period detail feminine
dress, reasserting female power and the capricious vitality of fashion. In

the process, princesses, queens, and fairies are elevated in place of kings.
Fashion is, essentially, used to manifest female power, rather than the
autocratic power of the king.
Louis XIV was a man of fashion. His sartorial reputation is assured
even today; Dana Thomas, for instance, reviews the history of luxury,
describing him as “dressed in satin suits with velvet sashes and frilly
blouses, high-heeled shoes or boots, and wigs of flowing curls topped
with ostrich-plumed chapeaux.”73 Morag Martin likewise identifies the
“roots of high fashion” in Louis XIV’s reign with its “lavish wigs and
codes of dress.”74 Jennifer M. Jones elaborates upon Louis XIV’s success
in creating “a distinctively French style, by deploying the artifice of fash-
ion for the purpose of court spectacles, and by disciplining fickle fash-
ion into a fixed court costume as he attempted to yoke the theatricality
of fashion to the theatre of absolutism.”75 Louis XIV essentially laid the
groundwork for Paris to become the centre of fashion in an expression of
authoritarian power, but it was a centre that widened a rift between the
formal and the tempestuous as his reign progressed.
Steele writes that, over time, “the baroque splendor of the early years
gave way to a look of rigid order, one even deliberately antiquated.”76
This shift occurred as the fairy-tale vogue emerged in print. As court
fashion ossified and stifled the sartorial expression of its subjects, Paris
began to generate modern fashions beyond the walls of Versailles, Steele
describing the scene: “Thousands of tailors, dressmakers, and milliners
were actively engaged in the business of producing new fashions for the
courtiers at Versailles, for wealthy bourgeois Parisians” and visitors to
Paris.77 Steele notes that the younger princesses and their friends rebelled
and followed Parisian rather than court modes, and it is here we see
clearly the impact of socially volatile, cosmopolitan fashion supplanting
sumptuary law and sovereign authority. This was, in turn, reflected in the
fairy tales being published. Most heroes, after all, effectively occupy the
same age group as Versaille’s wild-child princesses, the female descend-
ants of Louis XIV, his brother, and cousins. As Daniel Roche says, “[c]
lothes became weapons in the battle of appearances.”78 The battle spread
beyond Versailles, to Parisian salons and to the country estates and nun-
neries to which women were periodically banished. The problem for
women was male authority and control. The answer to the problem
involved stripping men of control and elegance, and dressing themselves
up instead.
Many festivities fashionable at the time involved sartorially disrupting

social hierarchies and were opportunities for women to flout the usual
protocols. The masquerade is a conspicuous example. While masquerades
as entertainments are rare in fairy tales, many tales spin on the principles
of masquerade, heroes revealing and concealing their identities in quick
changes of clothing. Such sartorial sleights of hand embellish sexual
and class transgression. Sarah R. Cohen notes that “[t]he masquerade’s
ability to disguise ‘true’ social status beneath alterative identities may
indeed have been its most attractive feature both to the court aristocrats
and to Parisian participants of varying rank. Masquerading literally dis-
solved social categories in its appeal.”79 Citizens of lower status could
attend balls if disguised, allowing the kinds of social liberties to occur
that would be viewed as erotic adventures similar to those of Zezolla.
The presence of smut-cheeked Cinderella at the ball begins to take on
a whole new significance. Cohen muses that such masquerades “pro-
vided, moreover, endless possibilities for exploring the intricate artifices
of the social world.”80 Cinderella’s desire to attend the ball inspires her
to exploit the very artifices that her own family has used to exploit and
debase her. She even baits her sisters in the Perrault and d’Aulnoy ver-
sions of the tale, mocking their inability to recognise her as the audacious
beauty, the hit of the ball. D’Aulnoy’s tale explicitly evokes masquerade,
suggesting that, even without a mask, the sisters can’t recognise the cun-
ning hero. Masks were not as popular by the time d’Aulnoy is writing,
but were still in evidence. Certainly women were wearing vizard masks
in English theatres around the time that it is claimed d’Aulnoy was there,
and these were viewed by many playwrights and theatre goers as sexually
provocative.81 Finette would have been unlikely to keep her mask on to
greet people at the ball: in 1695, according to the Traité de la Civilité,
it was considered “uncivil to keep on the mask when curtseying to any-
one.”82 Fortunately, her luxurious appearance is itself a form of mask.
The Cinderella tales of d’Aulnoy and Perrault were published in the
same year and, although Perrault’s tale has apparent precedence, at least
in print, d’Aulnoy herself was the leading figure of the genre; the short
lapse of time between the publications may, in fact, reflect the work of
printing the collections, with d’Aulnoy’s the larger work.83 D’Aulnoy
herself fostered, indeed enacted, the interdependence of fashion and
fairy tale. Salons, such as her own and those of her peers, provided space
for the fairy tale to become fairy tale, and it was aristocratic space situ-
ated where fashions were made and discarded. The storytellers were not
wearing peasant clothing and gathered in nurseries or inns, but were on

display in the very gilded rooms where the concept of French chic was
first formulated. Hannon asserts that the women “used their considera-
ble influence to make or break an author’s reputation, decided all ques-
tions involving the code of civility that regulated court and salon life.”84
Contrary to Louis XIV’s autocracy, the women used the salons to cre-
ate their own codes as effecting literary and social value, behaviour, and
even fashion. Murat’s prologue, “To the Modern Fairies,” cheerfully
upbraids Perrault’s reliance upon old, peasant Mother Goose by invoking
the powerful circle of women running the salons: “You are all beautiful,
young, with a good figure, fashionably and richly clothed.”85 Fairy-tale
tellers stood side by side with their glamorous literary creations.
In discussion of Cinderella, though, Perrault is more often given
greater authority. Duggan recognises the closeness of the publication
of Perrault’s and d’Aulnoy’s tales, but sees a one-way influence where
“d’Aulnoy playfully integrates elements drawn from Perrault’s tales in
such a way as to subvert the ideology conveyed through them.”86 Yet, is
there any real evidence that d’Aulnoy is taking elements explicitly from
Perrault? Perrault is notable, for example, for the inclusion of a pumpkin
carriage in his version of Cinderella, an innovation that has carried for-
ward into the Disney versions. D’Aulnoy’s “The Ram,” also published
in 1697, alongside “Finette Cendron,” also features a pumpkin carriage.
Perrault tells us that the fairy godmother takes the pumpkin, hollows it
out, and transforms it into a coach. For Perrault’s version, the pump-
kin, mice, rats, and lizards are available materials for transmogrification,
the better to get Cinderella to the ball. D’Aulnoy, on the other hand,
describes a huge pumpkin that can comfortably sit two, dried and hol-
lowed, and fitted with cushions and velvet. The pumpkin has not been
transmogrified. It has been crafted into a beautiful carriage for the Ram
and is drawn by goats: a regal adaption of vegetable as conveyance for a
cursed, bucolic prince. Duggan assumes that “d’Aulnoy appropriates and
modifies the use of the pumpkin carriage.”87 Elements, characters, and
even plot lines are frequently shared between the authors of fairy tale in
the ancien régime. One could equally speculate that Perrault adopts and
adapts d’Aulnoy’s pumpkin carriage: after all, while a lack of transmog-
rification explains the hollowing out of the pumpkin in “The Ram,” it
is unclear why Perrault’s fairy godmother goes to the trouble of exca-
vating the gourd when she is about to magically transform it anyway.
Ultimately, Perrault’s efforts to assume the guise of Mother Goose may
well have led to disengagement from his female peers, who retained their
aristocratic privilege and sophistication in their writing.88
Perrault’s Cinderella has even so eclipsed d’Aulnoy’s cunning hero
and most other versions, unusually even that of the Brothers Grimm.
The Brothers Grimm are particularly violent towards the stepsisters,
with their feet mutilated and eyes plucked out, and these rather ruth-
less revenges have been sustained even as their tale lost fashionable
detail between 1812 and 1857. The particular violence and darkness
has increasingly led people today to regard the Brothers Grimm’s tale
as the more authentic. Nevertheless, it is Perrault’s pumpkin carriage,
his glass slipper, fairy godmother, and injunction to return by midnight
that remain iconic, for the core of the Cinderella tale is fashion. While
Perrault maintains the fiction of repeating old Mother Goose tales, he
intently focuses the tale’s sartorial mechanism, accentuating courtly
markers of fashion innovation and excellence. Cinderella’s own desires
have never been romantic, but fashionable, and she and her sisters com-
pete to be seen and to stand out at court.
Perrault’s “Cinderella; or, The Glass Slipper” actually benefits from
a happy sartorial timing, its glamour informed by the precedents laid at
Versailles. Perrault tells us that the stepsisters had beautiful bedrooms
and full-length mirrors. It is during Louis XIV’s reign that the French
developed the technology to create mirrors large enough to reflect the
stepsisters in full. Such mirrors finally allowed the viewer to take in their
entire ensemble at the one glance, rather than in smaller, fragmented
glimpses. Such mirrors were the great innovation and spectacle behind
Versailles’ famed La Grande Galerie (or Hall of Mirrors), which wasn’t
yet twenty years old. The room was not only made to appear larger
through optical illusion, but was able to reflect in full the magnificent
appearance of the court. The oranges and citrons given to Cinderella by
the prince reference Versailles’ gardens, which made a feature of orange
trees. A marvellous luxury, the trees were prized for their fragrance and
required the latest horticultural techniques to grow in their new climate.
Claire Goldstein argues the orange trees were part of a system of sym-
bolising the monarchy’s “control over technology and manufacturing,
mercantile trade, diplomacy, and the theatrical use of luxury.”89 It is the
latter use to which Cinderella puts them, pointedly sharing her gift with
her despised sisters. It is an ironic, histrionic gesture, sharing a prestig-
ious largess with the same sisters who stole her status and fortune. Thus,
she further draws their attention to herself, underscoring their inability
to see beyond the trappings of luxury. This is a world with a profound

emphasis upon the gaze and its direction, its inhabitants vying for atten-
tion and tokens of regard. Everyone in the tale is looking and being
looked at: even the prince is a spectator, unable to eat for looking at
Cinderella. Cinderella knows how to manipulate appearances and ulti-
mately commands the gaze of the court; particularly, in fact, its women.
The tale makes plain that, in matters of fashion, Cinderella is dressing
for, and is examined by, her female peers.
And so Perrault fills the tale with details about feminine dress and
toilette. The toilette is all about the gaze: the preparation to be looked
at, and the looking involved in the preparation. The latter particu-
larly involves the steady improvement in the quality of mirrors. Martin
observes that, after an initial private toilette, “[t]he second toilette was
a public display of primping in the mirror before a table laden with pots
and potions.”90 The woman at toilette is the centre of attention and,
while Martin focuses on the pleasure of the male gaze, it is likely that
women, too, enjoyed their own and others’ displays. As Perrault writes,
the fashionable feminine toilette is becoming a complex, sophisticated
performance, inverting the titillation of the striptease. The woman in
déshabillé is made up, a process often requiring practical assistance, in
order to create an attractive appearance. It is not always possible or easy
for women to pin their own gowns and furbelows, let alone arrange their
hair in complicated coiffures. Assistance is required for the most elab-
orate toilettes and a choreographed performance evolves before the
mirror, permitting the woman to enjoy her own dressing. Such per-
formances became popular subject matter in portraiture. Nicolas de
Largillière’s “Portrait of a Woman” (ca. 1696), for instance, shows an
aristocratic woman at her mirror, fixing her ribbons. In Perrault, how-
ever, the toilette is centred not upon the beautiful hero: the mirror is
tilted toward her callow stepsisters and their vain attempts to secure sar-
torial fame.
The stepsisters chatter constantly about what to wear to the ball, their
obsession indicative of their need to make the best impression. As they
chatter, they provide insight into their world. Perrault’s descriptions of
the sisters’ items of clothing and processes of dressing are compellingly
detailed; he writes of red velvet, brocade, and mouches.91 However,
some of language used to describe the fashions has become unclear over
the centuries. The barrière de diamants worn by the younger sister is
an idiosyncrasy of Perrault or a forgotten term for a piece of jewellery
prompting various responses from later translators and editors. Andrew

Lang, for example, like the first English translator, Samber, refers to a
stomacher, which would be put on if a mantua were worn open in order
to conceal the stays, though this was generally called a pièce d’estomac.92
Betts chooses a “diamond hairpin,”93 Zipes a diamond necklace,94 and
Christine A. Jones a “festoon,” observing that the tale may depict the
necklace as gaudy.95 However, portraits of the period reveal that simple
pearl necklaces were more common, with diamonds more likely to be
worn in the hair, as earrings, or on the dress itself.96 Indeed, a French
publication offers “bandeau” as a clarification in a footnote, indicating
a diamond headband of sorts.97 Another point of some ambiguity is the
trimming mentioned by the elder sister. Samber, the first translator of
Perrault into English (1729), has a little play with the details of “gar-
niture d’Angleterre,” translating this item as French rather than English
trimming.98 It was probably the lace known as “point d’Angleterre,”
although Jones notes that “garniture” could also as easily refer to the
ribbon or other fabric woven into the coiffure, a popular style promoted
by Madame de Montespan, otherwise known as Françoise Athénaïs de
Rochechouart de Mortemart, Marquise de Montespan.99 Nonetheless,
since Perrault subsequently describes the process of the sisters’ coif-
fures, it is more likely referring to a trimming for the red velvet dress
mentioned in the same sentence. In the Mercure Galant, June 1678, for
example, a plate depicts a woman’s summer dress which features a range
of ways in which the point d’Angleterre was worn, including what may be
bunches of the lace trimming the dress.100 The bobbin lace called point
d’Angleterre—the “point” was sometimes dropped—was actually Flemish
and smuggled.101 According to Pat Earnshaw, tracing the earliest use of
the description to 1661, references to point d’Angleterre are so common
in France, that “customs evasion is regarded as primarily French rather
than English: Flemish lace was banned, English lace was allowed, so what
was being imported was English lace.”102 The lace was certainly still
fashionable at the time Perrault published. Samber’s little joke possibly
passes over the fashion felony—the breaking of sumptuary laws regarding
imported lace—nestled in Perrault’s text.103
Items of dress are certainly mentioned by Perrault, but also fashion-
able practices. The sisters engage a fashionable hairdresser to arrange
their hair and headdress, in this case “cornettes.” This was a popu-
lar style at the time of Madame de Montespan’s supremacy, suggest-
ing that Perrault was setting his tale in the near fashionable past.104
DeJean also locates the origins of the celebrity hairdresser with Monsieur
Champagne in 1663 some years prior to publication, where the term
“coiffeur” is first used.105 There was also a fashionable female hairdresser,
Madame Martin, who promoted taller hairstyles and became popular in
Louis XIV’s court. Sévigné writes in 1671, for instance, that “La Martin
exaggerated the style” of Madame de Nevers hair and goes on in great
detail, noting that it would make “an older and plainer woman appear
ridiculous.”106 Indeed, Sévigné offers to send her friend a doll with the
hair so dressed in order that she might better emulate it. Women, usu-
ally the wives of wig-makers, were well-known for dressing hair. While
Perrault provides no name, it is clear that the stepsisters seek out the
latest in hair styling. They suffer in the name of glamour, too, eating
nothing for two days and breaking more than a dozen laces in tighten-
ing their stays to achieve a small waist. The crash diets, the expensive
hairdressers, the possibly illegal lace actually reference the extraordi-
nary efforts of women to present the best sartorial impression at court
and aristocratic entertainments. However, their preparation precludes
the stepsisters actually obtaining new items to wear: they must rely on
re-wearing and re-working the apparel they already possess, including
one sister simply wearing her ordinary skirt.107 Thus, the sisters must put
energy, skill, and economy into contriving a fashionable appearance for
the ball.
Cinderella, on the other hand, makes little effort beyond request-
ing a gown from her fairy godmother.108 From being covered in soot
and wearing rags, she is spontaneously transformed into a modish
royal, arrayed in material of gold, silver, and gems. Even the Brothers
Grimm’s 1812 version at least pauses to allow her to wash prior to dress-
ing. Cinderella’s toilette is literally and uniquely magical in Perrault. She
does not put on clothes she is gifted, clothes already a part of the fashion
cycle. These are new, magicked from the tatters of her degradation, only
to revert to tatters once the spell is over.
In Disney adaptations of Perrault, the transformation occurs in swirls
of sparkling light fuelled by the fairy godmother’s wand, so that a blue
ball gown appears conjured from light itself and Cinderella is trans-
formed within its thaumaturgic folds. Tiny crystals sustain the light in
the 2015 gown, since the 1951 feature could simply animate sparkle in
the pale gown. The blue has usurped the gold and silver of Perrault’s
original in the popular imagination. Zac Posen’s 2016 Met Gala dress
for Claire Danes drew obvious comparisons to Cinderella’s dress: a pale
blue ball gown, the fabric was woven with fibre optics. Woven with light,
in fact, Posen referred to the dress as “Galactic Cinderella,” replacing
fairy magic with “space-age” technology in keeping with the year’s gala
theme, “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology.” Other,
less technologically enchanting blue ball gowns regularly invite compar-
ison to Cinderella’s. Disney’s version of Cinderella’s gown is even evolv-
ing into a metonym for the gown itself, evident in the release of Vogue:
The Gown (2014) as a blue volume. The book’s author, Jo Ellison,
assures that the gown’s “opulence still ignites in us the promise of a
Cinderella moment.”109 She further observes that, for “the dress of their
dreams, most women will defer to Cinderella.”110 The magical, dream-
like materialisation of Cinderella’s gown is key, however it is achieved,
whether by fairy godmother’s wand, fibre optics, or the purchase of cou-
ture. The gown simply is Cinderella. It is the sisters’ toilette that pro-
vides Cinderella with the hard work of preparing clothing and fixing hair.
Cinderella’s sartorial sleight of hand is conspicuous for its effortless-
ness, the hero adorned with new fashions each evening. Perrault estab-
lishes her as a trendsetter, the women examining her hair and dress
with the intention of replicating her appearance. Thus, Perrault inti-
mates the competition to match Cinderella: where Cinderella’s ensem-
ble is whipped up by magic, however, the other ladies of the court
must seek out such beautiful fabrics—fashion being still driven in large
part by textiles—and dressmakers able to recreate the fairy godmoth-
er’s wand work. Such exuberant activity is perfectly at home at Louis
XIV’s court, Madame de Sévigné noting the gown of the King’s mis-
tress in a November 6, 1676, letter: “M. de Langlée has given Mme
de Montespan a dress of gold on gold, all embroidered with gold, all
edged with gold, and on top of that a sort of gold pile stitched with
gold mixed with a certain gold, which makes the most divine stuff ever
imagined. The fairies have secretly devised this work.”111 The fabu-
lousness of the gold material is cheerfully credited to fairies, something
Perrault parrots in his tale with the fairy godmother’s production of fine
fabric in Cinderella’s gown. Colleen Hill likewise links this description
to Perrault’s tale, noting that the King’s mistress, the post occupied by
Madame de Montespan, was expected to represent French fashion
innovation.112 However, as Steele notes in referencing this same dress,
it “was not noticeably more fashionable than the court dress of ear-
lier eras.”113 Madame de Montespan was known for introducing fash-
ion in the court, however, and this particular dress, as a gift, while not
indicative of her fashion influence, does underscore the trendsetter’s inter-

est in exquisite fabric. Indeed, Perrault seems to have had Madame de
Montespan in mind when writing his tale. She was Louis XIV’s mistress
from 1667 to the 1680s, during which time Perrault would likely have
encountered her, particularly as he was involved in the design and con-
struction of the gardens at Versailles. In his memoirs, he notes that the
ladies of court wanted to be involved and Madame de Montespan, in par-
ticular, designed the fountain of the marsh.114 A particular role of a king’s
mistress was to lead French fashion and, here, Perrault’s tale, in which
Cinderella has fashion magically conjured for her, seems apt.
Cinderella does not bestir fashion just once, but on multiple occa-
sions. On the second night of the ball, Cinderella is described as being
even better dressed, though there is no detail provided by which this can
be assessed. This is as in the Brothers Grimm’s version, in which each
night the hero’s dress is more spectacular. Cinderella must keep one step
ahead of her peers, must appear always in something new and novel in
order to maintain the court’s attention and astonishment. There are
plenty of real life examples of this dynamic, including the balls held for
the Duc de Bourgogne’s marriage to Marie-Adélaïde, the princess wear-
ing a new gown for each ball.115 Such sartorial range signals rank and
impact: Cinderella has the material power to command the rich variety of
fashion.
The competitive nature of fashion underpins the tale, rooted in the
relationship of Cinderella with her sisters. When Cinderella ostensi-
bly tries to borrow a yellow day dress in order to go to the ball, Javotte
denies her. Javotte rubs in her denial by using the vulgar nickname, say-
ing she’d be foolish to loan her dress to such a creature as Cucendron.
To this point, neither stepsister has been named, but Cinderella now dis-
tinguishes Javotte. It personalises the subtle slight: Cinderella is merely
toying with her, secretly despising her tawdry, outmoded, everyday
gown. As Javotte declares herself mad to loan the dress, Cinderella thinks
herself mad to wear it, emphasising their sartorial skirmish. Versions of
the tale all focus on the sisters stealing, borrowing, discovering, and con-
juring clothing. The sister-bond is broken by the initial misappropria-
tion of clothing that leaves Cinderella literally in tatters and, eventually,
the sisters outmoded.116 Perrault’s hero is particularly passive-aggressive
with her sly sartorial slurs. The Brothers Grimm’s hero allows the birds
to wreak violent reprisal by pecking out her sisters’ eyes, removing their
ability to gaze into mirrors and enjoy fashionable sights, while Zezolla’s
stepsisters retire to obscurity in impotent rage. On her way to the pal-

ace, Finette Cendron, however, takes explicit revenge upon her sisters’
wearing of her dresses, deliberately splashing them in mud (Fig. 2.1).
She laughs, informing them that she despises them. Her scorn is directed
squarely at their presumption in purloining and then wearing her dresses,
originally gifted to her by her fairy godmother.
While the gifts of godmothers and fairies represent the material ben-
efits that could be accrued by a well-connected woman, the work of the
fairies in bestowing innovative fashions upon the hero also sheds light
upon the burgeoning fashion industry in which women were vying for
Fig. 2.1 Finette Cendron rides to the palace. Illustration by Gordon Browne.

Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy, Fairy Tales by the
Countess d’Aulnoy, trans. J. R. Planché (London: George Routledge, 1888)
position and luxury goods were denounced even as they were coveted.
Cinderella continually seeks to astonish her sisters and the women of
court with unique, fairy-conjured ensembles. No mere mortal hands
fashion these gowns. Jennifer M. Jones describes the ancien régime econ-
omy in which innovations in clothing production prompted controversy
about female workers, guild practices, and the morality of fashionable
luxury itself.117 There is no mention of production behind the fairy’s
largesse—fashion being spontaneously conjured or bestowed—yet,
perhaps, this is a hint at the role of women as producers of “hidden
work.”118 In the flick of the fairy godmother’s wand, there is conceivably
a gesture that women should have the right and responsibility of mak-
ing fashions for women.119 Indeed, Jones indicates that as time passed,
“female fashion merchants claimed to produce something more elusive
and more significant than mere garments painstakingly stitched from
cloth by seamstresses working within domestic workshops. They claimed
to produce not merely clothing, but la mode itself.”120 The conspiracy
between Cinderella and her fairy godmother is itself a claim to la mode
and a forerunner of this movement.
Cinderella is herself naturally gifted in matters of style and taste. In
fact, the French vogue has a trend for such heroes. L’Héritier’s “The
Enchantments of Eloquence,” for instance, describes Blanche as clever in
sartorial preparations, particularly the displaying of des collets-Montés, col-
lars that, at the time of L’Héritier’s writing, were associated with unfash-
ionable, elderly women.121 L’Héritier continues to espouse the talents of
Blanche by assuring that, if she did live in L’Héritier’s time, she would
be most able to arrange the skirts of elaborate gowns and even des cor-
nettes, the hairstyle mentioned in Perrault’s Cinderella. Thus, L’Héritier
settles her tasteful hero within the flux of fashion. Perrault notes that
even though her sisters delight in demeaning Cinderella, they nonethe-
less seek her fashion advice. In turn, Cinderella resists sabotaging their
appearance and even offers to dress their hair: she is that good or, more
likely, she knows they pose no threat. D’Aulnoy’s Finette Cendron is
a cunning advisor in all things, including, notably, fashion. Taste and
caches of rich raiment are her weapons of choice in skirmishes that are
not merely sartorial, but sometimes graphically physical, as she claims
la mode.
Finette’s royal parents mismanage their kingdom and so are cast out
with their daughters. The queen calculates that they’ll be unable to pro-
vide their lazy daughters with elegant clothing and so must contrive to
“lose” them. From the outset, the tale focuses upon sartorial obligations
and desires, the queen determining that she and the king can live com-
fortably if only they are not required to provide and maintain a royal
wardrobe. In their straitened circumstances, the queen herself dresses
practically in thick shoes, short underskirt, and white camisole. These
items of clothing appear to be simple, classless undergarments, or a form
of serviceable déshabillé, suited to the queen’s scheme to become a fish-
wife. Her daughters, however, do not seek similar roles and so must ulti-
mately assure themselves of an appropriately regal wardrobe.
On each attempt to shake off the daughters, the youngest, Finette,
prudently consults with her fairy godmother, aiming to thwart her moth-
er’s design. Perrault neither names, nor explains, the sudden appearance
of Cinderella’s fairy godmother. Cinderella cries and her fairy godmother
appears to ensure that she gets to the ball. The Brothers Grimm like-
wise summon assistance through tears. Finette’s fairy godmother is Fairy
Merluche, a tricky figure, taking her name from a species of cod.122
Finette must do more than cry: she seeks Merluche’s aid with gifts and
exhausting journeys. Indeed, where Perrault’s Cinderella is forced into
the role of lady’s maid to her sisters, Finette is opportunistically enlisted
as Merluche’s lady’s maid, asked to dress her hair. Where Cinderella’s
sisters fail to reward her for her service, Merluche extravagantly gifts
Finette with a bag of gold and silver dresses, and a box containing not
simply a few, but millions of diamonds. Merluche likewise warns Finette
not to assist her vindictive sisters, explaining, to an extent, why Finette
encounters so much misfortune in later giving her sisters help. It is
always unwise to disregard the advice of fairies, particularly those who
understand the mercenary nature of one’s family.
The sisters are eventually, successfully cast out and the two oldest
rely upon Finette’s wits. Nonetheless, they quickly steal her clothes and
diamonds, bedecking themselves in preparation to visit a château they
have discovered. Finette realises that her clothing is gone and decries
the treachery of her sisters in taking what was hers, leaving her with
nothing suitable to wear, traipsing behind them like a servant. The sis-
ters claim that she is just like a scullery maid, thus justifying the sartorial
redistribution, a tactic which has additional weight in light of the class
regulation implicit in sumptuary law. The cruelty is not primarily struc-
tured to dispossess the hero as in Perrault’s version, however. Threats of
physical abuse simply ensure that the sisters retain their luxurious life-
style at Finette’s cost, and Finette herself must learn to take her fairy
godmother’s advice and not be used. The tale does reinforce Finette’s
comparative youth, too, as she is promised trinkets, including a doll, and
candy by her sisters in return for her compliance. The fashion doll per-
haps makes an appearance here. Peers observes that “[t]he original fash-
ion dolls, those of the pre-1790 era, are creatures of myth, mystique and
conventionalised stories. Even to their original audience fashion dolls
had a certain unbelievable aura.”123 As Peers notes, the dolls would vary,
some small, some life-size, their fashions scrupulously detailed or cob-
bled together from dressmaking scraps. For Finette, the doll is offered as
recompense for the loss of her own sartorial mystique.
Despite her subservience to her sisters, Finette Cendron continues
to display bravery and wit. When the sisters discover ogres live in the
château, Finette springs into action, first roasting the husband in his
own oven. While it is made clear that the ogre would likely eat the girls,
Finette’s act of ogre-slaughter carries Zezolla’s criminal DNA, particu-
larly when she then kills the ogre’s wife. She first promises the wife that
she can improve her appearance, implying that, in giving up her bearskin
ensembles to follow fashion and by allowing Finette and her sisters to
dress her hair, even the widowed ogress can look like a star and attract a
king to marry her.124 Thus, Finette foreshadows her own sartorial tactics,
while also drawing upon her hairdressing skills to secure a viable future
for herself and her sisters. In this instance, however, she does not wait
for reward but, instead, once she’s settled the ogress in a chair to have
her locks crimped, lops off her head and seizes her rich estate. Her sis-
ters take advantage of her nimble fingers again and keep the rewards for
themselves, cheating Finette and badly beating her if she protests her
misuse. Finette’s sobs even conspire against her and threaten to choke
her. The violence perpetrated against her underscores her predicament,
her criminal behaviour and skills serving merely to enrich her sisters.
Finette contemplates her next move in the ashes of the hearth, the
very seat of the storyteller herself. She finds a key and, upon clean-
ing it, discovers it is golden, suggesting to her that it is a key to great
wealth; indeed, it does open a casket containing an expensive ward-
robe. The tale continues to underscore that clothing equates to wealth.
She is able to use this wealth to craft a public persona as Cendron: as
Wilson writes, “it is still clothes that make the body culturally visible.”125
This visibility makes possible her escape from social oblivion. Finette
names herself Cendron, too, taking her alias from the cinders in which
she was abandoned and from which she consequently arose, a sartorial
phoenix. She does not exist under a slander bestowed upon her by her
sisters, but determines her own persona in fashion. The regal wardrobe
of this persona happens to be limitless, the fairy casket producing new
dresses whenever she goes to it, everything the height of fashion so that
the ladies copy her. As with Perrault, a key marker of Finette’s success
is in being copied. She is not merely fashionable; she is the pinnacle of
fashion, her magical and extravagant resources equipping her to lead
the crowd. Dresses weighed down with diamonds and gold—her sisters
declaring in awe that one such gown weighed in excess of one thousand
pounds—she is an ostentatious display of wealth and status.
Hannon asserts that “the gown’s burdensome weight varies in direct
proportion to the transformed hero’s shifting memories of her for-
mer state.”126 Taking into account contemporary court dictates, the
heaviness of the dress expresses the status of the wearer: the heavier
the dress, the more engorged the fabric with precious jewels and met-
als, the greater the status of its wearer. The dress of d’Aulnoy’s women
here is consistent with court dress at the time, frequently described as
being adorned with all manner of pearls, diamonds, rubies, and other
precious stones. Antonia Fraser describes the wedding gown of Marie-
Adélaïde de Savoie, for instance, as “silver, dotted all over with so many
rubies and diamonds that the total weight, together with that of her
bejewelled coiffure, was said to be more than her own.”127 In “La Biche
au bois” (The Doe in the Woods, 1698), d’Aulnoy actually compares
the clothes created for the hero, Desiree, to “the wedding of a young
princess as appealing as the one I describe,”128 a specific reference to
Marie-Adélaïde who was married the year before the tale’s publication.
D’Aulnoy later references the princess by name in a poem comparing
Desiree to Adélaïde. Murat’s “La Sauvage” (The Savage, 1699) features
an entire scene in which her hero is taken to see the wedding festivities
for Marie-Adélaïde. The descriptions of fashion in d’Aulnoy and other
writers’ tales explicitly reference court costume, which was excessively
elaborate, stiff, formal, and heavy. The weight, in d’Aulnoy’s tale, may
be a practical burden, but Finette as Cendron continues to move easily
from kitchen to court: it does not challenge her individualism in quite
the way Hannon suggests. There is only one Cendron and that Cendron
is crafted by Finette herself, a name that also recalls the ashes Merluche
gave her, that would lead her back to her parents—in effect, back to her
true status. The weight of the gown secures her revived and restored
identity as a royal princess.
While it is easy to interpret heavy gowns as burdens, such gowns

are rich in fashionable symbolism and practical wealth. They are, in
many respects, sartorial armour in heavily regulated societies. In more
recent fiction, Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015) recreates these heavy
gowns. The ragged, clumsy hero, Agnieszka, is taken to the home of
the Dragon to learn magic. Her first spell transforms her clothing as it
“shook off my stains, squashed me back into stays, piled my hair back
upon my head, and left me once again looking like a doll for some prin-
cess to play with.”129 The spell effectively mimics the work of Perrault’s
fairy godmother. Agnieszka resents her transformation, though, finding
the heavy gowns confining in contrast to the freedom afforded by her
ragged dresses. Nonetheless, Novik reveals a further aspect to the sarto-
rial magic. During an attempted rape, Agnieszka transforms her simple
dress, too easily brushed aside, into a gown that acts as armour against
the criminal, attempted rape by the handsome prince and provides her
an opportunity of escape: “Power shuddered out of me. Crusted pearls
and whalebone closed up beneath his hands like armour, and he jerked
his hands off me and stepped back as a wall of velvet skirts fell rustling
between us.”130 This is a much darker elaboration of sartorial transfor-
mation, but Finette and other Cinderellas do, like Agnieszka, arm them-
selves with literal and metaphoric sartorial weight, fleeing the amorous
clutches of princes in most versions of the tale.
Finette, however, is much more focused on restoring her for-
tunes than upon erotic adventure, like Zezolla, or love, like Perrault’s
Cinderella, and reclaims her royal prerogative in terms of dress. When
she determines to go to the palace to claim her lost slipper, thus claiming
the prince currently attached to the slipper, she takes matters into her
own hands and dresses as a queen in a blue satin gown decorated with
diamond stars, a diamond sun in her hair and moon on her back. Finette
uses the symbols of the heavens, eternal and universal, in her gown.
Vogel, writing on Charles Worth’s starry gowns for Empress Elisabeth
of Austria and Countess Castiglione in the nineteenth century, notes the
stars “belong to the world of fashion, which was open not just to the
empress but also to office girls and courtesans.”131 She relates the stars
to “the modern glamour of orchestrated light and illumination, insignias
in costume jewellery with heightened luminosity.”132 The glamour and
alternative to patriarchal autocracy is prefaced in Finette’s gown.
Her commitment to diamonds in this final ensemble has, however, a
very specific royal inspiration. DeJean tells us: “At the grandest soirées at
Versailles, diamonds flashed as never before. And no man has ever dared
show off more diamonds on his person than the Sun King.”133 It seems
that the cunning Finette decides, here, to eclipse the Sun King himself.
Indeed, upon her entering the palace, people cry, “Make room for the
beautiful Cendron, the wonder of the world!”134 Her grand entrance,
based entirely in the flamboyant sartorial expression of fashion, mimics
the pomp and ceremony of crown alliances of the times, her blue satin
and jewels disrupting the Sun King’s display of the body politic just
enough, while nonetheless reinforcing Finette’s royal appearance.135
D’Aulnoy is alert to the subtleties of court fashion in her tales. While
the ladies at the ball wish to emulate Finette, her dress being so fash-
ionable, it is not a completely new fashion. She is walking a thin line
between the heights of fashion and fashion trendsetting. Her costume at
the end, as she claims her shoe and therewith royal footing, is her most
magnificent and regal, referencing vital symbols of royal dress in its dia-
monds and sun. Styles confirms that Louis XIV “insisted that women
appearing at court should wear the voluminous, stiff gown made from
the most expensive patterned silks.”136 As Styles notes, the fashion for
those silks changed annually, but the form of the dress remained con-
sistent.137 The French Queen was never meant to be a leader of fashion:
that was the role of the mistress. Andreas Behnke reflects upon the mis-
judgement of a later queen, Marie Antoinette: “Marie-Antoinette’s
emulation of what she understood to be the glory of royal power was
interpreted by an increasingly hostile public […] as the adaptation
of a dress code fit for the king’s mistresses, not his wife.”138 Marie
Antoinette’s flouting of the distinctions between queen and mistress
in her studied informality of dress, particularly her championing of the
muslin la reine en gaulle, the simplicity of which contrasted dramatically
with court dress, contributed to her ultimate downfall and to that of
the French monarchy in the eighteenth century. Finette is cannier than
Marie Antoinette. She is fashionable, but she perfects the rich appearance
required of a queen: she undertakes the weight of regal dress and perfor-
mance as readily as her own mother discarded it for short petticoats and
thick shoes.
In d’Aulnoy’s tale, the nuances of sartorial performances inform the
action. By understanding how fashion was generated and thought about
by d’Aulnoy’s contemporaries, one can unpick the subtlety underlying
the profusion of diamonds and cinders to examine the material opera-
tion of magic. The loss of popularity of d’Aulnoy’s and Basile’s tales of
Cinderella may have much to do with the trivialisation of fashion by later

critics and readers, and the loss of sartorial understanding this entailed.
Nevertheless—and ironically—Perrault’s tale captured the more endur-
ing elements of Louis XIV’s fashionable legacy and would come to be
iconic.
Conclusion: Comeback Queens

Early modern Cinderellas were cunning and outrageous in their behav-
iour. In societies that had long been regulated by sumptuary law and
royal edicts, they courted danger with their sartorial choices and won
back their place in public life. These Cinderellas were the comeback
queens, focused on the pleasure of making a spectacle of themselves
through fashion. Unfortunately, Cinderella is always re-absorbed by
the patriarchal status quo. The royal obsession with her shoe upstages
Cinderella’s sartorial revenge and restoration plot. It is the shoe that has
become more famous than her gowns. Before examining Cinderella’s
shoes, however, Chapter 3 will examine Cinderella’s close “cousins,” the
heroes who, rather than engage in crime and delinquency, use dirt and
cinders to extort their sovereignty from paternal kings.
Notes
1. Ann Rosalin Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the
Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 14.
2. Cinderella balls became popular after 1880. They finished at midnight,
the name “in reference to that successful young professional beauty.”
J. Redding Ware, Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of
Heterodox English, Slang, and Phrase (London: George Routledge,
1909), 77. Ware’s tongue-in-cheek reference to the hero emphasizes her
expert exploitation of beauty and, indeed, fashion.
3. Christine A. Jones, ed. and trans., Mother Goose Refigured: A Critical
Translation of Charles Perrault’s Fairy Tales (Detroit: Wayne State
Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), 233.
6. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in
France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 158.
7. Juliane Vogel, “The Double Skin: Imperial Fashion in the Nineteenth

Century,” in The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World,
1500–2000, ed. Regina Schulte, Pernille Arenfeldt, Martin Kohlrausch,
and Xenia von Tippelskirch (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 219.
8. Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of
Things,” in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, ed. Dan
Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1999), 29.
9. Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds,” 30.
10. Elizabeth Wilson, “Magic Fashion,” Fashion Theory 8, no. 4 (2004):
383, Taylor & Francis Online.
11. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, rev. ed.
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 56.
12. Brian Moeran, The Magic of Fashion: Ritual, Commodity, Glamour
(London: Routledge, 2015), 26.
13. Nancy L. Canepa, From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto
de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State
15. Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 2007), 9.
16. The Slipper and the Rose, dir. Bryan Forbes (1976; B2MP, 2014), DVD.
17. Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales, trans. Christopher Betts
18. Colleen Hill, Fairy Tale Fashion (New Haven: Yale University Press/
New York: Fashion Institute of Technology, 2016), 29; and Laura
Valentine, The Old Old Fairy Tales (New York: A. L. Burt, 1902), 177.
20. In Ever After, Danielle continually flouts these laws, her sartorial duplic-
ity explicit in the film’s narrative. A servant herself, she sees no way to
wed a prince. She tells de Vinci that “a bird may love a fish, signore, but
where will they live?” Andy Tennant, dir., Ever After: A Cinderella Story
(1998), iTunes. De Vinci’s response is to make her wings for the ball,
allowing her to “fly” on par with the prince upon the public stage.
21. Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion,
Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (New York:
Free Press, 2005), 7.
22. Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV
to Elizabeth II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), xv.
23. Philip Lewis, Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in
the Writings of Charles Perrault (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996), 159.
24. Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds,” 30.

25. Paula Hohti, “Dress, Dissemination, and Innovation: Artisan Fashions
in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Italy,” in Fashioning the
Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe, 1500–1800,
ed. Evelyn Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 150.
26. Hohti, “Dress, Dissemination,” 157.
27. It is a pun on tale and account, the French words often confused at the
time. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers
and the History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001), 67.
28. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy
Tale Tradition (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 2002), 73.
29. L ynn Hunt, “Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France,” in From the
Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn
Norberg (Berkeley: University California Press, 1998), 236–237.
30. A notable exception is the case of feathered heroes. The costume of the
Prince of Peaceful Island in Murat’s “Anguillette” (Little Eel, 1698)
is described in detail, being made of all sorts of bird feathers with a
mantle of swan feathers, and further details including those of the belt
and helmet. Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton, ed. and trans.,
Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Seventeenth-Century French Women
Writers (Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance
Studies, 2010), 254. The King of Peacocks, in d’Aulnoy’s Princess
Rosette, has his attire described in less detail, but the peacock feathers
are, of course, mentioned.
31. Catherine Kovesi Killerby, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), 111.
32. Juliette Peers, The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie (Oxford:
Berg, 2004), 16.
33. Killerby, Sumptuary Law, 112.
34. Giambattista Basile, Giambattista Basile’s The Tale of Tales, or
35. Margaret Cavendish, too, writes in 1664, “I take more Pleasure to Devise
a Fashion than to Follow it.” Margaret Cavendish, Margaret Cavendish:
Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (New York: Routledge, 2012), 137.
36. James Laver, Taste and Fashion from the French Revolution Until To-Day
(London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1937), 254.
38. Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from
the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), 42.

Press, 2006), 120.
41. The ugliness of the sister here will be reflected in later representations of
Cinderella’s stepsisters.
42. Basile, Tale of Tales, 284.
43. Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (San Diego:
Harcourt, 1980), 447. Calvino, who includes this tale in his twentieth
century collection, gives us more than one variant, including “Water in
the Basket.”
44. Calvino, Italian Folktales, 448.
45. La Petite Cendrillon, ou La Chatte merveilleuse, Folie-vaudeville en un
acte (1810) by M. Désaugiers and M. Gentil actually adapts Perrault’s
tale by having the white cat, Minette, who has sat at the hearth with
Cinderella, rescuing her chestnuts from the fire, turn into the fairy god-
mother (Paris: Chez Barba, 1810, Internet Archive). Frances Freeling
Broderip’s “The Three Little Kittens” (1869), too, features a kitten
called Beauty who puts on a mitten “as gracefully as Cinderella of old
slipped her foot into the glass slipper!” Frances Freeling Broderip, The
Daisy and Her Friends: Simple Tales and Stories for Children (London:
Frederick Warne & Co., 1869), 50.
46. Canepa, Court to Forest, 162.
47. Babak Elahi, The Fabric of American Literary Realism: Readymade
Clothing, Social Mobility and Assimilation (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, 2009), 66.
48. The name alludes to a dark shade of red, evoking the murderous nature
of the sewing teacher.
50. Warner, From the Beast, 210. Warner goes on to interrogate the nature
of narration and the death of the mother to, at least in part, explain and
mitigate the vilification of women in the tales.
51. Graham Anderson, Fairytale in the Ancient World (London: Routledge,
2000), 40.
52. Johanna H. Stuckey, “‘Inanna and the Huluppu Tree’: An Ancient
Mesopotamian Narrative of Goddess Demotion,” in Feminist Poetics
of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, ed. Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn
McCredden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 94.
53. In later versions such as Ever After (1998) and Cinderella (2015), the
focus shifts from the father’s neglect to grief at his death. Consequently,
the relationship between Cinderella and her father becomes pivotal and
it is this relationship that inspires the stepmother’s jealousy.

57. Carmela Bernadetta Scala, Fairytales—A World Between the Imaginary:
Metaphor at Play in Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 90.
58. Kathy Peiss, “Making Up, Making Over: Cosmetics, Consumer Culture,
and Women’s Identity,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption
in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria De Grazia and Ellen Furlough
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 316.
59. Morag Martin, Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society,
1750–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 76.
60. Princess Beatrice later auctioned her hat on eBay for charity, hoping that
whoever won the hat would have fun with it. She may have actually set-
tled the score through her own good sportsmanship on the occasion.
63. Virginia Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction (Firenze:
Olschki, 1993), 229.
64. Sophie Raynard, “Perrault et les conteuses précieuses de la génération
1690: dialogue intertextual ou querelle masquée?” Romantic Review
99, no. 3/4 (May–November 2008): 327, ProQuest.
65. Nancy K. Miller, French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime
Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1995), 9.
66. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, “Beauty and the Beast: Animals in the
Visual and Material Culture of the Toilette,” Studies in Eighteenth-
Century Culture 42 (2013): 158, Project MUSE.
67. Today, the cat is still closely linked to female sexuality, as abundantly
clear at the 2017 Women’s Marches, in which vast numbers of women
wore pink “pussy hats,” a statement of protest against a president who
had been recorded saying he grabbed women by the pussy. The pussy
hat even made the cover of Time (February 2, 2017). The reclama-
tion of feline symbolism has much in sympathy with Zezolla’s rebel-
lion, in which she articulates her sexuality to seize her freedom. Pussy
hats were knitted, crocheted, and sewn by women, a counter to the
“Make America Great Again” caps mass produced in China for Donald
Trump’s presidential campaign. The disenfranchisement of female dress-
makers in the seventeenth century was an issue of great concern, and
the practices of guilds at that time and international conglomerates in
the present era resonate.
68. Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England

(Oxford: Berg, 2003), 10.
70. Christine M. Varholy, “‘Rich Like a Lady’: Cross-Class Dressing in the
Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London,” The Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 7, Project
MUSE.
71. Varholy, “‘Rich’,” 7.
72. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy,
trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 34.
73. Dana Thomas, Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster (New York: Penguin
Books, 2007), 22.
74. Martin, Selling Beauty, 1.
75. Jennifer Michelle Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and
Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 9.
76. Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Berg,
1988), 24.
77. Steele, Paris Fashion, 25.
78. Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the “Ancien
Régime”, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 6.
79. Sarah R. Cohen, Art, Dance, and the Body in French Culture of the
Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 147.
80. Cohen, Art, Dance, 150.
81. Will Pritchard, Outward Appearances: The Female Exterior in Restoration
London (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 108.
82. Augustin Challamel, The History of Fashion in France; or, the Dress of
Women from the Gallo-Roman Period to the Present Time, trans. Frances
Cashel Hoey and John Lillie (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1882), 130.
83. A further study of the publication process could help clarify the point.
Perrault privately produced a manuscript of fairy tales, Contes de ma
mère Loye, in 1695 prior to publication of Histoires ou Contes du temps
passé. Avec des Moralités, but the 1695 manuscript did not include his
Cinderella.
Century France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 43.
85. Sophie Raynard and Ruth B. Bottigheimer in Ruth B. Bottigheimer,
ed., Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 203.
87. Duggan, Salonnières, 203.

88. D’Aulnoy does make reference to Peau d’Ane and La Belle au bois
dormant in “The White Cat,” thus referencing Perrault, so it is likely
there was respect between the authors.
89. Claire Goldstein, Vaux and Versailles: The Appropriations, Erasures,
and Accidents That Made Modern France (Philadephia: University of
Pennsylavania Press, 2008), 206. D’Aulnoy gives a more privileged
position to the orange in her tale aptly titled “The Bee and the Orange
Tree,” where the hero, Aimée, turns her princely lover into an orange
tree to save him from an ogress. Aimée then becomes jealous of a prin-
cess who admires the fragrance of her lover’s blossoms. That jealousy
informs Aimée’s lament, as it describes the fashionable contrast between
her own tiger skin ensemble and the princess’s rich raiment.
90. Martin, Selling Beauty, 76.
91. Scala reduces these to the “trivial details Perrault provides.” Carmela
Bernadette Scala, Fairytales—A World Between the Imaginary: Metaphor
at Play in Lo cunto de li cunti by Giambattista Basile (Newcastle upon
Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 161. Her argument
relies upon dress being inconsequential in affecting a women’s fate,
the detail thus underlining the folly of the stepsisters (162). Of course,
those trivial details actually reveal much about the economic and social
predicament and motivations of the sisters, and dress very much holds
consequence.
92. Andrew Lang, ed., The Blue Fairy Book (London: Longmans, Green, and
Co., 1889), 65.
93. Perrault, Complete, 131.
94. Jack Zipes, ed. and trans., Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic
French Fairy Tales (New York: NAL Books, 1989), 26.
95. Jones, Refigured, 138. Such a necklace sounds like the item at the heart
of a later scandal, the affair of the diamond necklace, involving Marie
Antoinette. The necklace featured tassels, pendants, and festoons. The
scandal is often cited as a contributing factor to the French Revolution.
96. Challamel, The History of Fashion in France, 130. Madame de Sévigné
records in a letter of July 29, 1676, that Mme de Montespan was wear-
ing pearls “embellished with diamond festoons and pendants” in her hair.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, Selected Letters, trans.
Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin Books, 1982), iBooks. Although
more elaborate with its diamonds, the pearls are more significant.
97. Charles Perrault, Mémoires, Contes et autres œuvres de Charles Perrault
(Paris: Librarie de Charles Gosselin, 1842), 155n2, Gallica BnF.
98. Charles Perrault, Histories, or Tales of Past Times, trans. Robert Samber
(London: J. Pote, 1729), 76, ECCO.

100. John L. Nevinson, Origin and Early History of the Fashion Plate
(Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1967), 82. The reproduction of the
plate itself is a little unclear, but a line pointing to the bunches contains
the details of the lace.
101. Pat Earnshaw, A Dictionary of Lace, 2nd ed. (Aylesbury: Shire
Publications, 1984), 128.
102. Earnshaw, Dictionary of Lace, 129. Emily L. Lowes adds that the “leg-
end is that when Colbert, in the reign of Louis XIV, determined to
encourage lace-making in his own country, made prohibitive the impor-
tation of any other lace than France’s own manufacture, the French
Court, which had already become enamoured of Brussels lace, there-
fore had it smuggled into England and thence to France, as English laces
were at that time too insignificant to come under Colbert’s ban.” Chats
on Old Lace & Needlework (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908), 104, 107.
103. In Émile Bergerat’s “Cendrillon en Automobile” (1909), the hero desires
a lace gown and the lace comes alive to clothe her: “Toutes, donc, se
détachèrent, malines, valenciennes, vénitiennes, qui sont de l’alençon
démarqué, anglaises que réclame Bruxelles, et les auvergnates de Velay, et
les espagnoles aussi.” Émile Bergerat, Contes de Caliban (Paris: Eugene
Fasquelle, 1909), 212. The translators’ note says the “description of
Cinderella’s gown refers in technical language to no fewer than half a
dozen different types of lace.” Gretchen Schultz and Lewis Seifert, eds.
and trans., Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the
French Decadent Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016),
xiv. The mention of “anglaises que réclame Bruxelles” is likely a reference
to the point d’Angleterre, made in Brussels, specified in Perrault’s tale.
104. Jones, Refigured, 138. Perrault’s familiarity with hair styles is evident in
his play Les Fontanges (1690), the title referencing a popular hairstyle.
105. DeJean, The Essence of Style, 22.
106. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, Letters From Madame
la Marquise deSévigné, trans. Violet Hammersley (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1955), 52–53. The 1811 J. Walker edition of the letters pro-
vides a paragraph that describes this letter, itself only short, concluding
that such a detailed description of hair dressing “does not appear of
consequence enough to merit a translation.” Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
Marquise de Sévigné, Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and
Her Friends in Nine Volumes, vol. 1 (London: J. Walker etc., 1811),
162. Fortunately, other translators have not agreed.
107. Jones, noting the references to fashions of the 1670s, interprets the sis-
ters’ dress as unfashionable, a storytelling trick to highlight the inno-
vation of Cinderella’s clothing (Jones, Refigured, 138). While this is a
possibility, the fairy-tale authors did not always depict fashions accu-
rately and Perrault himself frames the tales as old. It is possible he simply
chose earlier fashions to suggest that the tale’s setting predates 1697.
After all, the sisters are guided by Cinderella’s good taste and seek out
fashionable hairdressers. They are making do with what they have on
hand, but there is no direct suggestion that their dress is old-fashioned.
108. As the previous note indicates, Jones observes that Cinderella’s com-
parative sartorial minimalism may be the fashion innovation (Jones,
Refigured, 138). It is the articulation that highlights her natural taste
and beauty, a characteristic that has carried beyond Louis XIV’s court.
Adaptations of Perrault all strive to distinguish between the sisters and
the hero, often rendering Cinderella herself in a simple style contrasted
with her gaudy stepsisters. In Disney’s Cinderella (2015), for example,
the hero and her mother appear at the start of the film in floral, mus-
lin prints with flowing hair and flower ornaments. Even Cinderella’s
elaborate ball gown carries forward the butterfly motif from her child-
hood. Her clothing harmonises with nature. This is contrasted to the
haute couture, intricately tailored in luxurious fabrics, worn by her step-
mother. Her own daughters wear vividly coloured clothing with brightly
stylised, almost psychedelic, florals and plaid. The contrast again privi-
leges Cinderella’s natural, simple style. Yet, the stepmother and daugh-
ters are actually more experimental in terms of fashion—they are the
David Bowies in their world. The canary yellow and flamingo pink worn
by the sisters are bold, bright, audacious. The stepmother’s clothing is
elegant and glamorous. Nonetheless, simplicity or naturalness continues
to be privileged as fashion cycles.
109. Jo Ellison, Vogue: The Gown (Conran Octopus, 2014), 11.
110. Ellison, Vogue, 58.
111. Sévigné, Selected.
112. Hill, Fairy Tale Fashion, 41.
113. Steele, Paris  Fashion, 25.
114. Charles Perrault, Charles Perrault: Memoirs of My Life, ed. and trans.
Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1989), 97.
115. Lucy Norton, First Lady of Versailles: Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, Dauphine
of France (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 142.
116. While the misappropriation is often instigated by the stepmother, in
many earlier versions she is not involved, or becomes largely inciden-
tal once Cinderella begins to compete sartorially with her sisters.
In Disney’s Cinderella, both the 1951 and 2015 versions, the sisters
actively rip and tear Cinderella’s remodelled gown, forcing her to rely
upon her fairy godmother’s generosity.
117. Jones, Sexing, 78.

119. Even today, an argument frequently forwarded is that the problem with
fashion is the dominant role of the male fashion designer. Many argue
that the increased use of androgynous, teenage women as models and
muses, and the consequent designs, are a result of women not design-
ing for the bodies of actual women. Jennifer Craik, for example, notes
“the belief that male designers are misogynists who come up with styles
that ridicule women yet appeal to the masochistic streak in women.”
The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge,
1993), 60.
121. Dictionnaire Universel François et Latin, vol. 2 (Trevoux: Estienne
Ganeau, 1704).
122. Merluche would indicate a type of cod. It wouldn’t be the first time that
d’Aulnoy has unromantically named a character after fish and sea crea-
tures, and, in light of the queen’s ambitions, the fishy naming is apt.
The earlier Chinese variant of Cinderella, Ye Xian, also features a piscine
fairy godmother, whom the hero feeds.
123. Peers, Fashion Doll, 15.
124. Tempting though it is to equate Finette’s remark to a twenty-first cen-
tury desire to look like a celebrity, l’astre refers to the celestial body,
although, in context, it does indeed refer to Finette’s promise to pres-
ent the ogress as an ostentatious and brilliant spectacle. It is worth not-
ing that, later, Finette wears stars upon her gown. In a later edition, the
hairdressing is translated as “Whereupon the three Prince∫∫es pull’d
off her Cap, and comb’d and frizzled her Hair,” providing significantly
more detail to the scene, and Finette then “with a Hatchet, ∫ever’d
her Head from her Body at one Blow.” Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy,
A Collection of Novels and Tales of the Fairies: Written by That Celebrated
Wit of France, the Countess d’Anois, vol. 1 (Dublin: J. Potts, 1770), 69.
125. Wilson, “Magic,” 376.
126. Hannon, Fabulous, 145.
127. Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun
King (London: Phoenix, 2007), 305.
128. Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton, Enchanted Eloquence, 158.
129. Naomi Novik, Uprooted (London: Macmillan, 2015), 36.
130. Novik, Uprooted, 44.
131. Vogel, “Double Skin,” 229.
132. Vogel, “Double Skin,” 229.
133. DeJean, Essence, 162.
134. Zipes, Beauties, 415.
135. D’Aulnoy also wryly notes the sneaky moral of her tale, Finette encour-
aging the king and queen to restore her parents’ status and introduc-
ing her sisters as charming. Not surprisingly, the sisters who persecuted
Finette are confused and d’Aulnoy’s final moral notes that vengeance
lies in kindness. D’Aulnoy is less circumspect about the value of passive
aggression.
136. John Styles, “Fashion and Innovation in Early Modern Europe,” in
Fashioning the Early Modern: Dress, Textiles, and Innovation in Europe,
1500–1800, ed. Evelyn Welch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 47.
137. Styles, “Fashion and Innovation,” 47.
138. Andreas Behnke, “(Un)dressing the sovereign: Fashion as Symbolic
Form,” in The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous
World, ed. Andreas Behnke (London: Routledge, 2017), 122.
CHAPTER 3
Fashion Felons II: Breaking All the Fashion

Rules
The slatternly counterpart to Cinderella is Peau d’Âne (or Donkey Skin),

otherwise known as All Fur, Catskin, She-Bear, and any number of
similar monikers. Cinderella and Donkey Skin are related in the Aarne-
Thompson index as persecuted heroes. True to her name, Donkey Skin
is most apt to cast off her princess raiment and go cave-woman in furs.
Her choice to adopt prehistoric grunge is motivated by amatory pater-
nal attention. Where Cinderella is driven to restore herself to public life
after her unlawful degradation by mother and sisters, Donkey Skin rebels
against patriarchal privilege, using her sartorial splendour to manipulate
the male gaze.
The two heroes are closely connected, most particularly in the works
of Perrault, where correlations between ash, fashion, and fairy godmoth-
ers are clear and, hence, just as Cinderella is identified by her Perraultian
name, so, too, for the sake of clarity, is Donkey Skin. Donkey Skin’s
mother dies as Perrault’s “Peau d’Âne” (1694) begins, making the king,
a purportedly great ruler, promise only to marry a woman more beautiful
and prudent than herself. Of course, Donkey Skin grows up to outshine
her mother and the king falls madly in love—or perhaps lust would be
a better term—with her.1 Donkey Skin cannot disobey her father, how-
ever insane and corrupt his desire, so she seeks the advice of her fairy
godmother, who suggests a ruse by which Donkey Skin asks for a dress
impossible to produce. Unfortunately, the king does produce the dress.
Thrice the fairy godmother advises this course until, at last, she sug-
gests the poor princess ask for the skin of the donkey that provides the

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4_3
kingdom with its wealth courtesy of its magical, monetary excrement.

Once provided, the fairy godmother suggests she dress in the skin and
flee. Donkey Skin finds dirty work in a nearby kingdom, befitting her
horrible sartorial state, but, in her own room, enjoys putting on her fan-
tastical gowns. The prince spies upon her and falls in love, begging that
she bake him a cake. She drops her ring into the batter. He seeks the girl
who can fit the ring and Donkey Skin is finally revealed. Cinderella’s time
in ashes is analogous, a gesture to redress through defilement that, in
fact, informs the crux of Donkey Skin’s story. Donkey Skin, Cinderella,
and their peers operate through the patronage and advice of a fairy
godmother, and are reconstituted in the social hierarchy through a test
for “fit” as queen: Cinderella through a shoe, Donkey Skin more often
through a ring.2
Filthy, despised heroes wearing tatters, stinking furs, and mouldy
rushes abound in fairy tales.3 They are messy and slovenly and, although
the squalid garments have fallen out of favour in more recent fairy tale,
there are still traces of the hero in her dirt and disorder. Recently, in
Naomi Novik’s Uprooted (2015), the hero, Agnieszka, introduces her-
self as “grubby faced,” her clothing always torn or stained through her
clumsiness.4 She primarily draws upon the tradition of grimy Baba Yagas,
old witches living in chicken-legged huts, but she also evokes the unruly
princesses of the past who despise patriarchal privilege. Novik’s novel
repeatedly tells the reader that Agnieszka tangles the orderly magic prac-
tised by the male magician known as the Dragon, a disruption that is at
the heart of these heroes’ journeys. They do not utilise sartorial magic
to render themselves visible. The dirty Cinderellas and the nasty Donkey
Skins repel the male gaze, concealed within their dross. They send them-
selves to the social margins, rejecting the performance of fashion.
Yet, at the margins, they can just as readily turn back into fashion-
able beauties, claiming sartorial authority from lecherous, voyeuristic,
male gazes, discovering pleasure and, indeed, sovereignty through their
own appearance. Sovereignty has a basis in fashion. Lipovetsky argues
that “through the fleeting nature of fashion [people] have asserted their
power of initiative over looks” so that “human sovereignty and auton-
omy are affirmed.”5 In essence, fashion provides people with sovereignty
over the bodies they are born with, which can be particularly powerful
for women living in patriarchal societies in which their bodies are reg-
ulated, primarily through marriage, sex, and fertility. In Donkey Skin
tales, the king’s decision to wed his daughter appears unavoidable, even
3 FASHION FELONS II: BREAKING ALL THE FASHION RULES 93
where the tales tell us his advisors attempt to reason against the decision.
The princess cannot deny her father access to her body and, in the con-
text of Lipovetsky’s remarks, it may not be bizarre that her fairy god-
mother advises her to ask for dresses. These items of fashion will enable
her to evade and thwart her father’s lust, both by turning herself into a
spectacle and by making her repellent to look upon.
In fairy tales, princesses and princes, queens and kings are significant
protagonists, and carry with them the additional weight of sovereignty
as monarchy. Andreas Behnke examines the appearance of this sover-
eignty as “symbolized and visualized via sartorial abundance and specta-
cle. The exalted station of the prince was produced through a dress code
that materialized, and thus made visible, a power not of this world.”6 In
tales of Donkey Skin, the princess steals away with this unworldly power
in the material form of the dresses that were designed to clothe her as
the sovereign’s consort. Behnke follows the progression of sovereignty to
the present day and its relation to fashion, observing that sovereignty has
become “almost completely feminized,” where “we still live in the shad-
ows of Marie-Antoinette.”7 Behnke’s observation tallies with the atten-
tion to female fashion in fairy tales, in which it is always the clothing of
the princess articulated, seldom the clothing of princes. There is a reason
we only occasionally read of a prince or king’s sartorial choices.
This chapter examines how the fairy tale hero uses sartorial corrup-
tion to claim sovereignty. Examining a broad range of fairy tales from
the early modern Italian to Disney’s animated features, the chapter
also locates these female heroes’ male peers, swine who become proper
princes through female sartorial sufferance. The chapter further explores
the use of abhorrence to manipulate politics and fashion.
Ashes
Before the slipper and ring, the trademark of Cinderella and Donkey
Skin is soot.8 Jones recently translated Cinderella’s name as Ashkins, with
the even more insulting epithet, Ashwipe, in light of the more precise
translation of cendre: cinders still glow, but ash is the remnant of the
fire.9 The greater popularity of cinders does have the interesting effect
of adding a little fire’s glow to the hero’s name. Cinders and ash defame
the hero.10 Angela Carter’s personal notes even suggest that her names
“imply blackness,”11 and it is possible to take that a step further as lend-
ing racist overtones to her debasement. Such humiliation extends to
other heroes. In Basile’s “Sole, Luna e Talia” (Sun, Moon and Talia),
the hero has been raped by the already married king and, about to be
murdered by the queen, begs to be allowed to remove her clothes, those
that have sustained her status as princess. The queen incidentally has an
eye for the rich material, in common with many fairy-tale stepmothers
and sisters, for she assents simply so as to save the rich clothing. Talia
effectively strips off her sovereignty before she is hauled away “to supply
the ashes” for the washing tub of Hades’ ferryman, ash being a compo-
nent of soap.12 The reference to ashes is graphic—Talia will not merely
be covered in ash, her body will be transformed into ash. Stripped of sov-
ereignty, she will then be effaced. Indeed, the significance of ash in fairy
tales is frequently linked to death.
The death of the mother is particularly prevalent in fairy tales and
ashes become a visible manifestation of the daughter’s mourning, virtu-
ally a sartorial gesture. Marina Warner tells us Cinderella is mourning:
“her penitential garb is ash, dirty and low as a donkeyskin or a coat of
grasses, but more particularly the sign of loss.”13 Like Warner, many justi-
fiably interpret the cinders in terms of grieving and, indeed, these heroes
often have lost their mothers. D’Aulnoy’s Finette is one of the excep-
tions, with d’Aulnoy juxtaposing the mother and daughter’s responses
to sudden financial and political devastation. It is notable that d’Aulnoy’s
mothers have far greater chances of survival in general, with mothers and
daughters playing significant roles in many of her tales.
While some Cinderellas are obviously mourning in their cinders,
though, their defilement an act of sorrow, in other versions, Cinderella is
simply demoted and humiliated, and consequently claims the hearth and
the soot for herself. The hearth is a place of contemplation for the hard-
pressed hero. Basile’s hero is called Cinderella Cat once she is sent to the
kitchens to sleep in the hearth. Her mother has presumably died, but the
loss is never mentioned: Basile simply tells us her father lately remarried.
Warner argues that “omitting any mention of graves or bones, severs the
narrative link between the orphan’s mother and the fairy enchantress,”14
but Basile is not the only one to skip the grave or bones, and there is no
reason to think they were deliberately erased from his tale. D’Aulnoy’s
Finette chooses Cendron as an alias, becoming “crafty cinders,” because
she discovers within the hearth a key to a treasure chest of beautiful
dresses. Even Perrault’s Cinderella seems unconcerned with mourning.
Perrault credits the hero’s charm to her mother, but the mother’s death
is merely implied. Cinderella retreats to the hearth after her chores and
her sisters insult her for sleeping there in the ashes. In fact, for these
heroes, cinders are a transitory smudge upon their clothing impelling
them toward sartorial spectacle. The hearth, even with its ashes, provides
them with a base for action, for transformation.
D’Aulnoy’s Finette, in fact, enjoys her time as Cendron: “Not a lover
was there but forgot his mistress for Cendron: not a poet but made
verses to her. Never did a name make such a sensation in such a short
time, and the echoes brought nothing back but Cendron’s praises.”15
Her evocation of cinders is not the gesture of a grieving daughter, but
a desirable rogue.16 Basile’s “Cinderella Cat” places her among the
rascal cats—Cinderella is cousin to Puss in Boots.17 Betts, in fact, refers
to “Puss in Boots” as “the boy’s counterpart of a Cinderella story,”18
but Cinderella is more closely aligned with the cunning cat, under-
standing the value of making the right sartorial impression in claim-
ing status, even if the clothing has to be swindled. Indeed, the Puss in
Perrault’s tale pulls the ultimate con in convincing an ogre to turn him-
self into a mouse, which he then eats in order to claim his château, ech-
oing Finette’s duping and murder of the ogres in order for the sisters
to claim their château. Even Perrault’s own Cinderella, long argued as a
passive hero, develops, as Jones cogently argues, the art of the “rhetor-
ical manoeuvre.”19 She learns the command of speech—particularly sly
speech—from the fairy godmother. She becomes as verbally devious as
the talking puss. These clandestine Cinderellas emerge from their hearths
and cinders to con the world.
Donkey Skin likewise finds herself in core domestic spaces on farms
and in castle kitchens. In the Brothers Grimm’s tale “Allerleirauh” (All
Fur, 1812), the hero, sourced from Henriette Dorothea Wild and Carl
Nehrlich, is placed directly into the kitchens where she will sweep up the
ashes. As with Cinderella, she gravitates to the hearth. Ostensibly, this is
a debasement: considered a dirty wretch, she is assigned the lowliest role
in the household. Yet, the hearth is also the heart of a home and thus
these heroes do not actually cede their position in the household. The
hero becomes, instead, the daughter of the hearth, drawing upon a long
tradition of domestic goddesses such as Hecate.
Storytellers are themselves frequently aligned with the hearth.
Cinderella and Donkey Skin thus occupy the position of storytellers at
the hearth, the space at the centre of the tale-telling. Indeed, donkey skin
stories in the seventeenth century were a common genre of magical tale,
Bottigheimer noting “[i]t was just like Charles Perrault to have made a
terminological joke out of his first effort at writing a fairy tale.”20 Donkey
Skin is, therefore, itself a reference to storytelling. The mythology of
the storyteller is illustrated most particularly in the seventeenth-century
French tales, especially their frontispieces. The famous engraving for
the frontispiece of Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697)
features the hearth looming large in the background of the storytelling
scene. Harries observes the cat in the latter engraving as evoking “com-
forting domesticity.”21 The cat, too, recalls Basile’s earlier hero, who
makes friends with the hearth puss. In the engraving, the cat faces the
reader while all other figures look to each other, engaged in the story-
telling and the storyteller’s spinning. The cat breaks the fourth wall, self-
aware. At a practical level, it’s only logical that cats would be associated
with the warmth of the hearth, but cats in fairy tale have always been
mercurial creatures, aligned with fairies and witches, and, indeed, often
protagonists themselves, as in the case of the con artists and d’Aulnoy’s
gracious and gorgeous feline hero, the White Cat. The cat, the hearth,
the ashes all align as features of the feminine fairy tale tradition.
The hearth and its ashes thus suggest that perhaps there is more to
the narrative than simply debasement and grief. This is beautifully illus-
trated in Charles Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth (1846) with a glori-
ous frontispiece by Daniel Maclise in which a sleepy family sits before the
hearth, from which emerges the gathering of fairy-tale protagonists and
other fairy creatures. Only in tales of Cinderella, Donkey Skin, and their
peers, the heroes themselves occupy the hearth from which they emerge
as spectacles of fashion.22
Domestic Goddesses
Duggan contends that Perrault viewed women as virtuous only if obe-
dient and useful: “In the same way that Griselidis subjects herself to an
abusive, tyrannical husband, Donkey Skin is reduced to cleaning rags and
pigpens under the skin of a domestic animal in order not to disobey her
incestuous father, and Cinderella is given the responsibility” of domes-
tic labour.23 Perrault’s equation of obedience with filth and domestic
drudgery is simple on the face of it, although scholars such as Jones have
questioned whether such challenges have not, in fact, forced heroes to
develop better rhetorical strategies towards self-sovereignty.24 Duggan
nonetheless maintains that Perrault’s tales seduce women into such
drudgery with the promise of a prince.25 It is an equation maintained
by the Brothers Grimm and, later, by Disney. A real princess, these tales
suggest, knows how to make a house spic and span. Yet, such skills are
not necessarily a sign of submission to patriarchal authority, and domes-
tic drudgery is not necessarily performed in hopes of a prince.
Domestic labour is not, after all, an attribute of royal status. Yet, in
the frequently inverted world of fairy tale, a princess may indeed be in a
situation where she cooks, cleans, and looks after farm animals. At times,
they take to this work and their rags with relish, a form of resistance to
marital pressures. Princess Joliette in d’Aulnoy’s “La Bonne Petite Souris”
(The Good Little Mouse, 1697) adamantly resists the marriage propos-
als of an evil prince, preferring her role as turkey keeper. When her fairy
godmother admires her turkeys, Joliette’s response is sassy: “They want
me to give them up for a paltry crown.”26 The ultimate prize in status
jewellery is deliberately dismissed. She would rather remain dirty, caring
for her turkeys, than be pressured into royal matrimony.
By contrast, an obsession with domestic cleanliness can appear trifling,
suggesting that female domestic labour lacks significance. L’Héritier’s
cross-dressing Leonore in “Marmoisan” nearly reveals her disguised
femininity through attention to domestic matters. L’Héritier’s tale is
particularly notable for the shifting pronouns for her hero/hero as she/
he negotiates gender roles, here being in the martial, masculine role of
Marmoisan, whose pernickety responses in matters of domestic habits are
noted: “his ill temper grew even more when he noticed that his tent had
not been tidied properly.”27 The tale describes such fervour for tidiness
and cleanliness as feminine. Leonore does not, however, undertake the
labour herself but, rather, oversees the house- (or, rather, tent-) keeping.
Still, Leonore’s concern with cleanliness may expose her cross-dressing,
the tale implicitly advocating that men have more significant priorities,
and thus cleanliness and orderliness can only be a virtue and responsibil-
ity for women.
L’Héritier’s indictment is oddly echoed later in Andersen’s sea
witch, who pronounces “cleanliness before everything” 28 as she cleans a
kettle with a bunch of snakes. The dubious morality of the witch is rein-
forced by her fetish for cleaning, her priorities clearly askew. La Force ear-
lier assigned a misplaced interest in cleanliness to a rather wicked, ticked
off fairy. In “Plus Belle que Fée” (Fairer Than a Fairy, 1697) an elderly
fairy losing her grasp on power becomes enraged by a queen’s asser-
tion that her daughter is more beautiful than the fairies. Indeed, the
queen bestows upon her daughter the rather literal appellation Fairer
than a Fairy. The fairy, Nabote, acts in revenge of all beautiful women,
Marianne Legault arguing that her actions are “not entirely based on
the old (patriarchal myth of) female rivalry, but rather also on wom-
en’s sense of female collectivity and honour. Nabote stands in support
of all the forgotten princesses.”29 Indeed, in the early modern tradition,
the fairies operate in terms of female integrity and desire, contrasting
with the competition motivated by close female family members living
under patriarchal control. Nonetheless, fairies can act against a female
hero. Nabote steals the princess away, has her stripped of her gorgeous
clothes and dressed shabbily. In fact, she orders the “young beauties” at
the palace “to strip Fairer of her beautiful clothes, thinking thereby to
take from her a portion of her charms” only to discover “what beauties
were then disclosed to view.”30 Fairy tales of the period frequently make
the point that the hero is beautiful no matter her clothed state, thus dis-
tinguishing between physical and material beauty, reinforcing the tran-
sitory nature of fashion. Fairer is consequently taken into the “infernal
regions”31 of the fairy’s palace, where she is given a small, dark cabinet
with straw to sleep upon and is made to sweep clean a gallery bedecked
with cobwebs so enchanted that they proliferate even as they’re swept
away. The princess is, nonetheless, “courageously resolved, notwith-
standing the great length of the gallery, to execute the task imposed
on her. She took her broom, and mounted the ladder nimbly, but,
O Heavens! What was her surprise when, as she endeavoured to sweep
the marble and clear off the cobwebs, she found they increased in propor-
tion to her exertions!”32 The task is a pointless punishment, implying the
trifling, unending nature of domestic cleaning as delegated to women.
While the obsession with cleanliness in these tales is ridiculed, the
labour itself, particularly if carried out in a state of abjection, becomes
symbolic of the princesses’ true grit, a phrase itself based in dirt. The
dirt and rags of the heroes at such points in their careers become a mark
of heroism. Furthermore, that mettle is proven in not merely a cross-
class-dressing, such as discussed in relation to Cinderella in Chapter 2,
but, to a certain extent, a cross-gender-dressing, in that they cast
off feminine preoccupation with cleanliness in dress and toilette for
a masculine insouciance. They may not don masculine attire, but they
do get as grungy as any active, adventurous, male hero. The domestic
sphere simply becomes their battleground.
Consequently, in “The Enchantments of Eloquence,” L’Héritier’s
Blanche does find comfort in doing household chores: “she had the
example of her neighbors, and she had also read somewhere that the
daughters of kings during the time of Homer had done the washing, and
that Achilles had also enjoyed cooking.”33 The additional reference to
Achilles here weakens the gendered implications and draws attention to
the heroic precedents for such chores. The action of domestic labour,
rather than the simple mania for cleanliness, becomes the pivotal desire
and occupation of these heroes. The action of that domestic labour
becomes indicative of the hero’s navigation of status.34
In the twentieth century, domestic labour became a major focus for
musical numbers in Disney animated features. The mix of the American
Dream and its aspirational qualities and the protestant work ethic
informs animated, musical anthems for domestic labour in Disney’s early
fairy-tale features. The tradition of working songs is easily as long as that
of fairy tale. However, where the early modern tales mention domestic
labour as something outside the princess’s ordinary life—and certainly
outside the experience of aristocratic readers who had servants to attend
to such tasks—Disney’s use of the working song emerges from the busi-
ness ethic of the studio and its founder, and the everyday, economic life
of the general American public. This public provides the primary audi-
ence, largely composed of the working and middle classes. Labour is, in
these features, a positive, virtuous thing.35
The first of Disney’s animated features, Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (1937), features two working songs, “Heigh-Ho,” sung by the
dwarfs, and “Whistle While You Work,” sung by Snow White. Ted Gioia,
while rejecting the authenticity of “the saccharine image” of the songs,
rationalises that the feature was released in a period of high unemployment
at the end of the Great Depression, observing, “who can wonder at the
fetishization of labor in these cheery movie songs.”36 Disney’s Snow White
inexplicably plays out much of the Cinderella narrative, providing the prin-
cess with an opportunity to labour that she’d never previously experienced.
Earlier versions of the tale do not detail her position in the castle, and there
is no suggestion that her stepmother has assigned her menial tasks: the
queen simply wants her dead. Disney’s Snow White is first encountered in
a brown, patched dress and wooden clogs, cleaning the steps and collecting
water. When she encounters her prince, she runs away, hiding behind the
curtains to first check the state of her dress and hair, intimating her sense
of worth as a beautiful princess. Fortunately, only the bottom of her skirt is
ripped and worn, so she reappears on the balcony to finish their duet, the
balustrade successfully concealing the tattered state of her apparel.
She has another dress and cape, apparently, for picking flowers in the
woods, and the queen’s conversation with the huntsman reveals that she
is still regarded as a princess, despite being assigned menial tasks. This
dress is a bright, regal concoction of red, blue, and yellow, the bold hues
taking full advantage of emergent Technicolour, the screen equivalent of
innovation in achieving ever brighter fabric dyes.37 There is no explana-
tion of how she reconciles her status as princess and scullery maid. The
positions are treated as interchangeable.
In the Brothers Grimm’s “Sneewittchen” (Little Snow White, 1812),
from Ferdinand Grimm and Marie Hassenpflug, once on the run follow-
ing the queen’s attempt to murder her, the hero finds a little cottage and
proceeds to eat the food and fall asleep on the beds. The dwarfs offer to
provide for her on the condition that she undertakes an impressive list
of chores including washing, cooking, making beds, sewing, and knit-
ting, all the skills of the nineteenth-century servant. In Disney’s feature,
Snow White finds the cottage in disarray and immediately decides to set
it to rights herself, rationalising that the occupants appear quite incapa-
ble of keeping their house in order and will perhaps provide her refuge
if she cleans first. Although she still undertakes the domestic chores,
she does so on her own terms in order to secure her own protection, in
some respects mimicking earlier heroes who serve their fairy godmoth-
ers in return for assistance.38 Furthermore, she does not work alone,
but instructs woodland animals in the task and corrects their errors. She
orders the squirrels, for example, not to hide the dirt under the rug.
Once the dwarfs arrive, they immediately become subservient to Snow
White. Their domestic life is clearly ruled by the princess who must be
persuaded to tell stories and dance with them. The avuncular dwarfs of
the Brothers Grimm, who remonstrate with and command the rather
naïve and vapid princess, are replaced by seven childlike dwarfs with silly
names.
Douglas Brode argues, “Walt’s Snow White makes her own decisions,
redeeming housework from mere drudgery.”39 This is the approach of
many of fairy tale’s domestic goddesses who find themselves in positions
of drudgery, but nonetheless take charge, just like Joliette. For Disney,
domesticity becomes an opportunity for activity: the princess, in fact,
takes melodic command with her working song. It is a tradition that
Enchanted (2007) explicitly parodies in the number “Happy Working
Song.” Giselle awakens to see the untidy horror that is Robert’s apart-
ment. In contemporary New York, she is far from a princess’s traditional
allies, the cute woodland birds, squirrels, deer, and rabbits. Her lyrical
call instead brings urban vermin including pigeons, rats, and cock-
roaches. A little fazed, she nonetheless claps her hands, the pigeons twirl
her great white skirts about to simulate an apron, and she orders her
team in song to set about cleaning while singing their working song. The
words cheerfully focus upon toilet-cleaning, clogged plug holes, and vac-
uum lint, the more abject aspects of housework that are usually left out
of Disney working songs. The attention to the grime and ick is parodic,
yet also confirms that fairy-tale princesses are not afraid of getting their
hands dirty. The bright music and cheerful lyrics are emblematic of the
princess’s optimistic, motivated attitude: a little dirt and grime can’t
bring her down. She has gumption in the face of abjection.
There is, incidentally, a similar, ironic play upon the working song in
Jacques Demy’s Peau d’Âne (1970). Demy evokes Disney when the hero
bakes a cake for the prince. She sings as she does so and, like Disney’s
Cinderella, who creates a chorus of bubble-reflections as she washes the
floors and sings “Oh, Sing Sweet Nightingale,” Peau d’Âne duplicates
herself. One of her selves is adorned in her gown the colour of the sun as
she does the actual baking, and the other is still in her donkey skin, read-
ing the recipe and cleaning the hut. Duggan remarks: “Demy’s juxtapo-
sition of the princess with her beastly double, along with the incongruity
of the image of the princess baking a cake in a formal, elaborate and cum-
bersome dress, renders the scene rather ridiculous.”40 Disney’s Enchanted
utilises a similar juxtaposition with Giselle cleaning in her snow-white,
crinoline-supported, wedding gown. Perrault’s Donkey Skin also works
in a luxurious dress, establishing hygienic conditions by washing her face
and putting on a silver smock. The extravagant sartorial gestures work to
distinguish the hero’s baking efforts from simple domesticity or labour.
Like Giselle, Peau d’Âne does not surrender her status, but sartorially
asserts it in her labour, however incongruous it may appear.
The working songs of these twentieth-century, musical princesses
embody a can-do attitude in a world in which housework is not a dirty
fairy-tale word. These are not the Victorian domestic goddesses known
for purity and virtue, obedient to patriarchy, but domestic goddesses
who are not afraid to work even as they fix their hair and put on their
silver smocks. They go into hiding in the domestic, finding private sov-
ereignty in their cleaning and baking. Labour simply becomes another
opportunity for a little understated, fashionable remodelling as the
heroes become, in the moment, “invisible” to the court.
The Witty Fancy of Pastoral Domesticity

Heroes also get their hands dirty in a retreat to the pastoral, where exile
and labour are idealised. The pastoral is not a wilderness or dark wood,
but a picturesque country scene often dotted with sheep—and some-
times sheep in bling—an alternative scene to the court and the fast pace
of cosmopolitan life. While frequently the pastoral is evoked nostalgically,
Hannon presents the case that “retrograde narrative elements” are not
inconsistent with the more progressive tone of the tales.41 David Whitley
picks up this theme in discussing the pastoral in Disney’s animation, par-
ticularly early animation featuring heroes such as Snow White and Briar
Rose, where “the survival of pastoral in a predominantly urban age is also
because its modes of representation can be developed in such different
directions.”42 Indeed, Whitley argues that, while the pastoral themes of
Disney were strongly established in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
there was no major departure in Cinderella, suggesting that though
“[d]omesticity would appear to be the very antithesis of the pastoral
idyll,” Cinderella occupies a role in common with many a shepherdess,
and the tale’s transformations of mice and pumpkins “makes sense as a
kind of witty pastoral conceit.”43 Disney actually reproduces the mores
of ancien régime tales in creating the pastoral landscape, mores in which
the pastoral retreat plays a part in the hero’s recovery of position, before
her re-entry into the life of court.
In the pastoral landscapes, labour takes on an aura of both natu-
ral grace and messy, sometimes violent, debasement. While Perrault’s
Donkey Skin must launder the dishcloths and muck out the pigs, she
also lives on a farm that has a charming aviary, appealing enough that the
prince likes to spend time there. Pastoral scenes are popular in French
literature of the seventeenth century and, indeed, influenced royal life,
as famously evident in the later construction of Hameau de la Reine, a
small, picturesque farm that remains on the grounds of Versailles to this
day, despite the execution of Marie Antoinette, for whom it was built.
The pastoral scene retains an aesthetic luxuriousness that simulates the
sophistication of the court. With Louis XIV centralising aristocratic life
in Versailles, country estates became locations of exile and the pastoral
idylls in the fairy tales almost always correspond with a period of exile
in which heroes, rather than simply remaining passive, move to recover
from their social obliteration.
D’Aulnoy was particularly fond of sending her princesses into pastoral

exile, or even into pastoral horrors. Hannon argues these “are infused
with a strong parodic dimension.”44 In “L’Oranger et l’Abeille” (The
Bee and the Orange Tree, 1697), the princess, Aimée, is raised by a
family of ogres. She sleeps in their cave, but contrives for herself a tiger-
skin dress and buckskins, and creates her own pleasant cave retreat with
butterfly-wing hangings and other comfortable furnishings crafted from
local materials.45 Like many of d’Aulnoy’s heroes, she manages, with skill
and labour, to create a pleasant pastoral idyll, but it is a contrived sim-
ulation of the more civilised comfort of French fashion. The idyll itself
is under constant threat from ogres, giants, and bad-tempered fairies.
In this case, Aimée’s adoptive mother plans to eat the handsome, ship-
wrecked prince she discovers and to wed Aimée to her own son. Aimée
will eventually realise and reclaim her royal status but, even in exile and
in ignorance of her true identity, she cannot help but improvise the
appearance of fashionable sophistication.
Heroes frequently disguise themselves in order to retreat from dan-
ger, but they cannot conceal their nobility. Hannon notes that women
were “‘[n]atural’ authorities on taste, language and manners,”46 but, for
many female authors, that natural authority extended only to women
born with noble blood. They cross-class-dress, appearing as romantic
shepherdesses or as a variety of animals and barbarians, but their “innate
nobility” is incapable of concealment. Thus, no matter the rude cloth-
ing, heroes dress with such taste the clothing is transformed. The hero
of d’Aulnoy’s “La Princesse Carpillon” (Princess Little Carp, 1698),
for example, seeks to escape marriage to Prince Hunchback by obtain-
ing a cow and the costume of a shepherdess, including wooden clogs, a
“grey sackcloth dress,” and a “yellow linen mobcap.”47 Wooden shoes
and undyed or cheaply dyed fabrics in shades of grey or brown were fre-
quently the lot of the peasant, a direct contrast to the luxurious mate-
rial and dyes available to aristocrats. An Amazonian fairy appears to be
rather amused by Little Carp’s attempt at pastoral labour: “you cannot
keep a lie going to play the role you’ve chosen unless I help you.”48
Little Carp’s natural taste and nobility has, as Stallybrass suggests, “per-
meated”49 the clothing, transforming the rude clothing into something
rather more fashionable.
Marie Adélaïde of Savoie may, in fact, have been the model for
Little Carp. She engaged in many outdoor pursuits. Indeed, in the year
before the tale’s publication, she became an avid angler, Norton offer-
ing an anecdote: “It became a perfect craze all through that summer of
1697, and Dangeau tells of baskets of ‘monstrous fine carp’ […] Louis
XIV thought her too funny for words, especially when, arriving for the
spring visit to Fontainebleau, she ran straight from the carriage to the
carp-basin, with footmen flying after her with rod and bait.”50 In the
tale of Little Carp itself, Prince Hunchback challenges the princess as
to whether she loves himself or his father, the king, perhaps hinting at
Marie Adélaïde’s apparent preference for Louis XIV over her own bride-
groom. Fairy-tale pastoral pursuits, indeed, appear to mimic the playful
entertainments and marital intrigues of the court of Versailles.
The pastoral, however, also becomes a contested landscape for those
in exile from their courts. In “The Ram,” the hero, Merveilleuse, finds
herself in a Cordelia-esque dilemma and the king orders her death.51
A kindly captain and her close companions save her, but she is still forced
to flee the kingdom. Hearing sheep, she reflects that there will probably
be shepherds who can show her the way to a village. Once there, she
supposes, she will find the means to dress as a peasant and escape discov-
ery from her affronted father. Thus, intending to conceal her status in
rustic garb, she enters the fairy-tale hero’s pastoral contract, but this is
not an ordinary pastoral scene. D’Aulnoy explicitly parodies courtly pas-
toral entertainments in her tale. There is a white ram with gilded horns
who wears strings of pearls upon his legs, and diamond necklaces and
flowers about his head, while he reclines upon a couch of orange blos-
soms; the choice of orange blossoms, not to mention the weight of jew-
els, perhaps alluding to Louis XIV’s personal preferences. A gold cloth
protects the Ram’s complexion from the outdoor sunshine, a protection
completely unnecessary to such an animal, but essential to an aristocrat.
The sheep with him are likewise adorned in earrings, ribbons, and flow-
ers and, rather than gambol, they gamble and dine on a variety of rare,
new, or expensive treats including coffee, ices, sherbet, lemonade, sweet-
meats, strawberries, and cream.52 It was only in 1669, for instance, that
the Turkish ambassador, Soliman Aga, brought coffee to fashionable
Parisian attention.53 The Ram’s pumpkin coach is, itself, a more organic
pastoral gesture than Perrault’s pumpkin carriage, since it is a pumpkin.
Pumpkins themselves were still quite a recent addition to French horti-
culture, associated with the wild, fertile, rustic “new world,” and, during
the period, were noted for their great size, making them a novel, even
fecund, vegetative option for a carriage.54 The Ram takes Merveilleuse
to a place where the trees grow “fruit” upon their branches that includes
partridges, turkeys, and other game. A range of other edible delicacies
such as jam and tarts, and also jewels and coins rain down. Rivers of per-
fumed water—orange-flower, of course—and streams of different alco-
holic wines and liqueurs also flow. Without the servants and labourers
who would sustain such a courtly lifestyle, further supported by urban
markets and trade, d’Aulnoy conjures ready-to-go luxury from nature
itself. A partridge does not simply appear as in nature, an animal to be
hunted—although heroes such as Aimée are quite capable with a bow
and arrow—it is already dressed, ready to be plucked from its branch and
eaten. Moreover, it is dressed to rival the partridges sold at La Guerbois,
a fashionable tavern at which Louis de Bechamel, Marquis de Nointel,
steward to Louis XIV, cooked.55 Bechamel’s recipe for dressing partridge
was actually set to the music of Petits oiseaux, rassurez-vous (Little birds,
take courage) for the men at the court, suggesting that the recipe had
its own beauty.56 Merveilleuse’s new courtly home is a palace formed
from trees, vines, and shrubs, including the ubiquitous orange trees.
The pastoral landscape is not lacking in luxury, it simply doesn’t require
the laborious and financial feats of running a major palace. Luxury itself
becomes a natural state, its goods readily plucked from earth or tree.
However, Merveilleuse does eventually return to her father’s kingdom
for the weddings of her sisters. She is restored in her sartorial status, hav-
ing complained to the Ram that her sisters will be adorned as queens,
thus cajoling him into providing her clothing of a like status. She even
rides in a mother-of-pearl coach drawn by hippogriffs, a suitably fashion-
able and magical means of conveyance. With Merveilleuse “dazzl[ing]
everyone by her glittering beauty and the jewels that adorned her,”57 she
readily reclaims her place at court. The king sees the error of his ways in
exiling her and abdicates, installing Merveilleuse as queen. Unfortunately,
back at court, she forgets the Ram and his bucolic kingdom, and he
dies of a broken heart. Where, commonly, the princess will restore the
beastly lover, in this case, the princess leaves in her wake a number of
fallen comrades and lovers. The Ram himself has perhaps become natural-
ised to his shape, resigned to his abjection. He earlier expresses his joy at
Merveilleuse’s presence by frisking like a sheep. He therefore passes away
in bestial state. The princess, however, maintains her sovereignty and even
increases it, becoming a sovereign in her own right.
The pastoral exiles, retreats, and sanctuaries largely provide the heroes
with freedom from court life and from the tricky romantic and familial
relationships with kings and princes that threaten their sovereignty.

The pastoral is a place of simulated luxury, an idealisation of the natural
state that is reflected in the representation of feminine nobility as innate.
A princess, however savage her upbringing, however rustic her exile, will
always exhibit the best sartorial taste.
Sex and the Furry Princess

Bestiality itself is the full embodiment of the abjection of the male or
female hero. Whether putting on the skin of an animal or being trans-
formed utterly into a beast, the motivation behind the adoption of a
brutish appearance is to repel desire. Ironically, in fairy tales, the beast
often becomes an object of the very desire they’re seeking to avoid.
The best known beasts are male and, as Warner notes, Disney’s fea-
ture, Beauty and the Beast (1991) was “more vividly aware of contem-
porary sexual politics than any made before.”58 The Disney beast is
an impressive masculine object in a tight blue jacket. He is the object
of both Belle and the audience’s female gaze as he “swells, he towers,
he inflates, he tumesces.”59 Practically bursting out of his clothing, or
even his skin as Prince Lindworm does, the beast is ever a figure of sex
dominating the hero’s bedchamber and even her bed. Even as a frog,
the beast’s slimy presence in her bed becomes the final straw, prompt-
ing her to throw him against the wall in the Brothers Grimm’s “Der
Froschkönig oder der eiserne Heinrich” (The Frog King, or Iron Henry,
1812), from the Wild family. The moment the princess does so, he turns
into a handsome prince, falling to her bed, “and in their delight they
fell asleep together,”60 which does seem rather suggestive of sex. Other
beasts are a little more delicate in their sensibilities and seduce their
beloved in dreams. Nonetheless, as Warner writes, his “sexual equipment
was always part of his charm.”61 Zipes likewise notes that tales of beauty
and the beast “set standards for sexual and social conduct.”62 The inter-
est in the sexuality of the beast continues to contemporary retellings.
Angela Carter’s rewritings of beast tales are, according to Jessica Tiffin,
her “most potent symbols, the space in which she can most powerfully
explore the notion of sexuality as an animal urge”63 and are certainly
her most popular tales. The tales of the beast, because of their abjection,
inspire sexual interest.
Female beasts are not, however, uncommon in fairy tale either.
Certainly, Carter herself explored the female beast in tales such as
“The Tiger’s Bride” and “The Company of Wolves,” in which women

undress and discover their bestial nature beneath their clothing. For
Carter, clothing is absolutely the raiment of human culture, staving off
sex. And, occasionally, a male beast may even have a queer secret. In the
nineteenth and twentieth-century pantomime era, male beasts, such as
princes, would often be played by leading actresses. Klaw & Erlanger’s
production of the Drury Lane spectacle The Sleeping Beauty and the
Beast (1901), for instance, features an actress in the role of beast. The
booklet of the production features her in the costume of the masculine
beast, in a leonine head, carrying paws that protrude from her tightly
fitted jacket. Only her legs, clad in tights, and the heels on her dainty
shoes proclaim her gender and, indeed, fetishise the femaleness of her
legs (Fig. 3.1).64 The cross-dressing actress or principal boy is common
in the period, but these female beasts offer a peculiar variation. Beasts
with exposed, sexy legs, they manifest the entertaining perversion of gen-
der and sexual desire, the undressing and exposure of the body, repre-
sented in fairy tale’s many enchanted beasts.
It is notable that many filthy heroes dabble in bestiality. While the
male beast offers the prospect of dangerous sexuality and a charming
Fig. 3.1 The Beast from The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast. Malcolm Douglas,
The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast (suggested by Klaw & Erlanger’s Production)
(New York: Towers & Curran, 1901)
husband if only your love is strong enough, the female hero’s bestiality
is more commonly a response to a depraved or abhorrent sexual threat.
Her response transforms her, in turn, into a loathsome or frightening
beast as both a protection and as a means for her to take control of her
sexual fate. Despite her bestiality, however, she almost always forms a
relationship with a king or prince. Bestiality simply gives her the power
to reveal herself, in full sovereignty, to the prince she chooses.
The princess of Basile’s “L’orsa” (The She-Bear) is one of the early
modern female beasts. As in the tale of Donkey Skin, the king’s wife dies,
making him promise that he will only remarry if he finds a woman as
beautiful as she. The king makes a great show of his grief, even reproach-
ing the stars. It is a short-lived anguish, however, and, by the end of the
day, he’s contemplating how to find a woman who fits the bill in order
both to satisfy his sexual desire and to have a son. When his daughter,
Preziosa, discovers that he’s chosen her, she is manifestly angry in a man-
ner quite unlike Perrault’s obedient Donkey Skin. Her father physically
threatens her, so she turns, aptly enough, to the woman who provides
her make-up. Who better to contrive a disguise than the woman who
deals in cosmetics? The woman provides her with a stick that, when the
king becomes amorous, she can place in her mouth, turning her into a
bear and allowing her to escape. The bear is not a cuddly creature, but
a ferocious beast: this is an era before the teddy bear when bear bait-
ing and bear fights were common entertainments. Thus, Preziosa goes
to her father’s bed and quite literally terrifies him. The tale’s incest plot
does not draw its erotic punches. The princess turns into a real and phys-
ical threat to her father, transforming his hopes of sex into the threat of
being pulled apart and devoured.
Preziosa runs away and chooses to remain a bear, living in harmony
with the animals. She, in effect, becomes one with the pastoral land-
scape. A prince out hunting is terrified by the bear, but Preziosa likes
the prince and so wags her tail invitingly. The prince makes a variety of
domestic animal noises, a playful parody of amorous speech, and takes
her home. His bravery pays off. Preziosa occasionally takes the stick from
her mouth in order dress her hair and, at one of these moments, the
prince spies her and realises that the bear is a woman with golden hair.
His appeal to her is rich in explicit sexual metaphor, asking her to lift the
curtain so that he can “see the pomp of your marvels!”65 Preziosa isn’t
easily seduced, of course, and the prince responds with a tantrum that
mimics her father’s emotional instability. He develops a life-threatening
illness and insists that the bear nurse him. Preziosa cooks for the prince,
her paws apparently adept at roasting chickens and making gratins. The
prince kisses her in her bear form, highlighting the eroticism of
Preziosa’s cross-special dressing and the “animal passions” she incites. It
is only during the kiss that she loses her stick and transforms back into a
woman, willing to be wed. The tale, on the whole, is a bawdy one, but
one in which the disguised woman is permitted to enact a sexual sover-
eignty denied her in her feminine attire.
The tale “Peau d’Ours” (Bearskin, 1753)—attributed to Murat by
Warner, although often attributed to Marie-Madeleine de Lubert—plays
upon Basile’s “The She-Bear,” but without the provocation of incest.
The princess, Hawthorne, is doomed to wed Rhinoceros, king of ogres.
The threat of marriage to a disgusting king is common in tales of the
1690s and the choice of a rhinoceros is both exotically, spine-tingling
awful and, of course, rather phallic considering the horn. Rhinoceros is
a shape-changer, appearing as both rhinoceros and ogre. Hawthorne’s
companion, Corianda, takes the bear skins decorating Rhinoceros’ home
and sews Hawthorne into them, concealing her. In effect, the hero, with
some nifty needlework, contrives to match beast for beast. Hawthorne
is magically transformed into an actual bear through her clothing and,
as in Basile’s tale, she escapes to the pastoral idyll of a wood where a
king becomes enchanted with the pretty bear, eventually choosing to
wed her. These narratives operate on the premise that the hero is sexually
desirable to such an extent that no blood relation or animal exterior is an
obstacle. The hero as a bear is an erotic and abject figure. Indeed, there
is a story that Charlotte-Rose de La Force disguised herself as a bear,
possibly inspired by such tales, in order to meet her young lover.66
The Brothers Grimm do have a similar tale in “Prinzessin Mäusehaut”
(Princess Mouseskin, 1812), from the Wild family and similar to “All
Fur.” The tale follows the initial trajectory of Mervellieuse in the daugh-
ter being punished for not expressing sufficient love for her father. She
escapes death by requesting the male servant, sent to kill her, provide
her with a mouseskin outfit. Wearing this, she actually further cross-
dresses, pretending to be a man, and is employed by the king, who is
physically abusive and throws his boots at her. When she tartly sug-
gests she doesn’t come from a place where people simply throw boots
at people’s heads, the king realises she isn’t what she seems and, find-
ing an expensive ring that belongs to her, uncovers the truth and mar-
ries her. The tale, however, has lost its sexual charge, despite carrying
elements of abjection and cross-dressing. Even her bestial attire is less

than fearsome—she is wearing clothing made of rodent skins.
Just as bestial or smutty attire can be put on, it can be taken off, and
the process of putting on and taking off feminine glamour becomes a
calculated, voyeuristic display, an alternate toilette, that the heroes use
to their advantage. Philip Lewis discusses Donkey Skin’s cross-dressing
act, which “the narrative pointedly describes, when she puts on the skin,
as travesty.”67 Like Cinderella, Donkey Skin easily changes between
classes as she changes dress. Dressing and undressing in the most glam-
orous and abject attires becomes a fairy-tale fan dance, illuminating the
erotic gamesmanship Christine M. Varholy refers to in respect to cross-
class-dressing. Unlike Cinderella, however, Donkey Skin obtains her
dresses from her father, Varholy reflecting that contemporary women
“received clothing from their fathers, husbands, or masters, men who
existed in positions of authority over them.”68 Instead of receiving cloth-
ing from a female benefactress that will free her, Donkey Skin receives
clothing as part of a sexual exchange from men who have power over
her. She must steal or coerce her sartorial freedom and, by exchanging
bestial and glamorous attire, she is able to exert sovereignty over her
own physical sexuality.
A largely unrecognised antecedent of Donkey Skin’s story is Basile’s
“Rosella.” Donkey Skin, in efforts to confound the lust of her father,
requests “impossible” dresses before she will sleep with him. Most
scholars focus upon the incest that drives the father–daughter relation-
ship. However, while “Rosella” has no incest in the plot, the hero also
requests clothing in return for her sexual favours, while simultaneously
resisting those very sexual advances. Rosella is daughter of the Grand
Turk. Her father is tricked into seeking the blood of a handsome prince,
Paoluccio, to cure his leprosy. The Grand Turk is thus rendered a mon-
strous figure. Rosella falls in love with Paoluccio and secures his escape
but, as soon as he sets foot in his kingdom, her mother’s curse causes
him to forget Rosella. She makes shift, though, and secures a palace
directly across from his. Many of the lords of the court desire her and
Rosella quite consciously leads them on. She agrees to meet with her
most amorous suitors in her bed providing they bring money and ele-
gant attire, including rich brocades, and then tricks them into perform-
ing impossible tasks before they can join her in bed, so that they never
do join her there. Such tasks include combing her impossibly tangled
hair and closing the door that immediately opens again. When Paoluccio
claims she has wronged his courtiers, she returns that she was wronged
by the one who fits the ring she wears, a ring which naturally belongs
to Paoluccio. This is actually a reversal of “Donkey Skin,” in which the
ring is used to identify the female hero. In this case, Rosella maintains
her sovereignty within the patriarchal networks of desire and power and,
ultimately, shames the prince, rather than herself. Her offer of sex for
dresses provides her with a negotiating position and she is able to use the
prince’s ring to bring him to account.
The dresses play a larger role in Perrault’s “Donkey Skin,” being a
sartorial negotiating tactic for sex and marriage. Confronted with her
father’s demand that she marry him, the princess seeks out her fairy god-
mother who advises her to ask for a dress “[t]he colour of the heavens”69
before she will marry him. Here, Perrault’s tale rhymes with Basile’s
“Rosella,” with the princess at least willing to give the appearance of
trading sex for a pretty dress. Each time the king produces a requested
gown, the fairy godmother advises her to ask for yet another apparently
unachievable feat of couture. The various attempts give insight into dress
design and manufacture. The king calls the kingdom’s tailors to make
the gown: “Its sheer and splendid azure hue [o]utshone the sky’s most
glorious blue.”70 It doesn’t seem such an extreme challenge to produce
a beautiful blue dress. Yet, sky-blue was a difficult colour for contem-
porary dyers to achieve. Indigo, which gave a deeper, more luxurious
blue, had been restricted in France prior to Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s trade
reforms.71 Once the blue is achieved, however, the fairy godmother
again counsels the princess to ask her father for a dress, this time in the
colour of the moon. The king consults his needleworker to achieve this
task, producing a gown as beautiful as night. It is likely the dress would
have been embroidered in silver and gold thread, producing the effect
of starlight upon the fabric. The kingdom’s craftspeople are bending the
best of their skills to the effort and such effects were absolutely possible
at a more pragmatic level in Louis XIV’s court. These are neither mag-
ically conjured, nor impossible sartorial gestures: their magic is based in
their unique artistry.
Notably at this point, the princess is so surprised and delighted that
she is almost willing to give in to the king’s demands. Or, in other words,
for these beautiful gowns, she is willing to sleep with her father and take
her position as queen. Yet, the fairy godmother forestalls her, telling her
to ask for yet another dress as bright as the sun. This time, the king com-
mands the best jeweller and he produces the gown “[i]n cloth all sewn
with diamonds and gold.”72 This gown is plausibly a reference to Louis

XIV once more. Otherwise known as the Sun King, he appeared as a
teenager in the gold costume of Apollo. It would seem the fairy god-
mother shares Louis XIV’s tastes. The final dress is the epitome of sarto-
rial spectacle, evoking shining sovereignty itself.
Why does the fairy godmother persist with the dresses? Early modern
women often had no access to money with which to buy clothing for
themselves.73 The gifts of dresses in d’Aulnoy’s tales are almost always
from the hands of the fairies, providing the heroes with independence
from their parents. Donkey Skin’s fairy godmother plays the trick of
having the father provide his daughter with her sartorial independence.
Yet, there are problematic implications to her advice, for Varholy elab-
orates that “[a] man who was involved in a sexual relationship with a
woman could exert some control over his female partner’s appearance
by providing clothing in the form of gifts.”74 The fairy godmother
advises the hero to insist upon clothing that the father should not be
able to provide, yet the father consistently meets her expectations, con-
tinuing to exert pressure upon his daughter. Varholy indicates that such
gifts allowed the man “to reconstruct both his partner and himself.”75
The fairy godmother’s advice might well be aimed not at thwarting the
father’s desire with a request for an impossible dress, but at signifying
that Donkey Skin herself is an impossible, marvellous acquisition, in the
style of the gowns themselves. The father’s consistent success in provid-
ing the dresses begins to wear down Donkey Skin’s revulsion as she is, in
fact, reconstructed as his queen.
The fairy godmother’s final advice has the effect of deconstruct-
ing the very fiscal basis of the kingdom, rendering any further sartorial
commissions unattainable. The donkey which defecates gold coins is the
source of the kingdom’s wealth.76 The fairy godmother advises the prin-
cess to request the donkey’s skin, thus destroying the kingdom’s scato-
logical economy. Donkeys and asses are comic fodder for the storyteller,
and the princess is demeaned and abjected once she dons the donkey’s
skin and name. Warner argues that these daughters resort to natural,
even beastly, disguise in response to being “violated,” and such assaults
as they’ve endured have “contaminated them.”77 However, Preziosa
and Hawthorne revel in their bestiality, freely performing their sexual-
ity in their animal disguise. In bear form, for instance, Preziosa cheer-
fully bedecks her prince’s bed in flower blossoms as though for bridal
purposes. Duggan makes the distinction between heroes, pointing out
that while Preziosa becomes a bear, and cleans and decorates the prince’s
bedroom, Donkey Skin disguises herself in a skin and performs the tasks
of a scullion: “Both Doralice and Preziosa are active and sexual beings
without being demonized, whereas Donkey Skin is the desexualized
object of contemplation for the prince.”78 The skin of the dead donkey,
however, represents the wealth of the kingdom. Donkey Skin is running
away wearing what remains of her father’s treasury, and so her desexual-
isation and contamination may not be as genuine as it seems.
Moreover, the fairy godmother ensures that she takes away her dresses
and other accoutrements, including brushes, mirrors and jewels, and
even the fairy godmother’s own wand. Straparola’s Doralice, in virtu-
ally the same predicament, is actually placed in the chest that contains
her wardrobe, her nurse removing her rich clothing and jewels to ensure
room for the hero to conceal herself. Where Donkey Skin carries off the
riches of her father’s kingdom, Doralice herself is helplessly bartered, the
chest sold to a wealthy, honourable Genoese merchant and eventually
carried off to England where a king then purchases it. The chest is placed
in the king’s bedroom and Doralice makes a habit of popping out in the
morning to clean and make the bed, strewing it with flowers, until she is
discovered and taken as a bride. Lacking the ability to dress herself as a
desirable woman, she turns to “dressing” the room and thus achieves her
ends. Donkey Skin, however, does not flee empty-handed and, although
she wears what is described by the fairy godmother as “so foul a dress,”79
she retains and sustains her sartorial value within the abject disguise.
Indeed, Donkey Skin cleverly inverts the usual position of the natural
and abject being concealed by the luxurious. She wears the abject to con-
ceal her glamour.
On Sundays, however, Donkey Skin enjoys herself by locking herself
in her room and going about her toilette, setting up her little pots of
lotions and creams and her mirror, and, once clean again, dressing up in
her gowns. Fashion, of course, is worn to be seen, and Donkey Skin’s
actions are apparently perverse. As Bottigheimer notes, Perrault’s Donkey
Skin has an aspect unfamiliar to similar tales by Basile and Straparola,
that of “an exiled princess privately dressing up on Sundays for her own
pleasure.”80 However, in prioritising her own pleasure, she takes back
her sovereignty. She delights herself, finds pleasure in her own spectacle,
rather than constructing herself explicitly for the male gaze. In Demy’s
film adaptation of Perrault’s tale, the princess is very careful in arranging
her mirror in order to view her reflection at its best. Duggan writes that
she is “thus re-creating for herself the proper setting for the performa-
tive self,”81 noting that she sings “I love you so” to her own reflection.
Duggan notes that, earlier in the film, her fairy godmother is likewise
engaged in “the preparation of her self-as-spectacle.”82 She is seated at
a mirror and decides that her yellow dress is unflattering, consequently
changing it to lilac. Demy’s fairy godmother, the Lilac Fairy, is, as
Duggan says, coquettish.83 Duggan attributes the interest of fairy god-
mother and protégé in their mirrored reflections to a “self-conscious fash-
ioning of their respective selves, which they present to others as well as to
themselves as works of art,” thus presenting themselves as “female dan-
dies.”84 The Lilac Fairy herself is distinct from the world of Peau d’Âne:
she has blonde marcel waves and slinky bias-cut gowns, and speaks of bat-
teries, future poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire and Jean Cocteau, and has
a helicopter, suggesting that she is something of a time traveller, existing
within that flux of time in which fashion itself is found. She also flirts with
herself and teaches her protégée to find similar enjoyment.
Both the fairy godmother and Donkey Skin clearly place value upon
maintaining their appearances, and Donkey Skin carefully restores her
complexion with lotions after her week of grime and labour. Where
Cinderella seeks a selection of gowns to wear in order to be seen at pub-
lic festivals, Donkey Skin enjoys her gowns in private, becoming visi-
ble only for her own pleasure. Yet, her privacy is not absolute. Donkey
Skin is aware that a royal voyeur is spying upon her. Perrault hints that
he has, as narrator, been told Donkey Skin deliberately drops her ring
into the cake batter she prepares for the prince, adding that she likely
knew the prince was by the door and watching her peacocking in her
gowns. Perrault’s shift in address is mocking, since he’s likely address-
ing an observation that “woman’s senses are so keen”85 to one of the
very quick-witted women of the French salons. The tale, in verse form,
is dedicated to the Marquise de Lambert, a woman of the salons, as were
many of the fairy-tale authors, and a writer on the topic of education,
though the dedication’s assertion that the tale is “[f]or wasting time”86
asserts it has no pedagogical value. This aside, Donkey Skin is creating
her fashionable display for two specific gazes, her own and the voyeur’s.
Donkey Skin becomes rather enamoured of the beauty of her voyeur,
the depth of her love again allotted sartorially as she’d rather wear the
shabbiest dress he supplied than any other. Here, she again expresses the
sexual economy based on clothing, the same economy that her fairy god-
mother manipulated in her escape from her father’s kingdom.
The beauty of each of her dresses is also reiterated as she puts them
on in her little room, though the room itself cannot contain the sheer
volume of material. Malarte-Feldman writes that this failure to contain
the dress takes her out of her disguise: “Donkey-Skin’s split personal-
ity finds its spatial corollary in a movement that draws her from within
to without: out of her garret, out of her disguise, ‘out of her skin,’ so
to speak.”87 On a practical level, however, the sheer size of royal gowns
would be almost impossible to contain within a poor worker’s room and
that was the point: the sheer breadth and weight of the gowns symbol-
ise the princess’s status, and that can only be properly unfurled in pala-
tial space. Thus, Donkey Skin chooses to stay concealed within her
donkey skin, although she could easily burst out in a scintillating display
of sky, moon, or sun. The donkey skin is necessary for her work and her
invisibility—she must hold in her princesshood, or be visible as her father’s
daughter. In “Cap O’ Rushes,” a variant on the theme, the hero’s choice
of disguise is practical: “she gathered a lot of rushes and made them into
a kind of a sort of a cloak with a hood, to cover her from head to foot,
and to hide her fine clothes.”88 Having been thrown out of her home
by her rich father for comparing her love for him to meat’s love for salt,
with its overtones of King Lear and, indeed, d’Aulnoy’s “The Ram” and
the Brothers Grimm’s “Princess Mouseskin,” she needs employment, so
the clothing of rushes allows her to do menial tasks. The clothing makes
her appear a servant in order for her to be employed as such. However,
she nips off to the dance “[a]nd no one there was so finely dressed as
she.”89 Her final revelation involves a simple removal of her outer layer
of clothing: “she offed with her cap o’ rushes, and there she was in her
beautiful clothes.”90 The labour and dirt constrain, but do not soil the
splendour of the princess’s clothes and, ultimately, her beauty beneath.
She retains her visibility as princess beneath her invisibility as servant.
Donkey Skin’s revelation is rather more comical, as she hasn’t been
fortunate enough to conceal her massive, shining gowns beneath her
smelly fur and, consequently, the courtiers laughed at her. It is important
that at the scene of exposure, even as the ring fits, Donkey Skin rushes
to put on her best dress. It’s not so unusual for these heroes first to
change clothes at the romantic denouement in order to dress for their
new role. In The Slipper and the Rose, for instance, once Cinderella is
introduced to the prince’s father, the first comment concerns the neces-
sity of her changing into a more suitable gown. Perrault does not spec-
ify which dress Donkey Skin chooses to put on, but he does note that
it’s much better than any dress in existence. At last revealed in her full
sartorial princesshood, like Cinderella, her dresses transcend fashion and
set her apart. Indeed, among the moral commentary tagged to the tale’s
end, Perrault advises that young women may survive simply on bread
and water, so long as they have beautiful clothing. Clothes, after all,
define the woman.
In “The Good Little Mouse,” d’Aulnoy evokes the sartorial games-
manship of such tales. The wicked prince provides Joliette, the princess
masquerading as a turkey keeper, with beautiful gowns for their wed-
ding. The prince uses the gowns to force Joliette into the role of his
bride. She resists, however, in a more prosaic act of abjection: she simply
has the turkeys trample the gowns into the dirt. Like Donkey Skin, she
resists marriage by applying a good layer of dirt and scatological muck.
The good fairy compliments her sense, though expressing a wish that
she wasn’t as dirty. She has her take up the beautiful clothing and orders
her toilette. Joliette takes off the greasy handkerchief upon her head
to reveal golden ringlets and “taking in her delicate hands some water
from a fountain, which was in the poultry-yard, she washed her face,
which became as clear as oriental pearl. Roses seemed to be blooming
upon her cheeks and lips; her breath smelt of garden and wild thyme.”91
The attention to her toilette carries with it pastoral overtones in its refer-
ences to the poultry-yard and vegetative notes. Once cleaned and dressed
in satin and diamonds, the fairy asks Joliette who she is and Joliette
responds that she must be a princess, for she certainly has the appearance
of one. Once again, the natural-born beauty of the princess is revealed
beneath its dirty disguise.
The Brothers Grimm’s “All Furs” further follows the thread of
Donkey Skin. This princess, however, has no advising fairy and asks for
all three dresses and her fur at once: “one as golden as the sun, one as
white as the moon, and one as bright as the stars and then a cloak made
of a thousand kinds of pelts and furs, and each animal in the kingdom
had to contribute a piece of its skin to it.”92 The princess only reflects
upon the impossibility of the cloak as a ploy to forestall her father. Her
request for dresses appears to be a remnant of Perrault’s tale simplified
and the dresses are woven in the 1857 version, an odd description to
choose for dressmaking, being more pertinent to the making of cloth.
Where in Perrault, the cloak costs the king the source of his wealth,
in the Brothers Grimm tale, the cloak is a bloody price paid by all the
kingdom’s bestial inhabitants. Thomas Frederick Crane’s re-telling of
an Italian tale, “Fair Maria Wood,” follows the same trajectory, but the
daughter asks for four silk dresses, simply stipulating that they must be
more beautiful than any others, and a wooden dress, which she uses as
a boat to escape. By this stage, the tales lose further sartorial detail and,
simultaneously, the princess’s pleasure in her own appearance and her
playful sexuality disappear. As the fairy tale itself has become unpopular
due to the incidence of incest, it hasn’t, with the exception of Demy’s
film adaptation, re-entered the popular consciousness.
Male Fashion Pigs

While many a magnificent male beast exists in tale, the best equivalent
of the abject princess is surely the pig prince. The tales of pig princes
are many, though they have grown less popular than tales of terrify-
ing, cursed beasts who prowl decayed castles. Seifert argues that “[i]n
Western culture pigs have long been seen as highly ambiguous animals in
relation to humans. They are cast as the embodiment of typically human
vices such as gluttony, greed, and slovenliness, but at the same time they
serve as symbols of the uncivilized, nonhuman other.”93 Pigs also wallow
in muck and the pig-beasts, in particular, stand for the abject or filthy.
Such pigs exist in contested space between wildness and domesticity, and
are surprisingly violent. Moreover, the pig-beasts are royal, the birth of
the heir to the throne as a pig becoming particularly problematic for the
future of the kingdom. Behnke tells us that “sovereignty always deploys
a regime of visuality.”94 If sovereignty is made visible in porcine form,
there is undoubtedly a problem and the problem is usually laid at the feet
of the queen. Queens in these tales consequently take a leading role in
negotiating the future of their pig-sons, surrounding them with women
who work to balance their more violent, filthy, savage masculine aspects
with feminine qualities of fashion and domestication, eventually render-
ing the pigs appropriate rulers. Behnke, discussing the Rigaud portrait of
Louis XIV, notes “[t]his combination of masculinity and femininity com-
bines power and glory in the figure of the sovereign.”95 In the pig-prince
tales, the abject prince must combine femininity with masculinity to be
an absolute sovereign.
Straparola’s “The Pig Prince” shares with Basile’s “The She-Bear”
that the skin of the animal can be taken on and off, transforming the
wearer from human to beast and back again, until eventually it is
destroyed or laid aside. Beecher locates the motif within the tales of the
fox wife and Melusine, noting “[t]he destruction of the animal skins
was the precondition to domestication.”96 The destruction of the skin
is also clearly linked to sex. In the case of “The She-Bear,” the stick that
transforms the hero is lost with a lingering, passionate kiss. In the case
of “The Pig Prince,” the prince finally discards his pig skin to enjoy a
better sexual relationship with his wife. The prince has, up till this point,
enjoyed being a pig. His porcine state is the result of an apparently capri-
cious fairy. When a group of fairies alleviate the queen’s childlessness, the
third fairy provides the twist that the queen’s son will be born in a pig’s
skin, behaving and looking like a pig until he marries three times. It is
ultimately marital satisfaction, on both sides, and hence marital domesti-
cation, that prompts the prince to reject his pig skin.
What is particularly notable about the young prince is his deliberate
delight in filth and bestiality, wallowing like a pig and arriving home in
dirt. There are frequent references to how the Pig Prince muddies the
beautiful clothes of his mother and wives, defiling both the regal attire
and the beds of the latter. His abjection of the women in his life is a
symptom of his need to assert his dominance over them. When the Pig
Prince desires a wife, his mother rejects the possibility of finding a bride
of royal or noble birth, but the prince’s eye is upon one of the beautiful
daughters of a peasant. His bride, despite her lowly status, is provided
with royal dress and, in adopting her new role and the clothes that go
with it, she physically repulses the prince, who despoils her clothing with
his filth. The prince asserts that he has, after all, provided the clothing.
Once again, Varholy’s statement of the power men wield in providing
clothes for their lovers plays out. The bride rejects his claim, however:
“neither you nor any other of the whole kingdom of hogs could ever
have made this for me.”97 The bride asserts that abjection and esteem are
contradictory, but as heroes such as Preziosa have shown, the ability to
reconcile these provide women, in particular, a measure of sexual agency.
In “The Pig Prince,” it is the third bride, Meldina, who is able to cre-
ate this harmony between filth, bestiality, and her new royal status. Her
older sisters have already been murdered by the Pig Prince, having con-
spired to kill him in his bed. Meldina, instead, spreads her rich cloth-
ing for the pig to lie down upon. Their marriage is successful, Meldina
embracing the abject upon her gown and in her bed. The Pig Prince
soon reveals that he can slip into and out of his dirty pig skin, much like
a suit, but he does so only at night in his marital bed. He swears his wife
to secrecy, and one suspects the prince is actually happier cavorting about
the kingdom as a pig. As with the female hero-beasts, filth delivers a cer-
tain freedom from royal authority and obligation. Eventually, Meldina
chooses to tell his parents and his father orders the pig skin destroyed,
forcing his son to take on his royal responsibilities. The father then
abandons his own crown and royal robes, freeing himself of those same
responsibilities. Royalty becomes a sartorial statement that can be put on
and off.
The contrast of royal garb and filth plays out in d’Aulnoy’s “Le Prince
Marcassin” (The Prince Boar, 1698), where a mischievous third fairy
again perverts the fairies’ promise of a handsome and charming son by
making him a pig. However, d’Aulnoy’s version is a romance and the
pig is most aware of his monstrousness: he does not cavort in the mud,
but strives to maintain an appearance as a richly clad, princely man.
Indeed, he is not a pig, per se, but a boar—a wild, dangerous creature,
rather than a domesticated farm animal. Hannon argues that d’Aulnoy
represents “a bestial nature which is derisively underscored by the lux-
ury meant to disguise it.”98 Again, there is a conflict between sartorial
extravagance meant to signify sovereignty and the abject, and it renders
Marcassin a tragic, horrific figure.
After birth, Marcassin is “swaddled like a child in blankets of gold
brocade. The queen took him in her arms and lifted a frill of lace that
covered his head.”99 At birth, the boar-babe’s monstrosity is immedi-
ately disguised in gold brocade and lace. Marcassin is transformed by
his mother, turned into an object of royal luxury, an attempt to erase
his abject nature and to reconstruct his body through fashion. His ears
are pierced, a not uncommon practice for fashionable men, and he is
dressed in diamond bracelets and a thousand knots of rose-coloured rib-
bon, and, to make his legs look longer, silk stockings are gartered at the
knee, rather than below.100 Indeed, he grows tall, walks upright on his
trotters, and learns to speak, though with a lisp. He chooses clothes that
cover his trotters and a black velvet bonnet or cap in the English style
that conceals most of his porcine features. Good black dye being expen-
sive, Marcassin’s use of the cap provides him with an air of sobriety that
has little to do with economic restraint. Such headwear was largely out of
fashion at the time d’Aulnoy writes, although men did wear caps when
not wearing wigs of long curling hair. Putting a wig on the pig may
have been a step too far, even for the doting queen. D’Aulnoy asserts
that he remains terrifying in appearance, with great tusks, again distin-
guishing him from the domestic, farmyard pigs of which Straparola and,
later, Murat write. Yet, the cross-special dressing is not successful and,
ultimately, the contrast between his bestial body and the spectacle of his
fashions becomes comical. As he determinedly readies himself for his first
wedding, aiming to present a fine masculine figure with ribbons upon his
breeches, a scented doublet to conceal his animal smell, jewelled mantle,
curly wig of fair hair (the prince himself has no issue with choosing to
wear a fashionable wig) and feathered hat, he is declared “extraordinary”
and no one “could look at him without laughing.”101
D’Aulnoy’s romance plot again relies upon three brides, but is
much more involved, the first bride and her lover committing suicide.
Marcassin then approaches the first bride’s sister, convinced by the
wicked fairy to assert his will over that of his potential brides. His beastly
nature persistently drives his sexual desire. In other words, no matter
how luxurious his arrangements for marital bliss, “there was always a
certain taste of wild boar in it.”102 His second marriage takes place in
a forest, where wild animals are allowed to come and share the feast.
Discovering that his bride is planning to murder him, he asks whether,
in fact, she is not a lioness herself, positing her beastliness in his own
defence. Nonetheless, he murders her when she makes her homicidal
attempt and the poor queen decries that every wedding cannot end in
a funeral. There is a macabre wit to the tale that refuses to completely
vindicate Marcassin for his abjection. Indeed, when Marcassin retreats to
the pastoral, determined to forsake his crown, he conspires to marry the
last sister, Marthesie, and she reproaches him when she discovers that at
night, in their bed, he becomes human. She hides his pig skin, forcing
the revelation that, since their marriage, he has been able to shed the
skin. Marcassin is thus obliged to perform his royal role and, indeed, his
murderous past is wiped clean, as it is revealed the fairies had tricked him
and the two earlier brides survived.
Murat’s “Le Roi Porc” (The Pig King, 1699) begins with the same sce-
nario of the barren queen and the three fairies, although she notes that
the third fairy must have had a bad time at the banquet they were return-
ing from.103 The fairy carries away the baby pig and the queen tells her
husband she suffered a miscarriage, leaving the prince to be raised as a
pig. He is reared in a stable with a gold trough and is regarded as a very
pretty, fashionably pale pig. There is no inflection of pig/human hybrid-
ity in his description. When he reaches maturity at fifteen, the fairy allows
him to leave his pig skin and return to his palace by night. He must
nonetheless return to pig form by day. Murat introduces class intrigue,
with a local fairy attempting to turn two common ladies off as likely
brides. The good fairy curtails the likely fates of these ladies, who were
surely destined for death like the older sisters of other tales, by placing
paper dolls and cats in the marriage bed and spiriting the actual, common
brides away. As for his true bride, she is in the toils of the river Pactole
and thus at the mercy of a pastoral deity. She has found a portrait of the
prince as he appears in human form and prefers the charming image
to the river deity. After a series of misadventures, the lovers are finally
united. Notably, although the prince begins his life in the tale as a pig,
his beastly skin quickly becomes no more than a suit of clothes he puts on
and off. Murat does not broker with the abject, and the sexual desires of
the lovers are subordinated to the intrigues of the fairies themselves, who
constantly contest each other’s power through the fate of their favourites.
Conclusion: Beyond the Animal Skin

While fairy tales have almost always restored the abject heroes to royal
splendour and renown, the subversive power of the abject continues to
suggest the simmering sexuality of She-Bears, and Donkey Skins, and
Pig Princes. Chapter 4 examines those princesses and working girls who
wield spindles, distaffs, and needles in their amorous adventures. Their
cunning skills with thread reveal their subtle minds and, just as dirty
princesses seek the storytelling wisdom of the hearth, these heroes draw
the very threads of fairy tale itself into new and fantastical designs.
Notes
1. At this point, Donkey Skin has not earned her name and is known simply
as the princess. Like Cinderella, her fame and identity are solely known
by the slur she suffers under.
2. An oft cited psychological reading of the test is epitomised in Bruno
Bettelheim’s remarks, expounding that the prince “lovingly accepts her
vagina in the form of the slipper, and approves of her desire for a penis,
symbolized by her tiny foot fitting within the slipper-vagina.” Bruno
Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance
of Fairy Tales (London: Vintage Books, 1976), 271. Donkey Skin’s
ring, similarly feminine, can be interpreted in a similar vein. Personally,
I’m inclined to dismiss the desire for a penis: the foremost claim of
Cinderella and Donkey Skin to social status is through the perfect fit of
their wardrobe. The incidental eroticism is sartorial.
3. Queen Florine in d’Aulnoy’s “The Blue Bird,” for example, disguises

herself in dirt and calls herself Mie Souillon, a name implying her slov-
enly, sluttish state.
4. Naomi Novik, Uprooted (London: Macmillan, 2015), 6.
5. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy,
trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994),
24.
6. Andreas Behnke, “(Un)dressing the Sovereign: Fashion as Symbolic
Form,” in The International Politics of Fashion: Being Fab in a Dangerous
World, ed. Andreas Behnke (London: Routledge, 2017), 120.
7. Behnke, “(Un)dressing,” 140.
8. Ford and Mitchell, on Disney’s Cinderella, note: “Never does she sleep
on the hearth, and never does she wear even a cute smear of ashes.”
Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell, The Makeover in Movies:
Before and After in Hollywood Films, 1941–2002 (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland & Company, 2004), 35. Ironically, the twentieth century’s
most iconic image of Cinderella lacks her ashes, although the 2015 film
redressed the issue, showing the ash blow upon her, her stepfamily com-
menting on her sooty appearance the next day.
10. Finette Cendron, of course, is an exception.
11. Angela Carter, Angela Carter Papers: Miscellaneous Fairy Tale Material,
1984, 1992, n.d., Add MS 88899/1/82, British Library, http://
www.bl.uk/collection-items/angela-carters-manuscript-notes-on-fairy-
tale-material.
Tellers, (London: Vintage, 1995), 206.
15. Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy, The Fairy Tales
of Madame d’Aulnoy, newly done into English, trans. Annie Macdonell and
Elizabeth Lee (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1892), 199.
16. Finette’s own grubbiness is evoked in her cheerful, poetic revenge upon
her sisters as she goes to try on the shoe: she thoroughly splashes them
with mud.
17. This perhaps makes sense of Puss’s acquisition of boots. If Cinderella
could succeed with a lost shoe, surely Puss could succeed with a proper
pair of boots. This will be discussed in Chapter 5.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xxxiv.
19. Christine A. Jones, “Thoughts on ‘Heroinism’ in French Fairy Tales,”
Marvels & Tales 27, no. 1 (2013): 19, Project MUSE.
20. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2009), 58.
History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 28.
22. Maria Tatar, in her translation of Franz Xaver von Schonwerth’s fairy
tales, asks, “Why did we lose all those male counterparts to Snow White,
Sleeping Beauty, and the girl who becomes the wife of the Frog King?
Boy heroes clearly had a hard time surviving the nineteenth-century
migration of fairy tales from the communal hearth into the nursery.”
Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, The Turnip Princess and Other Newly
Discovered Fairy Tales, ed. Erika Eichenseer, trans. Maria Tatar (New
York: Penguin Books, 2015), Kindle. Schonwerth’s nineteenth-century
tales, while fascinating, break from the earlier literary tradition, which
locates the female heroes at the heart of storytelling, and may simply
reflect later cross-gendered re-tellings that became popular in Bavaria at
that time.
24. Jones, “Thoughts.”
27. Lewis C. Seifert and Domna C. Stanton, eds. and trans., Enchanted
(Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance
Studies, 2010), 84.
28. Maria Tatar, ed., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999), 226.
29. Marianne Legault, Female Intimacies in Seventeenth-Century French
Literature (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 191. The name suggests
someone of small stature and, combined with the age of the fairy, may
be a reference to her having lost height as she grew older.
30. James Robinson Planché, trans., Fairy Tales, by Perrault, de Villeneuve,
Routledge, 1869), 186
33. Jack Zipes, ed. and trans., The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From
Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York: W. W. Norton,
2001), 555.
34. An advertising pamphlet, Cinderella’s Dream, and What It Taught Her
(ca. 1920), describes the hero having a dream about her fairy god-
mother, who suggests such products as Velvet brand soap and Kitchen’s
Metal Polish to assist her in her domestic drudgery. The brands capital-
ize upon what should be Cinderella’s humiliation by implying that her
work can be improved with the use of their products, even suggesting
the Velvet brand shaving stick for the prince. The use of the fairy tale as
a marketing tool elaborates the entwined relationship of the Cinderella
tale and domestic labour. Cinderella’s Dream, and What It Taught Her
(Melbourne: J. Kitchen & Sons, ca. 1920).
35. The trend towards working- and middle-class audiences takes hold with
the Brothers Grimm, who stressed peasant origins for the tales. Tatar
remarks that their castles had “the distinct odor of the barnyard.” The
Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 99. Their tales include many in which work-
ing heroes enjoy laziness and corruption, such as “The Twelve Lazy
Servants,” “The Clever Servant,” and “Clever Gretel.” The behaviour
of the working class in these tales reflects a disdain for their labour and
a desire for ease that is curiously at odds with the work ethic ostensibly
promoted by the Brothers Grimm themselves.
36. Ted Gioia, Work Songs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 252.
37. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s, The Wizard of Oz (1939) sought to capitalise
on Snow White’s success and also made much of the red, blue, and yel-
low colour palette.
38. There is a similar dynamic in Diana Wynne Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle
(1986), in which Sophie, transformed into an old woman, cleans the
wizard Howl’s castle and declares herself housekeeper in order to stay.
39. Douglas Brode, Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney
Entertainment (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 178–179.
40. Anne E. Duggan, Queer Enchantments: Gender, Sexuality, and Class in
the Fairy-Tale Cinema of Jacques Demy (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 2013), 60.
42. David Whitley, The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 10.
43. Whitley, Idea of Nature, 36. Whitley acknowledges that this is taken
from the Perrault version.
45. The use of leopard skin is notable in portraits of fashionable women as

Diana. The portrait of Lady Mary Herbert, Viscountess Montagu, ca.
1688, by François de Troy, for example, shows her essentially girdled
with the leopard skin over her gown.
47. Seifert and Stanton, Enchanted, 123.
49. Peter Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning, and the Life of
Things,” in Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, eds.
Dan Ben-Amos and Liliane Weissberg (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1999), 30.
50. Norton, First Lady, 131.
51. The story begins with the king demanding proof of love from his daugh-
ters in a manner that recalls Shakespeare’s King Lear.
52. Earrings were worn by both men and women in the seventeenth century.
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, rev. ed.
53. Jones notes that Nicolas de Blégny, Louis XIV’s physician, wrote on
caffeinated drinks including coffee, making “beverage consumption a
way of communicating status, engaging in social activity, and enjoying
the Parisian cityscape.” “Exotic Edibles: Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, and
the Early Modern French How-to,” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 43, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 636, Project MUSE. The trans-
ference to the pastoral does not take away from any of these sophisti-
cated qualities.
54. Cindy Ott, Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2012), 35. Branagh’s Cinderella
(2015) features the fairy godmother in search of an appropriate vege-
table for transformation. Cinderella first offers her another innovation
from the New World, the tomato.
55. Planché provides a footnote explaining this to be “a famous traiteur, or
rôtisseur,” quoting an Englishman who wrote of the “cook-shop” and
its fowls in 1701 (Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, D’Aulnoy’s Fairy Tales,
trans. J. R. Planché (London: G. Routledge, 1888), 170).
56. The song goes “Du vin, de l’huile et du citron, Coriandre et la rocam-
bole, Dans ce ragoût à l’espagnole, Le tout ensemble sera bon.” Francisque
Michel and Édouard Fournier, Histoire des hôtelleries, cabarets, courtilles,
et des anciennes communautés et confréries d’hôteliers, de taverniers, de
marchands de vins, etc. (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, 1859), 313, Internet
Archive.

62. Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for
Children and the Process of Civilization (New York: Routledge, 1991), 33.
63. Jessica Tiffin, Marvelous Geometry: Narrative and Metafiction in Modern
Fairy Tale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 91.
64. Malcolm Douglas, The Sleeping Beauty and the Beast (suggested by Klaw
& Erlanger’s Production) (New York: Towers & Curran, 1901).
66. “Un jour, un montreur d’ours entra dans la cour de l’hôtel du president
Briou. L’un des ours n’était autre que Charlotte-Rose” (One day a bear
tamer entered the courtyard of the home of the president of Briou. One
of the bears was none other than Charlotte-Rose). Michel Souloumiac,
Mademoiselle de la Force: Un auteur méconnu du XVIIe siècle (Paris:
ARAH, 2004), 40.
67. Philip Lewis, Seeing Through the Mother Goose Tales: Visual Turns in
the Writings of Charles Perrault (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996), 164.
68. Christine M. Varholy, “’Rich Like a Lady’: Cross-Class Dressing in the
Brothels and Theaters of Early Modern London,” The Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2008): 7, Project
Muse.
71. Andrew Ure notes that Colbert “entertain[ed] a prejudice against
indigo” and restricted the amount that could be used in the woad vats
for blue dyes. The Philosophy of Manufactures: Or, an Exposition of the
Scientific, Moral, and Commercial Economy of the Factory System of Great
Britain (London: Charles Knight, 1967), 459.
73. Varholy, “Rich,” 7. Varholy refers specifically to English women of the
period, but this can be extrapolated across wider Europe.
74. Varholy, “Rich,” 7.
75. Varholy, “Rich,” 7.
76. This donkey is a popular fairy-tale character, one which graces Basile’s
“The Tale of the Ogre,” for instance, in which he produces wealth on the
jolly prompting of “Giddy up, shit gold.” Tale of Tales, 45.
77. Warner, Beast to Blonde, 358.

80. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales, 62.
81. Duggan, Queer, 64.
83. The lilac identification occurs in an apocryphal version attributed to
Perrault in 1781.
87. Claire-Lise Malarte-Feldman, “Perrault’s Contes: An Irregular Pearl of
Classical Literature,” in Out of the Woods: The Origins of the Literary
Fairy Tale in Italy and France, ed. Nancy L. Canepa (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1997), 114–115.
88. Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, 3rd ed. (London: David Nutt,
1898), 52.
89. Jacobs, English, 53.
90. Jacobs, English, 55.
91. d’Aulnoy, D’Aulnoy’s, 162.
92. Grimm, Original Folk, 216.
93. Lewis C. Seifert, “Animal-Human Hybridity in d’Aulnoy’s ‘Babiole’ and
‘Prince Wild Boar,” Marvels & Tales 25, no. 2 (2011): 253, Project
MUSE.
96. Giovan Francesco Straparola, The Pleasant Nights, vol. 1, ed. Donald
Beecher, trans. W. G. Waters (rev. by ed.) (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2012), 285.
97. Straparola, Pleasant, 275.
99. Zipes, Great, 58.
100. Men generally fixed the garter below the knee. Men would perhaps be
more inclined to wear one earring though, in The Story of the Marquise-
Marquis de Banneville, a collaboration, it is speculated, between
François-Timoléon de Choisy, L’Héritier, and Perrault, much is made of
a man wearing two earrings, as this was regarded a more feminine fash-
ion choice. The story itself not only involves cross-dressing, but debates
its virtues.
103. “Porc” can refer to the farmyard pig or the meat of the pig, although
in the context of the title, it is clearly “pig,” rather than “pork.”
However, in the tale itself, Murat reverts to “cochon” when referenc-
ing the hero. Histoires sublimes et allégoriques (Paris: Florentin & Pierre
Delaulne, 1699), BnF Gallica. This may be a play on d’Aulnoy’s “Le
Prince Marcassin,” which is introduced in her collection when guests
request Madame de Lure to tell them the story of “Prince Boar,” and
the baron misunderstands and thinks the ladies have brought a boar to
eat, being “right to take precautions against the bad food that is being
served at my house.” Sophie Raynard in Ruth B. Bottigheimer, ed.,
Fairy Tales Framed: Early Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 190. The guests
all laugh raucously at the error. Murat’s tale itself is arch and flippant,
beginning, “Once upon a time there was a king who ruled a realm
whose name I don’t know.” Zipes, Great, 82.
CHAPTER 4
Skills with Threads: Heroes Who Make

Fashion
Dresses, coats, hoods, and every kind of furbelow begin with thread.
One of the essentials of human culture is the ability to make and utilise
thread with a wide variety of tools developed for its creation and manip-
ulation. These tools and the skills required to wield them are usually
treated as the province of female activity and talent.1
In fairy tale, such tools and skills are treasured, even revered as met-
aphors for the work of fairy tale itself. Warner eloquently articulates the
relationship: “Spinning a tale, weaving a plot: the metaphors illuminate
the relation; while the structure of fairy stories, with their repetitions,
reprises, elaboration and minutiae, replicates the thread and fabric of one
of women’s principal labours.”2 Basile’s frame tale for the first European
fairy-tale collection evokes this relation most revealingly, too. The hero
opens a hazelnut to discover a doll that spins gold. The hero begs the
spinning doll to excite a craving for fairy tales in her nemesis, a craving
that inspires the tales of the collection. The relationship between tex-
tile work and fairy tale is ancient and is rooted in the narrative genres
that women celebrated. Medieval narrative poems, chansons de toile, for
instance, are actual songs of cloth, with their female protagonists fre-
quently engaged in spinning, weaving, or embroidery and other kinds
of sewing, Burns observing that more traditional love narratives “are
undone and resewn by singing women who fashion alternative love
scenarios through clothwork.”3 The Lays of Marie de France, in the
twelfth century, also picked up these strands, and tales of werewolves
and nightingales lay the weft for such tales as “Little Red Riding Hood”

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4_4
and “The Blue Bird.” Gloria Thomas Gilmore argues that clothing and
linens in the lays “function as subtexts, as ‘écriture féminine,’ or wom-
en’s writing, because textile work has been the primary responsibility of
women.”4 This chapter explores the unfolding relationship of fairy tale
and textile.
The transformations of fibre and textile achieved by the tools of
female work are a practical, tangible casting of those accomplished
by fairy wands in the tales. How fairy tales relate the tools and skills
involved in the production and employment of thread has gradually
changed as centuries have progressed, and the textile and clothing indus-
tries themselves advance. While the work of women as they spin and
sew has always been celebrated, clothing itself is usually gifted or mag-
ically conjured by fairy benefactresses in early modern tales. The mak-
ing of luxury clothing and jewellery, in particular, was controlled by
male guilds. When Donkey Skin demands her impossible dresses, the
king must order these from male tailors and jewellers, whom he threat-
ens with death and torture if the clothing does not match his daughter’s
wishes. It was only in the 1670s, just before the French fairy-tale vogue,
that seamstresses first formed a guild in Paris, “with the right to make
clothing for women and children,”5 forbidden from cutting and sew-
ing tailored clothing. Nonetheless, it was an auspicious move; the man-
teau, a simple, untailored gown, was gaining popularity with women,
while the first fashion periodicals broadcast the latest styles beyond the
court of Versailles, providing a wider female audience with access to
fashion news.6 Women were just beginning to make inroads into com-
mercial avenues for their dressmaking skills. As the French fairy-tale
vogue passes, tailors and seamstresses emerge in the tales of the Brothers
Grimm to take leading roles. Fairy tales shifted focus from court politics
towards middle-class ambitions and the entertainment of nursery occu-
pants, and skills with a needle and thread shifted, also.
Female skill with thread becomes an increasingly practical and pru-
dent necessity in fairy tales. Thus, in the Brothers Grimm’s “All Fur”
(1857), the king turns to the best needlewomen7 of his kingdom, for
it had become more common for women to do the fine sewing on rich
garments. In Nesbit’s 1908 version of Perrault’s Cinderella tale, the step-
sisters utilise the “delicate gold and coloured embroidery, the fairy-like
lace” that Cinderella’s mother had worked for her, as “no money could
have bought” such lace.8 Disney’s mid-twentieth-century Cinderella
ceases to rely solely upon her fairy godmother and picks up a needle
4 SKILLS WITH THREADS: HEROES WHO MAKE FASHION 131
herself. The animated feature gives a song to Cinderella’s remodelling of

her mother’s old gown, performed by a chorus of needle-wielding mice.
However, the gown is ruined and it takes her godmother’s “Bibbidi-
Bobbidi-Boo” song to magic another.9 Tatar argues “the amount of
footage devoted in ‘Cinderella’ to that perennial ‘female’ problem of
what to wear is extraordinary.”10 However, it is entirely in keeping with
the sartorial focus of a Cinderella tale—Cinderella is, after all, a protago-
nist of fashion and the creation of her gown is significant. Stuard notes,
furthermore, that “[a] woman who sewed was in a good position to offer
any number of political comments on her gown.”11 These comments are
not always obvious, but they can be intuited by understanding the opera-
tions of fashion and, moreover, the politics of the creation and consump-
tion of fashion as inevitably worn upon the sleeve.
This chapter examines the way thread is used to delineate female vir-
tue and cunning, and how female heroes have, across the centuries, uti-
lised their sewing skills to transform their lives. Word and thread evolve
through fairy tale to clothe the wily heroes, and even to weave relation-
ships between women and history.
Wondrous Cloth: Fairy Tale’s Écriture Féminine

The most miraculous and unusual needlecraft is worked in fairy tale. One
such example is described in d’Aulnoy’s “La Chatte Blanche” (The White
Cat, 1698). The king challenges his three sons to find, among other
things, a cloth fine enough to pass through the eye of the needle used
to make point de Venise, a needlepoint lace that was losing popularity as
d’Aulnoy writes, in part due to Louis XIV’s sumptuary restrictions in
1660.12 In Nesbit’s retelling, it is “a number ten sewing needle,”13 often
the finest of the needles in general use—there were finer needles—and
therefore more familiar for Nesbit’s intended child audience.14 The king
makes a great show of choosing the smallest needle possible for his test,
incidentally echoing the observation of the fourteenth-century Persian-
language poet Amīr Khusrau (Dihlavī) of a cloth so incredibly fine that
one hundred yards could be drawn through a needle’s eye.15 The king’s
ultimate aim is to distract his heirs with the promise of his crown if they
complete impossible tasks. The youngest son encounters the White
Cat, who supplies him with his cloth. Its four hundred yards are con-
tained within a grain of millet within a grain of wheat within a cherry
stone within a hazelnut within a walnut.16 Hannon suggests the cloth
“unfolds […] in a feat of enclosure,” mimicking how d’Aulnoy’s first tale

appeared enclosed within Histoire d’Hypolite, comte de Duglas (1690),17
thus standing as a metaphor for the tales within tales.18
The nested containment, on a less metaphoric level, also accentuates
the preposterous fineness of such a large cloth, and the cracking of each
nut and seed builds the tension of the tale as the king looks for the fine
linen. The nuts and seeds in d’Aulnoy’s tale also evoke miniature sewing
trinkets. Tape measures fixed in nuts were about in the seventeenth cen-
tury and were the precursors to later, popular souvenir items.19 It was
common to visit the Palais Royal in the nineteenth century, for instance,
to buy walnut shell sewing boxes in which tiny scissors, thimbles, and
other equipment were neatly stored, small enough to make excellent
souvenirs and to be stowed in pockets and reticules. Walnut- and acorn-
shaped boxes were also used to hold thimbles. The novelty of such uses
for nuts recalls the pastoral, containing within the simple country nut the
sophisticated skill or tools of the needle-worker.
The White Cat’s cloth itself is not simply fine, however, for she does
not do anything by halves. The cloth depicts the creatures of the oceans
and the land, and the heavenly bodies, and portraits of all the great royal
families right down to their lowliest subjects. In sum, the cloth depicts
the entirety of the known world, recalling the elaborately detailed
embroidery, including stumpwork and tapestry, of flora, fauna and human
history that were popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Brooks writes of the embroiderers of the period who would “create min-
iature, often three-dimensional, worlds peopled with kings and queens,
heroes and fashionable ladies and gentlemen set in landscapes filled with
animals and flowers.”20 The amazing work presented by the White Cat
is actually in keeping with textile work of the time. Embroiderers would
work from the latest discoveries in the natural sciences and history to
reproduce and organise knowledge in stitches and textiles.21 The White
Cat’s cloth is a phenomenal example of the exquisite detail, articulated
knowledge, and ethereal fineness expected from the best linens. It is an
object of aesthetic and intellectual wonder.
D’Aulnoy’s fairies, in particular, are incredibly skilful needlewomen,
but their ornamental work is a pleasant diversion and never offered for
economic exchange. It is always a gift, a labour of love. The work is part
of a courtly culture of patronage. In “La Biche au bois” (The Doe in the
Woods, 1698), the fairy godmothers of the little princess, Désirée, arrive
with the gift of a layette: “its cloth was so fine it could be used a hundred
years and not wear out; the fairies had spun it in their free time. As for
the lace, it even surpassed what I said about the cloth. The whole history
of the world was represented on it, either by needle or spindle work.”22
This lace representation of the world, recalling the design of the White
Cat’s cloth, both celebrates the birth of a future queen and wraps her
in the representation of her future sovereignty. D’Aulnoy emphasises
the supernatural skill: “[n]ot since men and women began to embroi-
der had anyone seen anything so marvellous.”23 The fairies also create
a refuge for the princess, who must not see the light of day till she turns
fifteen, embroidering tapestries that present great deeds of history. The
princess, denied access to the outside world, might thus look upon and
understand the world through an examination of the histories the fair-
ies literally embroider for her. Stuard highlights that a woman’s needle
could be used so that, “Without uttering a word a woman could insinu-
ate a world of meaning into her stitched designs with a repertoire so rich
in images.”24 The Greek myth of Philomela is a striking example when,
having lost her tongue, the hero weaves the tale of her rape into a tapes-
try. Histories can be embroidered and woven as well as written in these
early modern tales, forestalling the privilege provided to the printed
word, so often associated with masculine authority, and reasserting the
might and eloquence of the needle.
Needlework was not simply a chore for women, therefore, or an
incidental skill that embellished but had little value in itself. Jones and
Stallybrass, indeed, argue that in sewing, a woman “could be mate-
rializing a counter-memory for herself, registering her links to other
women and to the larger world of culture and politics. Women stitched
themselves into public visibility.”25 Jean Lorrain’s tale “Mandosiane
in Captivity” quite literally has the hero embroidered into existence:
“Princess Mandosiane was six hundred years old: for six centuries she
had existed on velvet with face and hands of painted silk.”26 She is a
publicly visible emblem of her kingdom’s power. However, when that
kingdom falls she is consigned to a crypt, unseen, living among the
rodents. One mouse offers to free her from her “silken chains.”27 The
mouse, of course, rents her threads, fabric, and embellishments, and she
falls to pieces, the work of “twenty nuns, who for fifty years had worked
with skeins of silk and gold”28 undone, her memory destroyed. Susanna
Clarke also plays upon the work of the embroiderer in her 2006 tale
“The Duke of Wellington Misplaces His Horse.” She draws upon the
links between working with thread and fate. Set in Regency England,
the Duke of Wellington follows his horse into a fairy meadow and
encounters a fairy intent upon her embroidery. Her work is prophetic,
always stitching the next event that will occur to the Duke, even to his
death. He concludes that his demise “is a problem of needlework!”29 and
seeks to rewrite—or at least, re-stitch—his fate. Inexpertly wielding the
needle, however, he only manages to produce “a stick figure”30 of him-
self, sealing his consequent fate politically. Here, the fairy’s work not
only catalogues and narrates the known world, but the future world, too,
and the quality of skill has great bearing upon how the future will be
realised. A poor needle-worker such as the Duke will only stitch for him-
self a flawed and puny visibility.
These tales thus articulate how écriture féminine can operate in terms of
needle and thread to manifest the natural world, history, and a public life.
Why the Little Golden Spinning Wheel Fell into the

Soup: The Noble Worth of Tools
The tools of spinning are ubiquitous in fairy tale. Distaffs, spindles, and
wheels populate tales throughout the centuries. Sometimes they are even
golden and ornamental, objects that hint at wealth and virtue beyond
their utility.
In the Brothers Grimm’s “All Fur” (1857), a king finds a little,
golden spinning wheel at the bottom of his bowl of bread soup.31 The
presence of the golden charm in the ordinary soup—often made to use
up stale bread and considered a peasant dish—is quite typical of the
Brothers Grimm’s folksy representation of royal life, a juxtaposition of
noble and peasant culture that has lost much of the outrageous humour
of cultural polarities represented in Straparola and Basile. The hero, All
Fur, has been dancing with the king each night, then returning to her
dirt and furs to work in the kitchens. She uses this opportunity to place
little golden charms, treasures carried from her home, in the soup the
king requests. While the first charm, a golden ring, is not unexpected—
golden rings proliferate in fairy tale—the miniature golden spinning
wheel and reel are rather more peculiar.32
The charms do have the practical value of being portable, but their
placement in the soup seems eccentric, particularly since the prin-
cess repeatedly denies that they belong to her. They’re like anonymous
charms from a bracelet, or tokens placed into an English Christmas plum
pudding, or even Monopoly tokens.33 The king is invited to discover
them within their soupy hiding place, and to determine their meaning
and worth, just as he is invited to recognise All Fur within her fur and
dirt, and to realise that she is, in fact, a princess and fitting bride. Such
exquisite, miniature tokens of feminine industry stand in for the virtues
of the woman herself and her actual, economic value and status. All Fur
places her tokens in the king’s soup as though strategically placing them
upon the marital Monopoly board.
Golden objects related to spinning and sewing do exist as useful tools,
however. A simple tool recreated as a luxurious commodity serves a dual
purpose of function and opulence. Homer records that Helen of Troy
received a golden spindle during her visit to Egypt, for example, and
such spindles were in existence at the time. So, Straparola’s Doralice,
All Fur’s distant ancestor, is realistically enticed by a merchant hawking
golden spindles and distaffs in the Renaissance. The merchant is, in fact,
her duplicitous father, who knows that his daughter will be attracted
by deluxe tools, so much so that she will allow him to sleep in her chil-
dren’s bedroom in payment. The costly materials suggest that the tools
can be appreciated for their beauty, making their actual use a pleasurable
experience.34
Women of rank and wealth are avid spinners in fairy tale, as evident
in their enthusiasm for new tools and accumulation of fibre. In d’Aul-
noy’s “La Princesse Printanière” (Princess Mayblossom, 1697), the
kindly princess presents gifts to the fairies, including gold scissors, good
needles, and several German spinning-wheels with distaffs made of cedar-
wood, suggesting that the fairies would welcome such well-made tools.
D’Aulnoy’s queen in “La Princesse Rosette” (Princess Rosette, 1697) is
distraught at the thought that her daughter will cause the deaths of her
brothers, but when questioned by the king, she excuses her sadness on
burning the flax on her distaff and is readily believed. Her husband gives
her enough flax to spin for one hundred years so that she will never be
bereft of fibre again. L’Héritier’s queen in “Ricdin-Ricdon” (1705) col-
lects a vast array of diverse and rare fibres for her spinning. Such activity,
while ostensibly having a practical purpose, is primarily a virtuous enter-
tainment or display of skill by the monarch and rarely is the final product
produced for practical use. A queen, of course, does not need to produce
cloth to wear. A woman at work spinning or sewing is simply represented
as attractive and desirable, so that the beauty of the woman becomes
entwined with the beauty of her tools. Basile’s Porziella, for instance, is
described as a beautiful little spindle. Jones and Stallybrass find evidence
of the social promotion of spinning with feminine beauty in early mod-

ern conduct books that “aimed to convince high-born women that
textile work and beauty could go together, via an equation between spin-
ning and the idealized simplicity of the good woman who spun.”35 The
idealised simplicity recalls the pastoral aesthetics that so many fairy-tale
authors fostered, whereby royal women amuse themselves pleasantly with
a homespun task.
The tools thus have a metonymic relationship with female beauty and
virtue, the work produced becoming largely inconsequential in many
tales. Jones and Stallybrass note that, in Renaissance texts, the classics
“were subjected to readings that dematerialized women’s textile work
in order to produce a feminine ideal of behaviour, an elite ideal that
obscured women’s economic labor in a cloth-based society by transcen-
dentalizing spinning into a symbolic exhibition of virtue.”36 This is par-
ticularly evident in early modern tales involving princesses and queens.
The distaff, in particular, came to stand for the female side of the fam-
ily and the visible display of feminine virtue. In “The Discreet Princess,”
L’Héritier’s Finette and her sisters are given glass distaffs by their father,
warned that these will shatter if they dishonour themselves. The fragility
of the glass distaffs is not simply symbolic in this case and, indeed, glass
distaffs were made for use even in antiquity. L’Héritier makes much of
Finette’s industriousness as she sews and spins, even as a lecherous prince
seeks to seduce the sisters. Jones and Stallybrass observe that Penelope’s
weaving is linked to “cunning”37 as she staves off her suitors, and
Finette, whose name itself indicates cunning, likewise fends off an irk-
some prince, in part by contriving a trap that literally dumps him down
the drain hole into the sewer. Her sisters are less “honourable” and have
sex with the prince, their unemployed distaffs shattering. Finette’s distaff
is the only one remaining when the king returns, confirming her virtue.
The reputation and beauty of the female hero of a fairy tale is thus
woven with her distaffs, her spindles, and other tools. Her labour and
her beautiful tools produce her good name.
Spinning for Your Life

The proliferation of spinning wheels in French fairy tales prompted
Anthony Hamilton to include the wheels as a motif in his eighteenth-cen-
tury fairy-tale parody. Titled Les Quatre Facardins (The Four
Facardins) (1730), the parody features both women and men spinning.
One hero encounters spinners who insert their arms through holes in
a door in order to keep their wheels in motion. This rather impractical
method shifts attention from the virtue of feminine activity to its arcane
symbolism. The hero nonetheless observes “an ebony spinning-wheel
inlaid with gold” and concludes “that spinning was a favourite occupa-
tion in this enchanted family.”38 The observation references the luxurious
tools used by noble or wealthy women who worked for enjoyment, rather
than pecuniary reimbursement. Later, in the interwoven tales, “men in
female dresses, who being each provided with a spindle and distaff, were
spinning with great application.”39 It is concluded that this cross-dressing
and performance of feminine labour is a “humiliating masquerade.”40
Yet, perversely, even the hero spins “with my brother adventurers”41
and wishes to know “the meaning of all the spindles and spinning I saw
around me.”42 Hamilton’s barbs against the fairy tale reveal evident
bemusement with the significance of spinning and spinners, and its rela-
tionship to the feminine.
Much has been written about tales that involve spinners—particularly
those recorded by the Brothers Grimm. Such analysis usually focuses
upon female labour and its value. Zipes, for example, examines rep-
resentations of female productivity and persecution in spinning tales
through a historical perspective on labour in the textile industry.43
Indeed, spinning provided one of the major sources of female employ-
ment for many centuries, literally being a cottage industry. Women of all
ages and family circumstances were able to spin thread in their homes in
order to make an income. Spinning is portable, requires little in the way
of tools, and can be taken up and put down without injury to the work.
Tatar determines, however, “that the occupation of spinning assumes a
privileged position only in texts furthest removed from reality,”44 with
the implication that tellers who had practical experience of spinning
viewed it as an unhappy occupation. Certainly, the queen and her daugh-
ters suffer under the demands of the flax-spinning-loving king in the
Brothers Grimm’s “Von dem bösen Flachsspinnen” (Nasty Flax Spinning,
1812) from Jeanette Hassenpflug. However, the tale—which focuses
upon the excessive demands of the king, and the queen’s ruse to have
ugly spinsters blame their physical deformities upon spinning—is not a
reflection of actual physical harm through the task but, rather, relates
to the queen’s cunning assessment of the king’s vanity in not wanting
ugly daughters. Many of the tales focus, in varying degrees, upon the
relationship between spinning and marriage. Jones and Stallybrass argue
for the marital charm of spinning in relation to folktales, for “a peasant

girl’s textile virtuosity could win her a desirable husband.”45 They none-
theless observe a certain “ambiguity”46 regarding the woman who spins.
Actually, many tales alternate between the positives and negatives of
spinning: attitudes towards and representations of spinning form a more
complicated, more tangled web involving destiny and the supernatural.
Natalie Zemon Davis recounts a range of beliefs related to spinning
in early modern Europe: “The events of a spinning day could be used
to foretell the future: a broken thread meant a quarrel; a man crossing
a thread stretched at the doorsill (it must be the first thread spun that
day) bore the same name as one’s future husband.”47 The prognostica-
tive quality of spinning is consistent with the Greek Fates spinning and
weaving to determine human destiny. Fairy lore permeates the culture
of spinning, too, Davis recounting that “[t]he women’s workplace was
itself open to fairies”48 who might finish the spinning at night, or steal a
spindle if the thread wasn’t correctly wound. Elizabeth A. Campbell like-
wise notes the relationship between fairy lore and spinning, citing an Old
Irish spinning song in which fairies “sorrow”49 for mortals and thus give
them the spinning wheel. Certainly, there are a range of domestic myths
about the spinning wheel’s origins with fairies. Davis aptly concludes that
this “is a domestic work culture, hidden from the streets, eliciting com-
ment not from city councils, but from storytellers.”50 The storyteller’s
interest in the “hidden” work of spinners survives in fairy tale, even as
the vast fleet of spinning wheels has grown still and disintegrated after
industrialisation rendered them obsolete.51
Of the spinning tales, the Brothers Grimm’s “Rumpelstilzchen”
(Rumpelstiltskin, 1857), first sourced from the Hassenpflug family and
Henriette Dorothea Wild, is best-known and is an example of this com-
plex relationship to hidden female labour. The hero’s father boasts to
the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. Earlier tales begin
with the hero spinning flax that is not transmuted, but simply spun well
and quickly, a profitable skill in its own right. The Brothers Grimm’s
version evokes the more masculine skill of alchemy. The anonymous
girl naturally cannot spin straw into gold, hence her dependence on
Rumpelstiltskin, who, like an alchemist, claims to perform the feat.52
In fact, the 1812 version of the Brothers Grimm’s tale does not even
mention the spinning wheel: the focus is solely on the transmutation
of straw into gold. The Brothers Grimm do provide a tangible descrip-
tion of spinning in the later versions, including that of 1857, with the
machinery whizzing, but the focus has moved to machinery and trans-
action, rather than the skill to use the wheel or the pleasure in its use.53
Once presented with gold, the king secures the hero’s supposed labour
by marrying her, thereby removing her talents from economic trade.
The marriage is not a love match, but simply a transaction. The hero’s
vaunted skill is merely a cypher for her potential and realised value in
economic exchange. For a tale synonymous with spinning, the tale is
brutally commercial.
The queen in L’Héritier’s “Ricdin-Ricdon” occupies the same story
position as the Brothers Grimm’s king in “Rumpelstiltskin,” but her
desire is informed less by economic ambition than by a genuine inter-
est in fibre crafts. Her son is something of a playboy prince, contrasted
with the domestic serenity represented in the queen. Like the Brothers
Grimm’s king, the son is charmed by an apparent peasant girl who spins
beautifully but, in this case, his mother’s love of spinning provides his
impetus. She is known as la reine Laborieuse (Queen Laborious), a refer-
ence to her diversions, including spinning. Early modern conduct books
expounded upon the virtue of high-born women spinning and engaging
in needlework, and the queen is an extreme example of such virtue.54
Gathering spinners about her, the queen fills rooms with the best and
most interesting fibres, even asbestos (referenced as incombustible flax).
Her enthusiasm for discussing skeins of yarn in detail is seen as somewhat
extreme. Her passion is an eccentricity, in fact, an intellectual curiosity in
textiles that exaggerates her virtue and not altogether for the best.
Laborieuse’s passion finds its male complement in “The Story of
Prince Sincere.” The King of Zinzolantines has a passion for silkworms
and is, in fact, “his silk-winding majesty,”55 perhaps related to the
Brothers Grimm’s flax-loving king. Unable to find anyone able to spin
the silk to his liking, he spins the silk himself, presenting the fruits of
his labour to the lords of his court, also largely “silk-worm fanciers.”56
The men of the court are represented as gender-deviant. The women
of court have meanwhile become bored, “[h]opeless of having their
charms and accomplishments appreciated by men who only understood
and admired the beauty of silkworms and the fineness of their silk.”57
They establish an alternative court in the provinces where they pursue
science. The tale follows the adventures of the king’s daughters, but
the conclusion, in which Prince Sincere seeks the king’s approval to
marry his youngest daughter, notes that ambassadors bring word “that
his silkworm-fancying majesty had blown his brains out with a pistol,
about twelve months before, in consequence of being unable to wind

an exceedingly entangled skein of silk.”58 The masculine passion for
silk has devastating consequences, likely related to its contravention of
masculine norms. Thus, the king and his lords drive away the women
of the court through their indifference to heteronormative behaviour
and the king himself commits suicide over a “trivial” obsession. For a
woman, spinning more often indicates virtue but, for a man, it is quite
the opposite.
L’Héritier’s “Ricdin-Ricdon,” however, contains more than one
view of spinning and while the virtues of such labour for women are
extolled, it is clear that they are only virtues when spinning is under-
taken for female pleasure and of a woman’s own free will. A woman’s
labour should not be reduced to forced economic exchange and not all
virtuous women know how to spin. Rosanie is the beautiful, virtuous
hero of the tale, who bluntly refers to spinning as “boring and consum-
ing work.”59 The tale itself becomes more complex as it evolves, so that
Rosanie’s spinning is incidental to her destiny. In d’Aulnoy’s “The Green
Serpent,” the unfortunate hero, Laideronnette, is enslaved by the wicked
fairy Magotine. Magotine instructs the princess to spin a distaff of spider
web as fine as her hair. Laideronnette, however, has never learned the
art of spinning. Magotine thus despises her as an “idle hussy,”60 equat-
ing her to Finette’s sisters and feminine vice. Laideronnette is certainly
not helped in her impossible task by having a spindle that is weighted
too heavily and web that is dirty. Fortunately for Laideronnette, another
fairy, Protectrice, taps her wand thrice and spins the web. The wrong
tool, ill-prepared fibre, and her own lapse in education make it impos-
sible for Laideronnette to spin the fibre, necessitating magical interven-
tion. Fairy tales in which heroes are unjustly punished with spinning
tasks more often than not offer a magical reprieve, facilitating a happily
ever after by helping the heroes to make their virtue visible in the com-
pleted task.
Many fairy tales describe heroes who despise spinning, though,
particularly as required labour is associated with low social status and
commodification. In Basile’s “La Facce de Crapa” (Goat-Face), for
example, Renzolla is required to spin flax with her maid. The maid sets
to work “to comb the flax, make the wicks, wind them on the distaffs,
turn the spindle, roll the skeins, and labor like a bitch.”61 Basile indicates
that the maid is an obedient, but clearly exploited and debased worker.
Not so Renzolla. She refuses to spin, declaring that if the king desires
shirts, he should purchase them. As the wife of the king, she won’t be
forced into labour and she likewise rejects any duty to clothe her hus-
band through her own labour. Saporita, the hero of Basile’s “Le Sette
Cotenelle” (The Seven Little Pork Rinds), likewise rejects spinning rolls
of flax in return for the kisses and clothing the merchant promises her.
She describes his expectations as beyond natural bounds, thereby refut-
ing such naturalisation of female labour. She then makes such a comical
hash of trying to spin everything at the last minute that some fairies do
the spinning and make the cloth instead, with Saporita feigning exhaus-
tion. Basile sprinkles the tales with further metaphors involving spinning
including the threat of “a good wool carding” and “spinning the fine
thread of fear.”62 His use of elaborate spinning metaphors reflects the
common knowledge of thread and fabric production, and its relation to
women in ways both positive and negative.
In Agnes Franz’s “Princess Rosalieb: A Fairy Tale” (1841), the
hero is disobedient and impatient. To control her behaviour, the fairy
Amarantha presents her with a ring which torments her when she misbe-
haves and a box that she is forbidden to open. The recalcitrant Rosalieb
is taught to spin on an ivory wheel and weave on a golden loom, befit-
ting her royal status but, although she initially enjoys the work, she
becomes distracted and the ring pricks her. She also learns to work tap-
estry but, again, in persisting on sewing the flowers in colours not set
out by the pattern, is pricked. In the latter case, Franz’s tale evinces that
patterns were becoming more common, the work of women becoming
regulated according to printed materials. The princess is punished for
her creativity and, when she throws away the ring, she is whisked away
to a tower where spirits armed with briar switches torment her till she
does her work, in this case, spinning flax. When she reforms, having been
confronted with an account of her bad behaviour in a book, she returns,
only to open the box and thus be transported back to the tower, where
she must now weave. Textile skill thus becomes part of an indoctrinating
process for the social management of women. It is only when Rosalieb
learns “contentment” that she is restored fully to her family as a perfect
daughter. Although she has agency in the story, the fairy sets conditions
which continue to regulate her behaviour till the desired conduct is
assured. Spinning, weaving and needlework, skills associated with fem-
ininity, are again used to subordinate the unruly woman, but without a
helpful fairy to counter the actions of Amarantha, Rosalieb must instead
conform to social expectations.
While spinning is usually associated with female skill, fairy tales do fea-
ture a range of male fairies able to produce thread, too. Rumpelstiltskin,
as discussed, elevates male spinning to a form of alchemy and magic.
Ricdin-Ricdon possesses a useful wand that will spin and sew. The male
who spins usually does so with magic, not with labour. He is, moreo-
ver, a demon or implied goblin, such as the “little man” Rumpelstiltskin.
Male spinners are figures of non-normative gender, too, just as
Hamilton’s parody suggests. The ABC series Once Upon A Time re-tells
the tale of Rumplestiltskin63 (Robert Carlyle) through the prism of bes-
tiality and magic, transforming him into the Dark One and entwining his
persona with that of the Disney Beast. Rumplestiltskin is a spinner who
works from his peasant cottage while caring for his son, undertaking, in
effect, both feminine labour and childcare roles. He is sent to the army
to fight in the ogre wars, but mutilates himself so as to avoid leaving
his son fatherless. Condemned a coward—and thus less than a man—he
is tricked into becoming The Dark One, a creature of magic and evil.64
Rumplestiltskin continues to spin, though, now carelessly transforming
straw into gold upon his wheel, telling his new captive, Belle, that he
spins simply to forget.65 The gold means nothing, but the action of the
spinning wheel is integral to his identity. His high-pitched giggles and
cackles, his sartorial elegance, his emotional and physical vulnerabilities
further define and elaborate his feminine qualities.
Despite the complex treatment of spinning in fairy tales, tales such as
Basile’s “Sun, Moon and Talia” and Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty” ren-
der unprofitable the attempts to do away with the textile industry and
its spinners. In Basile’s “Sun, Moon and Talia,” the life of the princess
is threatened by a prophecy involving a piece of flax. Her father conse-
quently prohibits all fibre in his kingdom, destroying the textile indus-
try and a major source of female employment. Eventually, however, Talia
does see an old woman lawlessly spinning and, curious as to what she is
doing, she picks up the distaff to draw the thread. A little flax catches
under her nail and Talia appears to die. Perrault’s princess is cursed to
die by pricking her hand on a spindle, resulting in all spinners and spin-
dles being prohibited in the kingdom. Again, a major source of female
employment is outlawed. Like Talia, the princess witnesses illicit spinning
and is curious, pricking her finger upon a surprisingly sharp spindle and
falling into unconsciousness. The princess in the Brothers Grimm’s tale,
“Dornröschen” (Briar Rose, 1812), from Marie Hassenpflug, shares the
same fate. In both the Brothers Grimm and Perrault tales, the spinner, an
old woman, lives on the edges of royal society, in an attic room high in
a tower. The princess is freely roaming her palace when she comes upon
the isolated old woman, juxtaposing youthful curiosity with the margin-
alisation of the old woman, pushed so far from the centre of activity that
she does not even know about the law banning spinning. The recurring
appearance of the old woman in the tales references the immemorial tra-
ditions of women’s labour even as she herself is pushed to the far reaches
of the corridors of power, represented in the palace itself. Yet, it also ref-
erences the links between old spinners and storytellers, too, placing these
women and their curious princesses within the realm of the same hearth
from which Cinderellas and Donkey Skins spring forth.
The specific threat posed by fibre and spindle has its roots, in part,
in female sexuality. The term “spinster” in English came to mean both
a spinner and a woman who remains unmarried, and the link between
spinning and the single woman is historically strong. In Planché’s nine-
teenth-century theatrical adaptation of d’Aulnoy’s “The Green Serpent”,
The Island of Jewels, Laidronetta explicitly references the connection:
“Madam, although a spinster, I’m no spinner.”66 Women who didn’t
marry could support themselves through spinning, although a sin-
gle woman was also strongly associated with prostitution, Ruth Mazo
Karras adding that “singlewoman” was actually a term for a prostitute
in England by the sixteenth century.67 Perhaps the greatest threat in the
sleeping beauty tales is spinsterhood and consequent sexual perversion,
represented by that curse and the none-too-subtle prick to her finger.
Spindles, spinning wheels, and distaffs are bound up in the construction
of the hero’s sexuality, much as L’Héritier’s glass distaffs embody a vir-
gin’s honour.
The Disney retelling, Sleeping Beauty (1959), excludes the immemo-
rial traditions of feminine skill. The king burns all the spinning wheels in
a glorious bonfire, reducing to ashes his kingdom’s textile industry as he
seeks to take back control of the fate of his beloved daughter.68 This pos-
sibly explains why he’s wearing the same clothing sixteen years later. Yet,
the curse will out. Rather than Rose happening upon a spinner whose
skill intrigues her, however, she is hypnotised into pricking her finger
upon the distaff of an inactive spinning wheel. By this point in history,
the animators are in the princess’s shoes, apparently, for the princess is
still urged to “touch the spindle,” but, instead, touches the distaff, which
ought not to be so sharp.69 The same act of magic occurs in the later
live action, Maleficent (2014). The skill of spinning ceases to enchant
the princess, the old woman has been driven completely from the corri-
dors of power, and the spinning wheel is an inactive, unfamiliar relic. The
old roots of the tale in spun fibre are moribund and the tale begins to
shift to a world of mass production in which a dress can be purchased in
either pink or blue.
Walking down the Path of Pins or Needles

Spindles and distaffs aren’t the only tools in the hero’s workbox. In some
oral versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in particular the Briffaults’
“The Grandmother’s Tale” (1855), the child on her way to her grand-
mother’s house is accosted by the wolf, who asks which path she’ll take,
the path of pins or the path of needles. The girl chooses, collecting nee-
dles rather than flowers on her way. Yvonne Verdier understands these
references in the context of nineteenth-century France, where girls from
smaller villages were sent to the seamstress upon reaching puberty.70 Pins
and needles, according to Verdier, have symbolic values tied to a woman’s
sexual maturity,71 much as the prick of the spindle intimates the sexual
awakening of the sleeping beauty, yet their very abundance in everyday life
invests them with a variety of meanings and practical uses.
Early modern fairy tales feature pins and needles as ever-present,
essential items, but they are rarely explicitly employed. Pins were used
for all manner of purposes, including the fastening of clothing and doc-
uments, and women often carried pins kept on pin cushions or in pin
poppets. In “The White Cat,” for instance, the hero does not want
to wed King Migonnet and refuses to put one pin more on, irrespec-
tive of whether he finds her beautiful or not, since she won’t have him
anyway. She refuses to add any additional folds, tucks, or furbelows to
her clothing—all of which would require pinning—in order to attract
the unwanted suitor. In d’Aulnoy’s “La Belle aux Cheveux d’Or” (The
Beauty with Golden Hair, 1697), a princess with commitment issues
rejects all courting gifts from the king, apart from English pins.72 The
princess’s choice to keep the pins suggests that they are not as valuable as
the king’s other gifts.
Indeed, although pins were certainly manufactured in England, they
were generally of poorer quality than French pins. This, then, implies
that the king’s gift includes substandard pins. However, Planché’s trans-
lation of d’Aulnoy notes this same choice “as proof of the estimation in
which English pins were held before 1700,” often being exchanged on
New Year.73 Pins were, however, readily available and in regular use. In
“The Good Little Mouse,” the queen and fairy give a reasonable account
of the value of their tools. The fairy finds the queen spinning silk and
asks if she’ll gamble her distaff and spindle on the fairy having the best
of news for her. The queen quips that she “wouldn’t give a pin for all
the news in the world.”74 Her quip draws on a popular idiom but, in
the vicinity of the distaff and spindle, underlines the value ascribed to
the items. Princess Mayblossom, too, includes needles in her gifts to the
fairies, but they are included among spinning wheels and scissors, rather
than being a valuable gift in their own right.
It is in the nineteenth century that pins and needles become posi-
tively heroic protagonists in fairy tales. A constant presence in the work-
boxes of young girls learning to sew and embroider, and in those of older
women maintaining the state of clothing and linens in the household, or
earning a living by the needle, pins and needles became the quintessence
of utility. Workboxes were personal, discreet objects of female industry,
but they animated to become fairy-tale protagonists in their own right.
The Brothers Grimm’s “Spindel, Weberschiffchen und Nadel” (Spindle,
Shuttle, and Needle, 1843), sourced from Ludwig Aurbacher, features a
young woman bequeathed the objects by her mother in order to make a
living. The prince seeks a wife. The young woman charms the objects with
song to bring him and clean the house ready for him, ensuring their life
together. In Harry A. James’ “The Enchanted Needle” from OddLand
and Other Fairytales (1901), a boy and girl are transformed into a nee-
dle and a dove, respectively. A fairy advises them to live for a year with
a poor, young seamstress. During this time, the king seeks a seamstress
to make wedding clothes for his daughter and asks for doll’s clothes to
be presented so that he might make his choice. Here, James intimates
the fashion doll, by then an old-fashioned concept. With the help of
the dove, the young seamstress wins the king’s patronage and is able to
afford to marry. The needle and the dove are transformed back into chil-
dren. Once again, the needle provides a livelihood and the possibility of
marriage, thus encouraging female industry.
However, this simple impetus did at times have a darker undertone,
exploring the ramifications of industrialisation, corporate greed, and
patriarchy itself. In Henry Morley’s “Silver Tassles” (1867), the wid-
owed hero, Neroli, has “a well-stored work-box, the poor woman’s
stock-in-trade.”75 Her tools allow her to maintain a neat appearance and
earn an income. However, as she lives in an ill-ventilated cottage and
the chimney smoke would linger upon luxurious fabrics, she can only
attract sewing work from poor clients. As the local factory uses slaves,
she can find no more profitable work there, either. Morley had already
written an article with Charles Dickens about slavery in North America
for Household Words (1852), and his tale explicitly references a number
of social and economic injustices rendering Neroli’s status as a single
mother precarious, even armed with her workbox and its useful contents.
Neroli wins the friendship of the rogue fairy Splug when she gives
him her silver thimble, a treasure he can use to buy bread. When Lord
Hemp, her greedy landlord, then takes her workbox in lieu of rent, her
daughter, Silver Tassels, asserts “Mother cannot live without that.”76
Silver Tassels is being quite literal, for destitution will be the result of
Neroli’s loss of tools. Hemp is unrepentant, so Splug charms the pins
and needles within the workbox. They stitch all Hemp’s clothing closed
so that he can’t undress or even remove a glove. The objects of the
workbox continue to cause mischief as he dines with the queen and later
as he goes to bed. The pins and needles and other tools are enchanted
agents of moral order, defending and upholding their virtuous mistress
against the greed of the social climbing, abusive industrialist.
The objects of the workbox, particularly pins and needles, seem
to nevertheless exist in a state of inevitable competition in fairy tales
through the nineteenth century. Andersen manages to doom an uppity
darning needle, who has the temerity to think herself so fine she should
be a sewing needle, to life in the mud of a street where she is con-
stantly run over by carts (“Stoppenaalen,” The Darning Needle, 1847).
The simple darning needle, as suggested in the tale, would be used for
such mending tasks as repairing the cook’s leather slipper, where a sew-
ing needle would be used for finer work. The tales reveal the tendency
of their anthropomorphism to replicate class structures, reasserting the
status quo and the importance of one’s proper use as a euphemism for
one’s proper place. Elizabeth Frances Dagley includes “The Adventures
of a Needle” and “The Remonstrance of a Pin” in her 1825 collection
Fairy Favours, and Other Tales. The two tales provide a detailed account
not just of the kinds of objects found in a workbox, but also the various
attitudes towards needlework and female employment, both for leisure
and for income. In fact, she provides a more nuanced account of the dif-
ficulties for working women in the nineteenth-century English economy
than Morley. Herself the daughter of an orphan, Richard Dagley, who
was schooled at Christ’s Hospital, she was the only one of ten children
to survive into adulthood. Her father did have some limited success in
publishing and as an artist, but he turned to working at a school, taking
along his daughter, wife, and sister-in-law. Dagley’s own writing artic-
ulates the problems and misery of economic insecurity, particularly in a
fairy tale about a needle—that indispensable tool of women’s labour.
In “The Adventures of a Needle,” a supercilious needle narrates, pro-
viding a startling account of women’s lives at various levels of society,
one so detailed it is worth describing here. The needle begins its recita-
tion with its start in a London shop, its “useful qualities” unnoticed as
“it happened that a manufacturer had procured a patent for some fine
gold and silver-eyed Needles, which were weekly puffed off in the news-
papers, with a long list of their perfections. They were upheld neither
to cut in the eye, nor to become blunt at the point; and, in the end,
I believe, were warranted to work of themselves: but of this I will not be
positive.”77 Already the needle exists in a heady atmosphere of commerce
and advertising, with a wry observation about the promotional claims for
innovation. After a detailed description of the shopkeeper’s sales tech-
niques, the needles are purchased and added to a workbag, a gift to a
niece who, as it transpires, is parsimonious. The needle is lost and then
found by a servant, Mary, who prises it from the floorboards with a pin.
In her pocket, it is forced to keep company with “crooked pins, and a
couple of vulgar worsted needles,”78 the latter being used to darn and
finish socks, hence their low status, and, indeed, later the needle does
tremble at the idea of darning a stocking. This is followed by the nee-
dle’s ruminations on the worth of a pin, “scarcely the sixteenth part of
a farthing,” repining that people take “recourse to the temporary expe-
dient of fastening”79 using a pin, when they should utilise the needle to
properly sew their clothing. After a spell with Mary, the needle is passed
on to her sister and, consequently, to her school friend, Lucy Lustre,
who is working a sampler, described in detail with its cherry tree and
strawberry border. Lucy grows bored with her work, however, and the
needle finds itself in the hands of “an urchin”80 of five, then falling into
the hands of an apprentice dressmaker, but it becomes blunt working
on Persian, a type of silk used to line a pelisse. Lost and brushed into the
street, the needle is vulnerable to the fate of Andersen’s uppity needle.
However, Dagley’s needle’s tale does not end in this abject state,
doomed to forever be fixed in the street, crushed by passing wheels. It
is found by a poor woman and is horrified to join a selection of worn
out, disreputable tools, including rusty needles. The needle’s consequent
employment provides an account of working-class women’s tasks, par-

ticularly highlighting the maintenance of clothing: “I was employed
upon an old coat of her husband’s: then I had to sew in the crown of
one of her boy’s hats; and, last of all, she had the barbarity to employ me
in fresh binding a pair of her own shoes!”81 Fortunately, the needle is
lost again and found by a girl at a charitable school, where work is taken
in, thus providing fresh employment for the needle. However, the nee-
dle is carried off in one of the finished shirts to a dressing-room and
here is witness to the exchange between a lady and a poor widow called
Mrs. Thomson, the latter noting that she cannot work to produce shirts
as cheaply as the children at the schools of industry. She is given some
sewing work when forced to match their price, and the needle travels
in one of those pieces to her scrupulously neat home. Despite her care,
the needle observes misery “really did exist, and to an extent far beyond
the squallid [sic] wretchedness visible in the cottages of the professedly
poor.”82 Mrs. Thomson’s honest attempts to earn a living by sewing are
thwarted by the schools of industry’s use of cheap child labour, and she
and her family are forced to enter the workhouse. The needle is conse-
quently found by Betty, a servant, and she and her mistress bring about
the rescue of the family from the workhouse by finding employment for
the widow. The needle is able, however, to “repose upon my laurels,”83
providing a satisfactory happy ending to a tale that candidly addresses
the exploitation of workers and the impact of unemployment upon fam-
ilies. The subsequent tale, “The Remonstrance of a Pin,” captures the
response of the pin that initially saved the needle from the floor boards
and is most indignant, providing a detailed account of how helpful and
necessary pins are.
What is particularly notable is that Andersen’s later needle protagonist
shares many prejudices with Dagley’s, and those prejudices reflect the
subtle layers of status evoked in women’s work, from the lowly chores
of patching shoes and darning socks to laborious dressmaking to the
fancy work performed with skill for pleasure. In these tales, the needles
are quite bumptious, sensitive to their usefulness and proper purpose and
place, reflecting a society that sets great store by staying in one’s place
and the proper conduct of self in that place. In these fairy tales about
needles, women’s labour is shaped by social attitudes, their agency effec-
tively that of a needle or pin, however sentient the latter may be. Their
value is inscribed in thread, leading to friction between women and
between needles and pins.
In Frances Freeling Broderip’s The Daisy and her Friends (1869),

“The Great Pin and Needle Controversy” begins with the pin’s decla-
ration, “I’m the most useful thing in the world, and therefore I require
ten men to make me in my full perfection.”84 The pin’s declaration
recalls the very real industry producing the everyday, seemingly insig-
nificant item. The needle retorts that it might be “fidgety,” but at least
“I leave the results of my work behind me!”85 As is common, the pin is
portrayed as a “quick fix” next to the more permanent work achieved
by the needle: the tales often using the contrast to advise against quick
improvisations. In Broderip’s tale, a trial is declared that rests upon the
behaviour of Rosa, a young girl who simply pins a tear in her dress and
when discovered, blames the “wretched little minnikin”86 for the fault.
Her stitching with the needle is not much better, as her “cat’s-teeth
stitches”87 create puckers in the mending. The injunction that Rosa
should learn the proper use of her tools is a common refrain, and speaks
to the wider social management of women’s labour and skill. The rebel-
lious girl is forced to conform, however much she might sigh in frustra-
tion, as she certainly does in Broderip’s tale. Broderip was the daughter
of Thomas Hood, a noted poet, author, and editor, who achieved par-
ticular fame for his poem, “The Song of the Shirt” (1843). This poem
and several of his other works, including “The Lady’s Dream” (1844)
and “Miss Kilmansegg and Her Precious Leg; a Golden Legend”
(1840), evoke tension between fashionably dressed customers and the
terrible working conditions and poverty of seamstresses. His seamstress
in “The Song of the Shirt” would certainly be in sympathy with wid-
owed Mrs. Thomson, but Broderip echoes these themes far more lightly
in a collection designed for children, simply offering “two wholesome
maxims” as the bodkin remarks, “‘Never put in a pin when you ought to
use a needle;’ and ‘Never sew up a hole that stands in need of a darn!’”88
The tale is a more comfortable account of female labour in which the
determined Rosa will climb to the top of a tree to prove her mettle to
a boy, but will also be cajoled into the “proper” application of her nee-
dles and pins. Female labour controls and limits her behaviour in ways
that Charlie does not have to imagine—the boy even remarks of the folly
of women’s clothing not standing up to brambles, “It would not do for
men to wear such trumpery gimcracks!”89—but her social position is not
so precarious and so she is not horribly punished for her small, perfunc-
tory sartorial repairs.
Mary de Morgan’s “On a Pincushion,” in the collection On A

Pincushion and other Fairy Tales (1877), turns the humble pin, so
often slighted for its common status, into the storyteller. The frame tale
describes a pebble brooch, a shawl pin, and a common pin gathered on
a pincushion. The pin repines its neglect as “I am always needed, and so
many pins are taken every day that it seems hard I should be left here for
nearly a week, and all because I am run so far into the pincushion that
nothing but my head can be seen.”90 The pin then suggests the group
tell stories in order to drown out the chatter of nearby bracelets. The
pin finishes its story—“The Story of the Opal”—but, while the shawl-pin
and the brooch are taken up, the pin is left to fall asleep. Unfortunately
for the pin, it is unnoticed and cannot fulfil its practical purpose, a sad
fate that again plays upon the conceptualisation of self-worth through
one’s place and purpose. De Morgan was herself involved in women’s
suffrage and supported causes for women’s education and workhouse
reform.91
Olga D. A. Ernst, the daughter of German emigrants to Australia,
foregrounded sense of purpose in “Where do the Pins go to?” from
Fairy Tales from the Land of the Wattle (1904), which she published in
her teens. The pedagogical impetus remains, but there is a curious switch
to a male human protagonist and a little subversion of expected feminine
norms. An eight-year-old boy enquires into the fate of some lost pins.
His intellectual curiosity is rewarded by the Genius of Thought, who
carries him from Heidelberg, at the time in rural Australia, to the Fair
Queen of Forgotten Things at the South Pole. The boy’s adventure is
based on his intellectual inquisitiveness and there is no real question of
him having a use for the pins himself. He witnesses one hundred pins
explaining to the queen: “this morning a lady bought us in a shop and
then took us to her home. We lay quietly on the toilet table for about
an hour, when a little girl came in, and taking us up began to play with
us. After a while she went over to the fireplace, and seeing a small crack
in the floor emptied us all into it, and when we were gone she danced
about with glee.”92 The boy recognises that they are talking about his
sister and the queen, seeing they are new, has the boy return them to
their domestic place. The sister’s behaviour has the overtones of wick-
edness: she has first played with the pins, rather than utilising them, and
then has wasted them, compounding her transgression by afterwards
cavorting over her crime. The queen redresses the misuse of the pins by
returning them to a useful fate, much as she then grants a “bent and
blackened pin”93 asylum based on the physical evidence of its previous

hard use. The boy, just as Rumpelstiltskin with spinning, has vested sci-
entific and economic interest in the pins’ fate. However, the boy’s sis-
ter subversively tips the tools of her employment into the abyss. As
with many a spinning hero, she attempts to escape impelled labour and
enforced practicality.
Pin and needle protagonists are generally represented in fairy tales
to encourage the development of practical skills by which they may be
employed, nonetheless, and this is perhaps most evident in Jane Eayre
Fryer’s famous The Mary Frances Sewing Book or Adventures Among
the Thimble People (1913). The book teaches girls how to sew through
tales of anthropomorphised scissors and pincushions. Fryer, herself an
American domestic science teacher, presents practical lessons accompa-
nied by inducements. The reader is instructed: “if any little girl, who
really wishes to learn to sew, will follow the lessons exactly as given by
the Thimble people, she can hardly fail to win the Needle-of-Don’t-
Have-to-Try for her very own.”94 The needle may not be Excalibur, but
it is certainly magical: “Mary Frances found her thimble, and threaded
the glowing needle, although she feared it would scorch the thread, –
but it seemed like any other needle except that she didn’t have to try
twice to put in the thread.”95 The needle quickly sews with barely any
effort on Mary’s part, until it reaches a type of sewing that Mary doesn’t
know. Mary is informed that the needle will only work the kind of
stitches that Mary has already learned. She must therefore continue to
learn in order to better utilise her magical needle. Such fairy tales are
explicitly pedagogical, skill with needle and thread becoming the object,
rather than the means, of the adventure.
Disney’s Cinderella (2015), over a century later, rediscovers the
workbox and its treasures. Cinderella’s mother’s workbox is a wooden
confection with spools of threads, bird bobbins, carved chickens, and
a book-shaped drawer for ribbons and other odds and ends.96 It rep-
resents the comfortable, pastoral estate of Cinderella’s family. It sits
beside her mother even as she dies and is so imbued with her presence
that Cinderella’s stepmother is anxious to have it taken from the room,
giving it to Cinderella that she may be useful and occupied. Indeed,
Cinderella turns her tools to good use in remaking her mother’s dress
for the ball. She inherits the legacy of the past century, the pins and
needles and threads with which women plied their hopes and practical
ambitions.
Cunning Fingers
For all the fairy tale heroes who avoid or disdain labour, there are heroes
whose skill with needle and thread becomes synonymous with their
cunning. Their clever fingers are mere extensions of their clever minds,
and they were evident in early modern tales, particularly in Basile’s col-
lection. The importance of an education in needlework for the high-
born Zezolla, for example, is manifest from the start of the tale. The
prince loves his daughter, and his consequent investment in her educa-
tion fronts the tale and sets events in motion, for he employs a teacher
to instruct Zezolla in “chain-stitch, openwork, fringes, and the hem-
stitch.”97 The teacher, Carmosina, who will become Zezolla’s step-
mother and nemesis, is an adept mentor for the girl. The skills Zezolla
learns—alongside the methods for murdering her stepmother and
manipulating her father—are detailed down to the individual stitches,
something rather rare in popular tales after the seventeenth century, and
the detail suggests her skill level. John Edward Taylor’s 1850 translation
actually “updates” her skill set to incorporate the knitting and point-
lace more common to the skills of middle- and upper-class women of
the nineteenth century.98 Zezolla is not simply darning old clothes and
sewing everyday dresses—the domestic drudgery that other spinners and
needle-workers seek to escape—but is, rather, engaging in more complex
and artistic work. She learns the manipulation of thread and society at
the knee of the crafty Carmosina.
Carmosina’s skills, in turn, enable her to earn an income and pro-
vide for her six daughters, eventually insinuating herself into the home
and heart of the prince.99 Not all women with quick needle skills and
sharp wits are virtuous. Centuries later, Andersen’s “Pigen, som traadte
paa Brødet” (The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, 1859), for instance,
notes the Old Woman of the Bogs’ marvellous needlework, too, but,
like Carmosina, her clever fingers “embroidered lies and did crochet
from rash remarks that had fallen to the ground – anything, in fact, that
could lead to injury and corruption. Oh yes, she knew all about sewing,
embroidery and crochet work did old great-granny.”100 Much scholar-
ship on embroidery tends to focus less upon the skill and cunning—even
wickedness—of embroiderers and other needle-workers and more upon
perceptions of quiet, virtuous activity that such work apparently encour-
ages. Rozsika Parker notes that despite “the covert ways” in which nee-
dlework could offer women agency: “During the seventeenth century
the art was used to inculcate femininity from such an early age that the
girl’s ensuing behaviour appeared innate.”101 She suggests such stereo-
typed femininity is defined by “docility, obedience, love of home, and a
life without work.”102 Beaudry likewise posits that such inculcation dis-
guised ulterior motives, as “embroidery has provided support and satis-
faction for women and has served as a covert means of negotiating the
constraints of femininity; women were able to make meanings of their
own while overtly living up to the oppressive stereotype of the passive,
silent, vain, and frivolous, even seductive needlewoman.”103 Nonetheless,
while proposing ulterior motives, Beaudry confirms the stereotype of the
embroiderer. It is a stereotype evident in the Brothers Grimm’s tale of
Snow White. The hero is given shelter in the dwarfs’ home if she can sew
and knit and thereby fulfil the stereotype of the docile, useful woman,
confined to their home. They even warn her against straying beyond
its walls. There are no details of the specific stitches or types of knitting
Snow White can perform. Later tales often generalise skills, ignoring the
range and variety of stitches and skills involved in such intricate work,
thus colluding with a patriarchal undervaluation of female work. In
Basile’s tales, though, embroidery is meticulously described and is a part
of a woman’s dynamic lifestyle. The woman who lives by the needle is
neither passive nor obedient.
Skill with a spindle or needle is part of the package of female agency in
many of Basile’s tales. Viola, proclaimed hero of “Viola,” is the daugh-
ter of an upright man and her female-dominated family circle appears to
work for their living by producing household textiles. She is pursued by
a prince, but her cunning takes her through a series of escapes until she is
adopted by an ogre and able to turn the tables upon the prince, leading
to their marriage. In the tale, she is forever on the move, fetching sew-
ing tools and materials, all the while keeping one step ahead of her royal
stalker. She is as willing to leap from a balcony into an ogre’s garden in
order to save some thread as she is to disappear into her aunt’s closet to
retrieve some scissors. Jennifer M. Jones reminds us that women such
as Viola needed to be redoubtable: “women’s work within the clothing
trades was a hard-won privilege, shaped and contested by day-to-day
encounters within a royally-controlled and regulated guild economy.”104
The guild economy and women from trade, farming, peasant, and work-
ing-class backgrounds are well represented in Basile’s collection, with
such heroes including Viola, Renzolla, Sapia Liccarda, Belluccia, Cicella,
Saporita, Lolla, Betta, and Parmetella. Basile’s tales celebrate peasants,
merchants, and artisans, and are consequently rich in detail about their
work and, indeed, their encounters with royalty itself.
Working fairy-tale heroes are consequently not as new as one might
imagine and class hierarchies not as immutable. Viola and her older
sisters all work in a room at street level, likely to be a workshop with
easy access for customers. The close quarters of the working-girls and
royalty, being muddled together in a market town, is evident in the
prince’s habit of walking by their room and greeting Viola. Viola’s
response is sassy as she returns, “I know more than you, hey!”105 As
Canepa notes, she is unconventional, “as she poses herself as an ironic
alternative to man, and not as a sexual object to be won by him.”106
This is such a shocking attitude for a woman that her sisters fear the
outcome of her mocking responses, for she treats him as a social equal,
not a royal personage. The sisters work on luxury textiles, placing them
in a commercial relationship with the prince, his family, and court.107
Viola is threatening their livelihood by teasing their best customer
as though on an equal footing with him, while likewise resisting his
advances, which would doubtless lead to her loss of income. She is con-
sequently sent to live with her aunt to learn her trade—which involves
sewing, as there are consequent references to scissors and thread. The
prince, desperately in love, discovers where Viola has gone and offers
the aunt riches for a kiss from the girl.108 The aunt is unhappy in her
role as procuress and with extending their commercial relationship to
the body of her niece, but agrees to send Viola to a room where the
prince is hiding, having told the prince that if he doesn’t know how to
use the cloth and scissors in his hand, he has no one to blame but him-
self. Her analogy playfully, if a little desperately, converges the skills of
needlework and seduction.
Viola, nothing if not crafty, evades the prince with strength and agil-
ity, even while fetching items including a measure, scissors, and “bres-
cianiello,” a thread from Brescia. Returning home, having snipped off
her aunt’s ears for her pandering, she continues her spirited discourse
with the prince and the sisters decide to do away with her altogether,
rather than to risk their lucrative contracts and social recrimination.
They have a window over an ogre’s garden and, while sewing a curtain
for the queen, drop down a skein of thread, sending Viola after it and
then leaving her there. This time there is a clear reference to the sisters’
work being engaged by the prince’s family, confirming the commer-
cial relationship that Viola is risking and that the prince is extending to
Viola’s person. Fortunately, the ogre mistakes Viola for his daughter—in
a farcical misunderstanding concerning passing wind and childbirth—
and his fairies treat the girl as a princess. Viola has at last found female
benefactors to assist her. The prince is heartbroken but, true to his
disreputable habits, locates her yet again. However, Viola is no longer a
working-girl and no longer so vulnerable to his desires. After the prince
tricks her into thinking there are fleas in her bed, the fairies conspire with
her to repay the trick by having the ogre make her musical slippers, deco-
rated with bells. Viola is no longer connected with the making of luxury
textiles, but with the commission of such goods. The prince finally agrees
that she does know more than he does and asks her to marry him. At this
point, Viola appears to lose her independence and craft, as her father,
the prince, and the ogre agree upon the terms of her marriage without
her input. No longer an uninhibited working-girl, her needle-sharp wit is
finally silenced.
Yet, the working-girl is not alone in turning her cunning fingers to
employment and the necessary defence of her virtue. The hero of Jean-
Paul Bignon’s Orientalist beauty and the beast tale “Princess Zeineb and
King Leopard” (1714) uncovers the truth of her lover’s alternative form,
and finds herself promptly reduced to nudity and homelessness. She
must restore her reputation stitch by stitch. Alone, she treks across the
world, eventually settling down in Borneo, where her beauty draws the
attention of lecherous men. Zeineb turns her sewing skills to earning an
income: “I noticed from the very first that the embroidery decorating
the clothes of the women was extremely coarse, and I was convinced that
I was more skilful in doing this simple work.”109 Zeineb’s skills derive
from her status, since she has had education and time lavished upon
her in order for her to produce more delicate, ornamental stitches. Her
superior work enables her to rent a cottage, set up an honest business,
and trade with the local nobility. However, her suitors are not content
with simply commissioning her sewing skills. The first suitor, for exam-
ple, brings her a drawing of the embroidery he wishes to have executed
on his sash, then attempts to seduce her. As with Viola, the body of
working-girl is perceived as purchasable along with her skills. Zeineb
defends her virtue with magic her lover has given her and, despite a
brush with being burned at the stake, is ultimately reunited with King
Leopard. However, Bignon’s tale fails to capture the quick, cunning apti-
tude of the needle-worker. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
working-girls are often represented as rather more guileless and whereas
Viola, with a quick snip of the sewing scissors, defends herself, Zeineb is
reliant upon the magic and muscle of King Leopard. Her skills and cun-
ning can no longer save her.
Happily, Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing’s hero is one of the exceptions.
Ewing was a successful English author who wrote fairy tales for Aunt
Judy’s Magazines and her own collection, Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales
(1882). In “The Little Darner,” appearing in the latter, her hero is in the
mould of Molly Whuppie or, indeed, d’Aulnoy’s Finette Cendron, at least
in her initial adventures. Her peers are frustrated with her goodness, so
determine to play a trick upon her while she is minding the pigs. The girls
simply chase the pigs into the ogre’s wood, but they and the hero all wind
up in the woods as the trick goes wrong and the ogre himself bags them
up and takes them to his wife. The hero is already thinking quickly, and
pushes her needles through the sack to leave a trail. Then, when she is
chosen to be cooked first for the ogres’ dinner, she decides that crying
won’t help, and pulls out her darning. The wife notices her good work,
telling her “the Ogre does wear such big holes in his stockings, and his
feet are so large, that, though my hand is not a small one, I cannot fill out
the heel with my fist.”110 The ogre lacks an appropriately sized darning
ball or mushroom with which to support the heel as it is re-stitched. The
hero asks for a basin of the right size and offers to make the repair with
this improved darning tool. Ewing goes into detail: “she had put all the
threads one way, and when she began to run the cross threads, interlac-
ing them with the utmost exactness, the old creature was delighted.”111
Like other female authors, Ewing draws upon the details of skill and tools
to tell her story, a sort of écriture féminine her female readers would be
most familiar with, thereby being able to recognise the hero’s good repair
work. The hero is able to convince the ogre’s wife to send the other chil-
dren home, following the path of needles, as she can’t darn while thinking
of their deaths or listening to the sharpening of the knife. The girls send
the village men back to kill the ogres and save the hero, and then they “all
learned to darn stockings at once.”112 Of course, the author utilises the
tale to encourage enthusiasm in her young readers for darning, but the
point is that she does so through showing the skill as life-saving, one a
clever adventurer can turn to good account in facing down ogres.
Male heroes do on occasion ply a needle. Wilhelm Hauff’s “Das
Märchen vom falschen Prinzen” (The Tale of the False Prince) (1826),
included in Hauff’s Fairy Tales (1905), opens with a tailor’s apprentice,
Labakan, who works so hard and well, “his needle became red-hot and
the thread smoked.”113 He also delights in beautiful clothing and so,

when tasked with repairing the clothing of the sultan’s brother with its
“glittering embroidery,”114 he decides to take the opportunity to wear
it out in public, thus making a sartorial display of himself. On his adven-
tures, he steals the identity of a fuming Prince Omar and convinces the
sultan of his identity, but the sultana knows the truth and, after some
consultation, she devises a test of skill to determine the real prince: “let
them each have a caftan and a pair of trousers to make, and we will see
who does it best.”115 The sultan is not convinced when Labakan pro-
duces beautiful clothing, as a tailor would, and consults a fairy who sets
a further test whereby the two contestants choose from two caskets.
Labakan, choosing the casket of happiness and riches, discovers within
a needle and thread, the tools of his trade, and thus further evidence of
his true identity, and is turned out of the palace. After some misfortune,
he starts his own business and discovers the needle can sew by itself and
the thread never runs out. As a result, he takes all the business in the
town as his work is “extraordinarily cheap.”116 Labakan is presented as
a non-gender-normative trickster, his masculinity further complicated by
the operation of Orientalism represented in Hauff’s collection, modelled
upon the Arabian Nights. Prince Omar, for instance, dismisses the skills
of the needle as unbefitting of a prince. It is women—the sultana and the
fairy—who cunningly unmask the trickster through his skill with the nee-
dle. The tale then takes an odd turn, by which the tailor is able to profit
through free labour, undercutting his fellow tailors. This is something, of
course, frowned upon in many of the needle fairy tales, as it puts seam-
stresses out of work and forces them to labour for unfair pay, but here it
is raised to a commercial virtue.
The Brothers Grimm also have a range of tailor-heroes. “Vom klu-
gen Schneiderlein” (The Clever Little Tailor) (1815), sourced from
Ferdinand Siebert, for example, begins with a princess who prom-
ises to marry anyone who can solve her riddles. Three tailors make the
attempt and the third one wins, much to her chagrin, and, after a failed
attempt to have him eaten by a bear, she must wed him. The tailor’s skill
with needle and thread is incidental: they are tricksters, first and fore-
most, their cunning self-serving. Even in “Von den Wichtelmännern”
(The Elves): “Von dem Schuster, dem sie die Arbeit gemacht” (About
the Shoemaker for Whom They Did the Work) (1812), sourced from
Henriette Dorothea Wild, the poverty of a shoemaker is alleviated by
the elves, so that he is soon financially comfortable. At least he and his
wife provide the elves with clothing and shoes in return, but, nonethe-
less, free labour is used to raise the hero’s financial fortunes, rather than
actual skill, a common thread in these tales of male needle-workers.
Beatrix Potter took up the theme, herself. In The Tailor of Gloucester
(1903), the tailor does a good service to the mice, who consequently
finish the waistcoat for the Mayor’s wedding day when he falls ill. Here,
the mice act like fairy godmothers, who, upon witnessing the humble
virtue of the tailor, repay him in kind.117 The tale itself is based on that
of Gloucester tailor John Prichard, who left the suit for the mayor unfin-
ished one night and, in the morning, found just a buttonhole left to
sew, a note attached, “No more twist,” referring to the twisted thread
being used: of course, it was the work of those in his employ, but he
told the tale that it was the work of fairies, thus establishing something
of a promotional fairy tale for his business.118 Potter’s illustrations, too,
had an eye to historical veracity, for she visited the South Kensington
Museum (the Victoria and Albert Museum, also known as the V&A) and
consulted the historical clothing on display for her story, which was set
“[i]n the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flow-
ered lappets – when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats
of paduasoy and taffeta.”119 Here, Potter provides a fulsome summary
of eighteenth-century masculine fashion, her children’s tale detailing cuts
and fabrics, stitches and threads, once again speaking the language of
fashion, that kind of écriture féminine, to tell the tale. She describes how
the tailor attempts to cut the expensive fabric as economically as possible,
repining that the bits left over are only enough to make tippets—narrow
scarf-like accessories—for mice. Then she describes in detail the clothing
the mice make. Her tale offers a snapshot of life in an eighteenth-cen-
tury tailor’s shop. Her cunning brush mimics the cunning fingers of
eighteenth-century tailors, plying their trade in the bustling city.
Modern Cinderellas
From the mid-nineteenth century, modern Cinderellas picked up the
thread of their working-class forebears in Basile’s collections. As fashion-
able clothing became more accessible to women from all walks of life,
Cinderella came to embody transformation, social mobility, and fashion
for a wider range of women. Gender and class have always underscored
the Cinderella narrative but, in the twentieth century, working- and
middle-class Cinderellas laid claim to their right to their own fairy
tale—and nowhere was this more obvious than in America, where the
story resonated with the mythology of the American Dream. Jane Yolen
argues that these Cinderellas are not the princesses of early modern tales,
but “a spun-sugar caricature of her hardier European and Oriental for-
bears, who made their own way in the world,”120 and that, particularly
since Disney’s Cinderella, the hero “has been a coy, helpless dreamer,
a ‘nice’ girl who awaits her rescue with patience and a song.”121 She
often has a needle or other sewing tool in her hand, too, embodying
useful domesticity. Sarah A. Gordon reflects that “[s]ewing is laden with
understandings of femininity, family, and social class. It evokes ideas
about thrift, housekeeping, wifely duty, motherly love, and sexual attrac-
tion.”122 Femininity, thrift, and sexual attraction are particular markers of
how sewing shaped the destinies of the modern Cinderellas.
“Modern Cinderella” literature appeared regularly, including Amanda
Minni Douglas’s juvenile novel, A Modern Cinderella (1913), Anna Alice
Chapin’s story, “A Modern Cinderella,” in the Los Angeles Herald (1907),
Charlotte M. Braeme’s novel, A Modern Cinderella (1888), and Harriet
Childe-Pemberton’s “Lilian Lane” from Fairy Tales for Every Day (1882).
The tale was popular in magazines such as Harper’s New Monthly and The
Atlantic Monthly, where the heroes were validated for their domesticity
and materialism.123 The ability to sew with a needle came to stand in lieu
of the fairy godmother’s wand, enabling Cinderellas to help themselves.
Authors did sentimentalise the lower-class Cinderellas, but their usefulness
was unquestioned. Carol Hanbery MacKay observes, “The Cinderella tale-
type presents the reader or listener with a plotline and set of archetypal
figures that cry out for feminist critique, from within and/or outside the
text.”124 Rather than simply accept these as creatures of spun-sugar, it is
worth examining their skill with spinning and applying thread.
The most notable of the modern Cinderellas is Louisa May Alcott’s
short story, “A Modern Cinderella, or, The Little Old Shoe,” first
published in The Atlantic (1860). In Alcott’s story, one of the self-
proclaimed “wicked sisters,” Di, attempts to knit “as a sort of penance
for past sins,” but “soon originated a somewhat remarkable pattern”
with her dropped stitches.125 With a knitting needle poked into her hair,
she is “like a sarcastic unicorn.”126 Like her predecessors, she lacks the
talents of Cinderella and has a caustic tongue, although in this case she
is supportive rather than obstructive. Nan, the Cinderella, is sweet and
docile, and “sat diligently ornamenting with microscopic stitches a great
patch.”127 Nan is useful and highly skilled, and will achieve her happily
ever after. Indeed, Di notes that “taking pussy for the godmother, the
characters of the story are well personated.”128 It wouldn’t really be a
Cinderella tale without the representation of a cat. Although the por-
trayal of the sisters is rather more jovial and the characters are self-aware
of their roles, Alcott does capture the spirit of how middle-class women
adopted the fairy tale to promote their own romantic desires at least par-
tially through their usefulness with needle and thread.
Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Making of a Marchioness (1901) is
likewise part of this trend of modern Cinderellas. The hero, Emily Fox-
Seton, lives in near poverty, earning an income by performing services
for aristocratic ladies. Served well by her clever sewing and organisational
skills, she marries Lord Walderhurst, a vastly wealthy aristocrat, who pre-
sents her with an engagement ring featuring a ruby “as big as a trouser-
button.”129 The intertwined allusions to sex and haberdashery in the
description reveal the nexus of sex and sewing that still persists about
the working-girl. While Emily is in the mould of the more compliant,
obedient figure of a Brothers Grimm Cinderella, she is nevertheless an
independent woman in an era in which independence was precarious
for single women and the workhouse was a real threat should she fail
to continue to support herself. She is introduced as a woman in a “trim
tailor-made skirt” whose immediate interests lie in keeping her clothing
clear of muddy splashes from the street and in studying the latest fash-
ions so as to maintain a respectable appearance:
Skirts had made one of their appalling changes, and as she walked down
Regent Street and Bond Street she had stopped at the windows of more
than one shop bearing the sign “Ladies’ Tailor and Habit Maker”, and had
looked at the tautly attired, preternaturally slim models, her large honest
hazel eyes wearing an anxious expression. She was trying to discover where
seams were to be placed, and how gathers were to be hung; or if there
were to be gathers at all; or if one must be bereft of every seam in a style
so unrelenting as to forbid the possibility of the honest and semi-penniless
struggling with the problem of remodelling last season’s skirt at all.130
Emily, as Cinderella, must serve as her own fairy godmother, remodel-

ling her old clothes to meet new fashions, and Burnett provides a useful
account of her skilled eye for cut and fit. A respectable, chic appearance
is necessary, forming part of the nebulous boundary between poverty
and decency. Moreover, a respectable appearance, thus cleverly contrived,
can lead to marital security. The Making of a Marchioness recognises the
practicality of Emily’s consequent marriage, both as a source of eco-

nomic stability for Emily and a social convenience for Lord Walderhurst.
Throughout the Cinderella trajectory of the tale, Emily’s skills are
foremost, promoting her usefulness above her beauty, for, after all, as
Burnett said herself, she had “big feet instead of little ones.”131 While
her dresses may not be as splendid or magical as classic Cinderella gowns
conjured by a fairy godmother, the ability to stitch becomes, for Emily,
her passport to an aristocrat marriage.
Needlecraft, a magazine “devoted to home dressmaking, home mil-
linery, fancy work and household decoration,” published their ver-
sion of “The Modern Cinderella” in the January 1919 issue, entitled
“Cinderella’s Confession: The story of how a shabby little stranger
became the best dressed girl in our time.” Written by Kathryn Holmes,
the story promotes the Woman’s Institute: “Cinderella was right!
More than 14,000 women and girls in the city, town and country have
proved that you can easily and quickly learn at home, through the
Woman’s Institute, to make all your own and your children’s clothes
and hats or prepare for success as a dressmaker or milliner.”132 The sto-
ry’s hero, Enid, is a stenographer, a representative of the many women
who found office work in the city. However, she is regarded as a rather
“shabby”133 creature whose outfits are out of fashion. She is socially
ostracised until, one day, she appears “a wonderfully radiant creature in
the neatest, prettiest, most becoming dress you ever saw and a charming
hat you just knew had been made for that little blonde head.”134 She
is dubbed Cinderella and becomes a social butterfly, eventually becom-
ing engaged to the boss’s son.135 Her secret, she reveals, is having taken
courses at the Woman’s Institute. The Woman’s Institute thus substi-
tutes for the fairy godmother, providing Cinderella with skills, not simply
gowns. Although women had for a long while made clothes, the fur-
ther implication in this story is that Enid is able to create many outfits
and thus match the feats of earlier Cinderellas who would wear a new
dress to each new festivity. Enid stresses that, armed with such skill, hav-
ing many clothes on a limited budget is something “any woman or girl
can do!”136 The bulk of the story is, in effect, an advertisement for the
Woman’s Institute, but also reflects the changing focus of the Cinderella
story, a story that becomes very popular in the twentieth century with its
re-worked, upwardly mobile hero. As for older Cinderellas, dress is vital
to social advancement, but for the modern Cinderella, skill with a needle
is a ticket from rags to riches.
Make Do and Mend
The increasing availability of ready-made clothing in the twentieth cen-
tury challenged the virtue illustrated in home sewing, but home sew-
ing continued to be promoted as economical, a shrewd skill useful to a
thrifty hero.137 Two world wars had encouraged women to “make do
and mend,” an initiative of the UK’s Board of Trade in World War II.
Housewives, in particular, were advised on thrift, preservation, and
mending. One of the main points of the campaign was to discourage the
public from “wasting” clothing and textile resources that could be used
in the war effort. Clothing coupons, rationing, and wartime prices also
made the purchase of new clothes prohibitive. Clothing care and refur-
bishment was promoted, and would continue to offer a prudent alterna-
tive to mass-produced fashion. Home sewing offered possibilities to the
fairy-tale heroes to manage their sartorial transformations themselves.
Disney’s Cinderella is informed by a “make do and mend” ethic,
rationing itself having ended a few years before the film’s release.
Specifically adapting Perrault’s tale, which already zeroed in upon the
introduction of French chic, Disney celebrates the post-war resurgence
of fashion. When Cinderella wakes up, the song, “A Dream is A Wish
Your Heart Makes,” orchestrates her toilette. The trajectory of passive
dream to actively articulated wish mimics her own trajectory of passive
servant to active princess. Indeed, in matters of toilette and dress, she
already apes the role she is destined to attain. The mice and birds ful-
fil the roles of maid and dresser as they mend, polish, and freshen her
clothing, and see that she is bathed and tidied. She may be a servant in
an attic room, but she reproduces the toilette of the elite through a lit-
tle improvisation, suggesting that any working-girl in an attic room can
aspire, can wish, to improve her lot. Her final appearance is neat. She
may wear a plain dress, apron, and headscarf, but she is as neat and clean
as a pin.
She reconstructs her everyday existence in an echo of the pastoral
retreats of early modern tales, particularly the French. David Whitley
argues that the feature is a “specialized form of pastoral” where
“Cinderella’s role is akin to that of the lovelorn shepherdess, managing
her somewhat incongruous flocks of chickens and mice.”138 She even
dresses the mice, a witty anthropomorphism that transforms wild vermin
into servants through clothing. She crafts and maintains a box of dimin-
utive clothing from which she selects garments for new mice as they
arrive at the house; cross-special dressing, if you will. This leads to a little
cross-gender-dressing humour, too, when she mistakenly selects a dress
for new “recruit,” Gus. She provides the mice with a kind of livery and
protection, in return for which they work for her, assisting her in tasks
about the farm. Already, clothing establishes the networks of obligation
between the hero and the small cohort to whom she acts as benefactress.
It is a nostalgic echo of the relationships negotiated in early modern
tales, but with servants and farm pests.
Cinderella retains her innate good taste, too, from earlier tales, but
adds to her skills the ability to refurbish clothing to make it appear
new and fashionable. With the chance to go to the ball in the offering,
Cinderella fetches one of her mother’s old dresses, beribboned and pink
with a hobble skirt that would have been fashionable only at the turn
of the century. She duly remarks that it is perhaps out of date.139 She
selects a pattern from a book to update the hobble dress, for Cinderella
can only ever succeed by representing the height of fashion. Perrault’s
Cinderella would have had no access to such advice, as sewing patterns
and manuals for a general audience were not readily available until
the nineteenth century, particularly through the efforts of Ebenezer
Butterick, who established the fashion magazine The Delineator to pro-
mote his patterns. Margaret Walsh notes that patterns helped to democ-
ratise fashion: “Capitalizing on the interest already awakened by fashion
reporting in magazines, merchant manufacturers set out to persuade
women that they could be well dressed if they used their reliable pat-
terns.”140 Rather than rely upon copying an existing gown, a woman
was able to transform a gown through the use of a pattern. As Walsh
observes, “[i]n order to turn out a new stylish article,” the home sewer
with no recourse to a fashionable modiste would need “an accurate dress
pattern.”141 Disney’s princess is able to capitalise upon the democratisa-
tion of dressmaking itself in order to make her own dress for the ball.
However, her time is limited, as she must do all the chores and work
on the outfits of her stepsisters and mother, rather than on her own
dress. Her mice-servants step in and appropriate discarded items to use
in Cinderella’s costume, a sort of “thrifting” that enables them to put
together the whole look.142 The mice undertake their task with their
working song, the female mice singing that the men should let the women
take care of the sewing. The male mice cut the fabric, however, thus actu-
ally reproducing the traditional gender division between cutting/tailor-
ing and sewing that has dominated for centuries. Nonetheless, despite
the efforts of the mice, Cinderella’s stepfamily rip the dress to shreds and
she requires a fairy godmother to whip up a new and stunning gown in
the contemporary New Look style, made famous by Dior, using reckless
lashings of sparkling magic rather than skilled thrift. Dior himself acknowl-
edged the homage: “in the world today haute couture is one of the last
repositories of the marvellous, and the couturiers the last possessors of the
wand of Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother.”143 Arguably, the couturier always
was in control of the wand, the godmother simply the commissioner of
the magic. According to Elizabeth Wilson, the New Look brought “a full-
blown romantic nostalgia into the austerity of the post-war world;”144
thus, a response to the make-do-and-mend ethic that had predominated,
reviving a golden age of fashion excess with its crinolines, wasp waists, and
extravagant lengths of fabric. Cinderella effectively led fashion once more
by simply bringing back the sartorial spectacle of the past.
Nine years later, dress making was still a central narrative feature in
Disney animation, though it shared its place with other domestic tasks
including cake-baking. The fairy godmothers, keeping Briar Rose under
wraps in Sleeping Beauty, cannot use magic and their attempts to make
their charge a dress result in a disastrous, ill-informed effort that no
number of bows or ruffles can improve or disguise. The fairies, notably,
are not supplied with a pattern and apparently have no clue as to dress
construction. They resort to magic and it is their battle over whether
the dress should be pink or blue, magically transforming the hue as they
argue, that betrays Rose.
Advertising through the mid-twentieth century quickly took advan-
tage of the fairy-tale narrative, promoting products for DIY Cinderellas.
Eileen Margerum claims “the sewing needle as magic wand” in the title
of her essay on sewing lesson advertising in teen magazines. She makes
the point that sewing clothing had become a “make do” measure in an
era in which affordable, ready-made clothing was available. Teenage girls,
with their restricted income, became the attractive market for home sew-
ing tools and advice. Margerum highlights the Singer Sewing Centre
campaigns in magazines such as Seventeen and Modern Miss: “the cam-
paign adopted an underlying motif that lasted for more than two dec-
ades: the Cinderella story.”145 She argues that the Cinderella in the
adverts is looking out for herself: “She is Cinderella the spendthrift but,
in 1946 America, having and spending money was itself the stuff of fairy
tales.”146 Like Enid in Needlework, the hero is able to sew her own new
clothes to carry her through the social whirl. Margerum suggests the
overt message was that, in sewing her own clothes, a girl could catch a
man and live happily ever after.147 However, although the denouement
is consistent in terms of heterosexual marriage and patriarchal gender
relations—and there was pressure at the time for women to return to a
domestic role—it is notable that the teenagers are encouraged to take
their economic situation seriously, to be resourceful, to enjoy an active
social life, and also to proffer and take advice. Just as Enid advises her
co-workers on her “secret,” the teenage girls offer each other and their
female readers their sewing and fashion “secrets.” An advertising strat-
egy, certainly, but one that encourages Cinderellas to communicate with
each other. Indeed, the adverts play to the democratisation of fashion
suggested earlier by Walsh.
As more women were able to sew their own fashions, the strict
social demarcation evident in early modern tales began to collapse, for,
as Gordon says, sewing “could challenge notions of correct appear-
ances.”148 Sewing could further become, too, a discourse through which
women could connect across generations. Cheryl Buckley reiterates the
broader relation of clothing to identity and memory in saying that “dress
and dressmaking are cultural sites where identity, place and memory fig-
ure prominently.”149 Sewing, Buckley proposes, provides an opportunity
where “women learn and teach each other skills which form their femi-
nine identities.”150 While domestic sewing did continue in the following
decades, needles and pins didn’t fully reappear in Disney features till the
twenty-first century. However, when they did reappear, sewing became
something of a metaphor for weaving and repairing the relationships
between fairy tale’s female protagonists. Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M.
Brush, for example, reflect “the new domesticity does not transform old
into new, it reweaves the old itself ”151 and, with that, I would add, the
problematic, old relations between women. It re-weaves itself precisely
because the ability to sew came under feminist renegotiation of the con-
struction of the feminine domestic sphere.
Addressing sewing in scholarship is fraught. Jessica Bain, for example,
notes there is a “historically problematic relationship between domestic
cultures and feminism,” adding that “sewing has failed to elicit the same
level of scholarly interest as other craft revivals.”152 As Disney moved into
the twenty-first century, it was increasingly negotiating feminist issues and
expectations in its features, particularly around its female protagonists.
Enchanted (2007) cheerfully references Disney’s golden age of animation
and its problematic, passive princesses who, many argued, sought only
romantic satisfaction. However, the nostalgic play with the past golden
age returned the narrative lens to sewing, too. Giselle is established as an
excellent seamstress early in the film when she makes a new dress from
the curtains, a tongue-in-cheek reference to The Sound of Music (1965)
scene in which the young nun uses the curtains to sew play-clothes for her
new charges. Appearing in her new dress, Giselle proudly declares that she
made it herself. It is Enchanted’s happily ever after, however, that is nota-
ble for its celebration of Giselle’s skill with needle and thread. The final
scenes show Giselle running her own fashion business, aided by her rats
and pigeons who, like her ancestor Cinderella’s mice, are now assistant
modistes. The name “Andalasia Fashions” invokes the unique relationship
of fashion to the fairy-tale realm: this is a business that makes and sells
“princess dresses” for young girls. It is clear that these are not the kind of
commercial Disney costumes sold around the world. These are the kind
of culturally and historically indeterminate, puffy-sleeved, full-skirted con-
coctions that have become associated with the concept of the fairy-tale
princess, particularly through Disney animation, but which are virtually
indistinguishable from girls’ party dresses, themselves endlessly and nos-
talgically evolving from the late nineteenth-century dresses girls wore on
special occasions. Indeed, it could be argued that the “princess dress” is
simply a contemporary term for the old-fashioned party dress, both styles
emerging to allow younger girls to create their own fashion spectacles
upon the public stage. The dresses provide the girls with a certain shared
social visibility and fellowship.
Giselle’s business is not merely an act of financial independence, but
a way to hand down to a new generation of young girls the sartorial
power of a party dress—and the power to make it. Linda Pershing and
Lisa Gablehouse are among those who question the “faux feminism”153
of Enchanted, where Giselle’s dressmaking business “ensur[es] the per-
petuation of princess culture by the next generation of consumers,”154
while Yvonne Tasker claims the film is postfeminist, rather than simply
faux, where her “work is not only reconciled with domesticity, but it
speaks to the pleasure of consuming fantasy femininity and the money
to be made from such fantasies.”155 These analyses tend to focus upon
the consumerism implied in Andalasia Fashions, possibly drawing on a
reading of the wider Disney organisation itself, ignoring that, while
this is a business selling dresses, the work of making the dresses is priv-
ileged as spectacle, the girls dancing among the rolls of tulle and satin
and cutting tables, rather than simply purchasing the finished product.
The workroom is visible: it is the shop front. The business becomes an

extension of Giselle’s own sewing skills and her ability to readily con-
jure fairy-tale fashion. The femininity implicit in Giselle’s business is not
irreconcilable with feminism for, over the centuries, sewing has always
provided women with a means of earning an income and a method of
shaping fashion.
Disney’s The Princess and the Frog features an actual princess devotee
able to commission her princess dresses personally. Charlotte La Bouff
is ostensibly a white, wealthy, spoiled brat of the American South, her
devoted father buying her whatever she desires. What she desires are the
accoutrements of a princess in the hopes that she can become a princess.
These accoutrements speak volumes about the conceptualisation of con-
temporary princesshood and its heightened femininity. Her bedroom is
pink, as are her clothes, including the collection of princess dresses. She
has an accumulation of dolls and bears wearing tiaras. She, of course,
enjoys fairy tales. The feature’s actual princess, however, is Tiana,
Disney’s first animated black princess.156 Tiana’s mother, Eudora, is
employed to sew the pink princess dresses for Charlotte. Disney recog-
nises the “class, race and gender hierarchies”157 that sewing has exploited
through the centuries, juxtaposing the working life of the dressmaker
with the privilege of her client. Sarah E. Turner points out that “this
princess, is something new and that Disney is working to de-stabilize or
at least question their own princess status quo.”158 In part, Disney does
this by recalling its traditions of dressmaking, but now making visible the
all too often unacknowledged seamstresses who labour on the array of
princess dresses. As Eudora tells a fairy tale while working, the lives and
wishes of the two girls, Charlotte and Tiana, are interwoven.
It is the relationship between generations, between mother and
daughter, that are re-woven and embodied in Brave (2012), the first
Pixar film featuring a lead female. Merida is a medieval, Scottish princess
who rejects the restrictions of her traditional role. Her rejection is aimed
primarily at her mother, Queen Elinor. Their conflict is exemplified by
Merida’s skill with bow and arrow, which breaks with traditional femi-
nine attributes, and Elinor’s skill in tapestry, which is, of course, indic-
ative of traditional feminine virtue. Gordon’s suggestion that “[s]ewing
continued to represent traditional ideas about women and the home, but
[…] also offered a tool for critiquing those older patterns”159 comes into
play in the relationship between mother and daughter. When Merida
rejects Elinor’s plans for her marriage and takes up a sword to slash
Elinor’s tapestry, the action is symbolically loaded. The act of destruc-

tion causes a rent in her family by ripping apart her mother’s stitches.
Merida then inadvertently, with a spell, turns Elinor herself into a bear.
The tale, however, does redeem feminine needlework. The witch
advises that the spell can be broken if the torn relationship is mended.
Merida has to take up the needle to repair her relationship with her
mother, thus re-evaluating her mother’s domestic and sovereign roles.
However, her skill with a needle, unlike her skill with a sword or bow, is
rudimentary. While it is not the literal mending of the tapestry that brings
mother and daughter back together, the importance of Merida gain-
ing a practical, emotional, and intellectual understanding of traditional
feminine skill as a strength is a more understated message in the tale.
Although computer animation was invented to digitally create the texture
of textiles, the tale subtly asserts female textile skills alongside the weap-
ons of hunting and war. Merida may be iconified with her bow and arrow,
but it is ultimately her taking up of the needle that sets right the domestic
gender wars in her family and, more broadly, her kingdom.
Re-weaving the Conclusion

In re-working and re-weaving the rent tapestry, Merida recognises that
her mother’s role is gender conservative, but that she can pick up the
threads of their dissent to re-weave a stronger future for women. Over
the centuries, fairy-tale heroes have learned various ways to ply their
needles and spindles. Beneath fashionable spectacle, the needle and
thread is always at work defining female labour, virtue, guile and, as we
move through the twenty-first century, relationships. In Chapter 5, we
embrace the fetish. Cinderella’s shoes are iconic and, yet, they are a slip-
pery sartorial statement. Zezolla loses a chianiello; Finette Cendron, a
red velvet mule embroidered in pearls; Cinderella, a glass slipper. In fairy
tales, shoes and other accessories are fetishised and become objects of
both desire and damnation.
Notes
1.
Mary C. Beaudry, for instance, reflects upon how archaeology, until
recently, paid little attention to such tools as they were associated with
female labour and deemed less informative than other artefacts. Mary
C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 2.
3. E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in
Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2002), 90.
4. Gloria Thomas Gilmore, “Marie de France’s Bisclavret: What the
Werewolf Will and Will Not Wear,” in Encountering Medieval Textiles
and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images, ed. Désirée G. Koslin and Janet E.
Snyder (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 67.
5. Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old
Regime France 1675–1791 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 25.
6. Crowston, Fabricating Women, 25.
7. The Brothers Grimm stipulate that they are young maidens or virgins,
a comment that likely indicates the prevalence of single women in
employment as seamstresses and the erotic aspect to their employment
that will be accounted for in this chapter.
8. Edith Nesbit, The Old Nursery Stories, reprint (London: Humphrey
Milford; Oxford University Press, 1930), 7.
9. The novelty song was written by Al Hoffman, Mack David, and Jerry
Livingston in 1949.
10. Maria Tatar, Off with Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of
Childhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 138.
Press, 2006), 104.
12. Pat Earnshaw, A Dictionary of Lace, reprint of 2nd ed. (Toronto: Dover,
1999), 180.
13. Nesbit, The Old Nursery Stories, 142.
14. Beaudry, Findings, 51.
15. Mohammad Wahid Mizra, The Life and Works of Amir Khusrau
(Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1935), 130, Internet Archive.
16. The three dresses requested by the Brothers Grimm’s All Fur are also of
so fine a quality that they can all be folded and packed into a nutshell,
making them readily transportable. Like the White Cat’s cloth, they
also capture wonders in their weave. The Brothers Grimm’s “Der Eisen-
Ofen” (The Iron Stove, 1815) from Dorothea Viehmann, too, features
a princess who has been given, among other items, three nuts. She bites
one open and finds a royal gown. A rival princess seeks to buy the dress
for her wedding to the prince. Each nut reveals a more splendid gown,
the final gown lined in gold. The motif of the nut containing a won-
drous textile was popular.
18. Such tests of the fineness of cloth are historically widespread. James

Taylor notes of the muslin garments of Dhaka, too, that they are “wove
to a degree of fineness that they may be drawn through a ring of mid-
dling size.” Sketch of the Topography & Statistics of Dacca (Calcutta: G.
H. Huttmann, Military Orphan Press, 1840), 163, Internet Archive.
Nineteenth-century Shetland shawls were also known as wedding ring
shawls owing to their fineness and their ability to be drawn through a
ring.
19. Mary M. Brooks, English Embroideries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries: In the Collection of the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford:
Ashmolean Museum; London: Jonathan Horne Publications, 2004),
76.
20. Brooks, English, 7.
21. Brooks, English, 19.
22. Lewis C. Seifert, and Domna C. Stanton, eds. and trans., Enchanted
(Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance
Studies, 2010), 155.
24. Stuard, Gilding, 103.
25. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the
Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
134.
26. Gretchen Schultz and Lewis Seifert, eds. and trans., Fairy Tales for the
Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 148.
27. Schultz and Seifert, Disillusioned, 150.
29. Susanna Clarke, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (London:
Bloomsbury, 2006), 108.
30. Clarke, Ladies of Grace Adieu, 110.
31. The 1812 version of the tale tells the reader that the golden objects are
gifts from her fiancé, who happens to be the king of the castle All Fur
goes to work in. This explains All Fur’s cunning in providing the king
with clues to her presence.
32. The ring appears in earlier variations of the tale such as Perrault’s
“Donkey Skin,” but the other objects do not.
33. Charm bracelets did become increasingly popular in the nineteenth cen-
tury. Incidentally, silver thimbles, another popular sewing tool, are com-
mon as both Monopoly tokens and additions to the plum pudding.
34. There’s a rather more flavoursome reference to making tools attractive
when Basile’s Parmetella must enlist the help of seven women using
human-bone spindles. Parmetella is to replace the bones with honey-

dipped spindles, figs attached. As the women lick their fingers to work
the fibre, they experience the sweetness and thus sweetened, the women
aid her.
35. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance, 107.
38. Anthony Hamilton, Fairy Tales and Romances, trans. M. Lewis,
H. T. Ryde, and C. Kenney (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), 27.
39. Hamilton, Fairy Tales, 48.
Press of Kentucky, 1994), 51–71.
44. Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 2nd ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 119–120.
47. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women in the Crafts in Sixteenth-Century
Lyon,” in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A.
Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 179.
48. Davis, “Women,” 179.
49. Elizabeth A. Campbell, Fortune’s Wheel: Dickens and the Iconography of
Women’s Time (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 187.
50. Davis, “Women,” 180.
51. People do still spin today, but it is viewed largely as a hobby, aligning
contemporary spinners with the fairy-tale queens and princesses of yore.
52. The Brothers Grimm had a version from anonymous oral sources that
began with the girl spinning flax that turned into gold, a magical occur-
rence that, for some odd reason, made her sorrowful. Jacob Grimm and
Wilhelm Grimm, The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm:
The Complete First Edition, trans. and ed. Jack Zipes (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2014), 495–496. While Zipes suggests that
the ability to spin yarn would make the girl a better wife, as she can earn
her living, the tale is still quite bizarre in its dismissal of the gold prod-
uct of her spinning (Zipes, Myth, 57).
Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 2001), 625.
54. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance, 107–109.
55. Laura Valentine, ed., The Old, Old Fairy Tales (New York: A. L. Burt,
1902), 149.
56. Valentine, Old Old, 148.
59. Zipes, Great Fairy Tale Tradition, 595.
60. Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, D’Aulnoy’s Fairy Tales, ed. and trans.
J. R. Planché (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1888), 251.
63. The variance in the spelling is consistent with the show’s official spelling.
64. Once Upon a Time, “Desperate Souls,” dir. Michael Waxman, writ. Jane
Espenson, 2012, iTunes. As the series progresses, this initial background
is further complicated. As backstories expand during the series, this anal-
ysis focuses only on the initial Rumplestiltskin story of the first season.
65. Once Upon a Time, “Skin Deep,” dir. Milan Cheylov, writ. Jane
Espenson, 2012, iTunes.
66. James Robinson Planché, The Extravaganzas of J. R. Planché, Esq.,
(Somerset Herald) 1825–1871: Vol. IV, ed. T. F. Dillon Croker and
Stephen Tucker (London: Samuel French, 1879), 37.
67. Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in
Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 52.
68. It is tempting to equate the burning of spinning wheels, producing a
history of feminine industry, with the burning of books, containing the
history of masculine industry.
69. Clyde Geronimi, dir., Sleeping Beauty, 1959. iTunes.
70. Yvonne Verdier, “Grands-mères, si vous saviez… Le Petit Chaperon
Rouge dans la tradition orale,” Cahiers de litterature orale 4 (1978): 25.
71. Verdier, “Grands-mères,” 26.
72. Emily L. Lowes appears to reference this tale in describing a four-inch
bag worked in golden thread, “fit for the Princess Golden Locks of our
fairy tales,” describing such objects as “each a marvel of minute hand-
icraft.” Chats on Old Lace & Needlework (London: T. Fisher Unwin,
1908), 261. Her reference to this detailed, miniature work and the fairy
tale evinces the evident relationship between fairy tales and women’s
needlework.
73. D’Aulnoy, D’Aulnoy’s, 19. This is also stated in The Female’s
Encyclopaedia of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge; Comprising Every
Branch of Domestic Economy (London: W. J. Sears, 1830), Hathi Trust
Digital Library, 401.
74. Jack Zipes, ed. and trans., Beauties, Beasts and Enchantment: Classic
French Fairy Tales (New York: NAL Books, 1989), 358.
75. Henry Morley, Oberon’s Horn: A Book of Fairy Tales (London: Cassell,
Petter, Glapin & Co., 1861), 126.
76. Morley, Oberon’s, 131.
77. Elizabeth Frances Dagley, Fairy Favours, and Other Tales (London:
William Cole, 1825), 77, Internet Archive.
78. Dagley, Fairy Favours, 85.
84. Frances Freeling Broderip, The Daisy and Her Friends: Simple Tales and
Stories for Children (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1869), 60.
85. Broderip, Daisy, 61.
90. Mary De Morgan, On a Pincushion and Other Fairy Tales (London:
Seeley, Jackson, & Halliday, 1877), 2, Internet Archive.
92. Olga D. A. Ernst, Fairy Tales from the Land of the Wattle (Melbourne:
McCarron, Bird & Co., 1904), 64–65.
93. Ernst, Wattle, 66.
94. Jane Eayre Fryer, The Mary Frances Sewing Book or Adventures Among
the Thimble People (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co., 1913), vi.
95. Fryer, Mary Frances, 101.
96. There is a nineteenth-century workbox of the same design in existence:
this is either that workbox or a replication of it.
97. Basile, Tale of Tales, 83. There is variance in the translation of the
sequence of stitches from the original, but the skills taught do appear to
include forms of openwork, chain stitch, and fringes.
98. Giambattista Basile, The Pentamerone, or The Story of Stories, Fun for the
Little Ones, 2nd ed., trans. John Edward Taylor (London: David Bogue,
1850), 62.
99. There is no indication of the father’s or fathers’ fates or identities.
100. Maria Tatar, ed., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1999), 236.
101. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the
Feminine (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 11.
102. Parker, Subversive, 11.
103. Beaudry, Findings, 5.
104. Jennifer Michelle Jones, Sexing La Mode: Gender, Fashion and
Commercial Culture in Old Regime France (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 77.
107. Relationships between royalty and commerce are not unusual in the
tales. However majestic the treasury, it still required filling. Anthony
Hamilton’s Moussellina (“The Four Facardins”) is the daughter of
a king whose wealth and fame rests upon the kingdom’s production
of toile peinte, a painted linen that was used for hangings. Anthony
Hamilton, Oeuvres du comte Antoine Hamilton: Les Quatre Facardins,
Conte (London, 1776), 214. Later translators gave this as “chintz,” at
the time of Hamilton’s writing a cotton fabric from India that Louis
XIV had actually ruled illegal to import. Toile peinte or indienne was fre-
quently used for chintz. Hamilton, Fairy Tales, 88.
108. For many centuries, single women who earned their living were fre-
quently viewed as sexually permissive and even, at times, treated as
prostitutes.
110. Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing, Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales (London:
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1882), 119.
111. Ewing, Old-Fashioned, 120.
112. Ewing, Old-Fashioned, 124.
113. Wilhelm Hauff, Hauff’s Tales, trans. Sybil Thesiger (London: James
Finch & Co., 1905), 90.
114. Hauff, Hauff’s, 91.
117. They are, in a sense, related to the mice in Disney’s Cinderella (1950,
2015).
118. Linda Lear, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (London: Allen Lane,
2007), 157.
119. Beatrix Potter, The Tailor of Gloucester (New York: Frederick Warne &
Co., ca. 1903), 9. The V&A has identified the mayor’s waistcoat as one
of cream satin and coloured silk made in Gloucester in 1770 (Museum
no. 652A-1898). “Beatrix Potter: The Tailor of Gloucester.” V&A web-
site. http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/beatrix-potter-tailor-
of-gloucester/.
120. Jane Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” in Cinderella: A Casebook, ed. Alan

Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 296.
121. Yolen, America’s, 297.
122. Sarah A. Gordon, “‘Boundless Possibilities’: Home Sewing and the
Meanings of Women’s Domestic Work in the United States, 1890–
1930,” Journal of Women’s History 16, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 68, Project
MUSE.
123. Abigail Heiniger, Jane Eyre’s Fairytale Legacy at Home and Abroad:
Constructions and Deconstructions of National Identity (London:
Routledge, 2016), 83.
124. Carol Hanbery MacKay, Creative Negativity: Four Victorian
Exemplars of the Female Quest (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001), 65.
125. Louisa May Alcott, “A Modern Cinderella: Or, The Little Old Shoe.”
The Atlantic, October, 1860. Atlantic online archive.
126. Alcott, “Modern Cinderella.”
129. Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Making of a Marchioness (London:
Smith, Elder, & Co., 1901), 78.
130. Burnett, Marchioness, 1–2.
131. Alison Lurie, “The Making of a Marchioness,” in In the Garden: Essays
in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett, ed. Angelica Shirley Carpenter
(Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 79.
132. Kathryn Holmes, “Cinderella’s Confession: The Story of How a
Shabby Little Stranger Became the Best Dressed Girl in Our Town,”
Needlecraft, January 13, 1919.
133. Holmes, “Cinderella’s Confession,” 13.
135. Heterosexual marriage continues as the denouement to the Cinderella
tale but, as in early versions, marriage is not an overt goal for the hero.
It is a sign of her achievement, however, since her marriage almost
always increases her social status.
137. Gordon, “Boundless,” 70.
138. David Whitley, The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (Aldershot, UK:
Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 36.
139. The film does tend to play fast and loose with historical dress, since
Cinderella as a child is dressed in an 1860s hooped skirt.
140. Margaret Walsh, “The Democratization of Fashion: The Emergence of
the Women’s Dress Pattern Industry,” The Journal of American History
66, no. 2 (September 1979), 300, JSTOR.
141. Walsh, “Democratization,” 301.

142. Uruguayan designer Gabriela Perezutti was herself inspired by the scene
to enter the fashion industry, remarking “I saw the Disney Cinderella
movie around six years old. After watching the scene of the birds and
mice putting together a dress for Cinderella, I ran to my grandmother’s
closet and started cutting her lace silk sleeping gowns to make the same
dress.” Council of Fashion Designers of America, The Pursuit of Style:
Advice and Musings from America’s Top Fashion Designers (New York:
Abrams, 2014), 68.
143. Christian Dior, Dior by Dior: The Autobiography of Christian Dior, trans.
Antonia Fraser. (London: V&A Publishing, 2012), 86. iBook.
144. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, rev. ed.
145. Eileen Margerum, “The Sewing Needle as Magic Wand: Selling Sewing
Lessons to American Girls After the Second World War,” in The Culture
of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara
Burman (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 198.
146. Margerum, “Sewing Needle,” 199.
147. Margerum, “Sewing Needle,” 203.
149. Cheryl Buckley, “On the Margins: Theorizing the History and
Significance of Making and Designing Clothes at Home,” in The
Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking,
ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 58.
150. Buckley, “Margins,” 59.
151. Jack Z. Bratich and Heidi M. Brush, “Fabricating Activism: Craft-Work,
Popular Culture, Gender,” Utopian Studies 22, no. 2 (2011): 238,
Project MUSE.
152. Jessica Bain, “‘Darn right I’m a Feminist…Sew What?’ The Politics
of Contemporary Home Dressmaking: Sewing, Slow Fashion and
Feminism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 54 (2016): 57.
Elsevier.
153. Linda Pershing with Lisa Gablehouse, “Disney’s Enchanted: Patriarchal
Backlash and Nostalgia in a Fairy Tale Film,” in Fairy Tale Films: Visions
of Ambiguity, ed. Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix (Logan:
Utah State University Press, 2010), 154.
154. Pershing with Gablehouse, “Disney’s,” 152.
155. Yvonne Tasker, “Enchanted (2007) by Postfeminism: Gender, Irony, and
the New Romantic Comedy,” in Feminism at the Movies: Understanding
Gender in Contemporary Popular Cinema, ed. Hilary Radner and
Rebecca Stringer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 75.
156. Nala and Aida from the Broadway productions of The Lion King (1997)
and Aida (2000) are both princess roles originated by Heather Headley,
a black actor. Broadway appears to have beaten Disney Animation to the
punch here.
158. Sarah E. Turner, “Blackness, Bayous and Gumbo: Encoding and
Decoding Race in a Colorblind World,” in Diversity in Disney Films:
Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability,
ed. Johnson Cheu (Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 2013), 87.
CHAPTER 5
Shoes, the Sole of Fairy Tale: Stepping

Between Desire and Damnation
A shoe is an object of fashion, and a method of conveyance and

transformation. In fairy tales, it is very often a protagonist in its own
right, acting independent of its wearer or even compelling their move-
ments. Yet, it retains the physical imprint of its wearer in ways that other
apparel does not. It is a fortune-making shoe for some, a vehicle of
doom and torture for others. It navigates the space between the fairy-
tale protagonist and the road they travel. Shoes are not especially prolific
motifs in fairy tale, yet each shoe is remarkable and tales with fascinat-
ing shoes are among the most popular: hence more than one pair of
red shoes upon the fairy-tale racks, a puss who finds his voice and asks
for boots, and, of course, a woman who loses her little slipper fleeing a
prince. The shoe is not the heart of the fairy tale, but it is the foundation
for many of fairy tale’s most cunning and inspiring heroes.
The plethora of shoes that exists in fairy tale is dispersed according to
the operations of extravagance and poverty, which, in turn, influence dis-
courses of desire and damnation. D’Aulnoy’s “Princess Rosette” provides
a brief, but eloquent, example of the extravagance. When the queen
grows melancholy over the prediction that her daughter will be the death
of her sons, she blames her sadness on a number of things, including
her seemingly trivial loss of a green satin slipper in the river. To cheer
her up, the king puts all the shoemakers to work and supplies her with
ten thousand green slippers. Such excess is hyperbole, but a queen did
have to buy a lot of shoes to maintain appearances—although even Marie
Antoinette, known for her sartorial excesses, did not quite manage to

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4_5
acquire ten thousand shoes. Such shoes in fairy tales are objects of mag-
nificent excess, desire, and fit. Early modern tales, in particular, aspired
to perfectly fitting shoes, the ultimate luxury. The comfort of such shoes
is only part of the story. Luxurious shoes sent messages about status and
sexual proclivity. Wooden shoes were all very well for workers and the
poor and despised, but to make one’s way in life, one needed a good fit
and a good heel.
Shoes and economic autonomy are inexorably linked. Terry Pratchett,
with his firm understanding of how fairy tales operate, places the
“‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness” in the mind of Sam Vimes
in Men at Arms (1993).1 It is an insightful metaphor for inequality artic-
ulated through shoe-wear: “A man who could afford fifty dollars had a
pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while
a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hun-
dred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”2
Perrault includes three pairs of significant boots in his tale collection.
“Le Maître chat; ou, Le Chat botté” (The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots)
is the most famous tale of boots, in which a likely puss elevates a peasant
to royal rank through swindling kings and ogres. Perrault revisits ogres
and boots in “Le Petit Poucet” (Little Thumbling). The tale has much in
common with “Puss in Boots” and d’Aulnoy’s tale of Finette Cendron
but, where the latter’s cunning, eavesdropping hero is a princess, Little
Thumbling is the son of poor woodcutters. He steals the ogre’s seven-
league boots and these fit him perfectly, as the boots magically—and
flexibly—adjust to the shape of their wearer. However, these, and the
seven-league boots worn by the dwarf in Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty,”
are more practical than fashionable and exist to account for the crossing
of vast territories in the tales. Little Thumbling is even able to earn an
income as an informant and courier from the use of his boots. Placing
well-fitting, practical boots upon the feet of his poorest heroes, Perrault
provides them with the sartorial means to make money. Money and good
shoes are the desirable objects that can raise one in social standing; pov-
erty and cheap shoes merely sustain a miserable situation. Of course, in
fairy tales, it is usually men who are awarded the practical boots: women
rely on shoes with rather more sartorial flair and fashion.
As tales about shoes and princesses have evolved, the shoe has
become a factory-produced consumer item and access to new, well-fitted
shoes, in particular, has become easier for heroes on the make. In Stella
Gibbons’ Cinderella tale, Nightingale Wood (1938), the penniless Viola
5 SHOES, THE SOLE OF FAIRY TALE: STEPPING BETWEEN DESIRE … 181
contemplates an upcoming ball, noticing that her silver slippers are “tar-
nished, stubbed at the toes, a button missing.”3 She doesn’t worry, how-
ever, for a new pair costs under a pound. As even gold and silver slippers
became readily available and comparatively cheap, all women could
become Cinderellas at least for an evening. Nonetheless, the bright sil-
ver easily corrodes and wears off, the shoes quickly falling into disrepair.
Something rather more well-made is required.
At the designer end of the spectrum, Cinderella continues to be an
inspiration. Salvatore Ferragamo, in particular, draws upon Cinderella
and other fairy tales in constructing the label’s mythology. Ferragamo’s
autobiography is titled Shoemaker of Dreams (1957) and the Museo 
Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence has run exhibitions that include Cinderella:
the shoe rediscovered (1998), showcasing the shoe Ferragamo designed for
Ever After (1998), and The Amazing Shoemaker (2013–2014), featuring
a range of fairy-tale exhibits and films. Stefania Ricci’s introduction to
the exhibition book, The Amazing Shoemaker: Fairy Tales and Legends
About Shoes and Shoemakers (2013), turns Ferragamo’s life itself into
fairy tale, beginning with how the son of poor Italian farmers made
white shoes for his sister’s confirmation when the family could neither
afford, nor borrow, white shoes.4 Ricci notes that soon Ferragamo, hav-
ing travelled to the United States, “found himself making shoes for the
feet of the most beautiful women of the world – adorable, whimsical,
mysterious and moody: the fairies and sorceresses of the twentieth cen-
tury.”5 These were Hollywood’s elite actors. Among Ferragamo’s famous
shoes, for instance, are the rainbow and gold platforms made in 1938 for
Judy Garland, inspired by her role as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz
(1939).6 Hollywood had usurped the position of European aristocracy in
the wearing of fairy-tale footwear.
The relationship between Cinderella and designer footwear has
evolved through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The design
houses of Jimmy Choo, Paul Andrew, Alexandre Birman, Manolo
Blahnik, Rene Caovilla, Nicholas Kirkwood, Christian Louboutin,
Charlotte Olympia, Jerome C. Rousseau, Stuart Weitzman, and,
of course, Salvatore Ferragamo, worked with Disney to reimagine
Cinderella’s slipper as part of the promotion for Cinderella (2015).7
Swarovski crystals and transparent plastic are used by Ferragamo to cre-
ate the scintillating effect of glass in a wearable heel. The shoes conse-
quently went on sale to the general public, albeit with a high price tag.
A Cinderella-esque fascination with designer shoes drives the narrative
of HBO’s Sex and the City (1998–2004), narrated by Carrie Bradshaw

(Sarah Jessica Parker), a shoe-obsessed, working writer in Manhattan.
In the 2008 film, her marriage becomes the focus. Her prince, Mr. Big,
proposes on one knee not with a ring, but with a Manolo Blahnik blue
satin pump. As for many twentieth-century Cinderellas, the shoe is a
pump. The silver and crystal buckle on the toe is a nod to Cinderella’s
past in the courts of kings, the satin recalling the Brothers Grimm’s frail
dancing shoes, but these are shoes that Carrie herself has aspired to and
earned. Big simply fits the shoe on Carrie’s foot to “close the deal.”8
The emphasis has shifted to the very merchant economy from which
Cinderella’s slipper first emerged in European literature and Cinderella,
in the form of Carrie Bradshaw, is an ideal luxury consumer.
From the luxury slipper to the iron shoe, this chapter will follow the
work of shoemakers, fairy godmothers, and witches in fairy tale. Shoes
that inspire desire will be juxtaposed with shoes that are as likely to
damn, mutilate, or even kill their wearer. In some cases, shoes can inspire
desire and damnation simultaneously. The material and construction of
shoes will shed fresh light upon the remarkable item of apparel that is lit-
erally all that stands between the fairy-tale hero and their path.
In Cinderella’s Shoes: The Origins of Sexy

Early in ABC’s Once Upon A Time, Rumplestiltskin detonates
Cinderella’s fairy godmother, grabs her wand, and does a quick deal with
Cinderella, providing her a gown, an elaborate coiffure and glass slip-
pers for the ball. Cinderella queries the latter. “Every story needs a mem-
orable detail,” he responds.9 Fashion is thus subordinated to the story,
becoming the iconic detail; yet, footwear fashions have, in fact, always
dictated Cinderella’s next step.
The shoe is the memorable and contentious detail of the Cinderella
story.10 It can be viewed as both constricting, a patriarchal vehicle of
repression that binds and objectifies, and liberating, carrying the hero
out of ignominy and into renown. Riello and McNeil propose the lat-
ter in observing that “[t]he inferior social and cultural position imposed
on women for centuries is refused by engaging with the acquisition of
one of the most important symbols of movement, richness and worth:
shoes.”11 The shoe is the motif indelibly identified with Cinderella and
her rise to royal fame and wealth. The shoes allow to her to dance with
the prince at the ball and yet at least one shoe spends much of the story
separated from her foot. It is a motif that changes through the stories,
but rarely does anyone explicitly address how shifting fashions in foot-
wear have influenced Cinderella tales.12
The shoe actually has a will of its own when the tale first steps into
the European, literary tradition in “The Cinderella Cat” and, as soon as
it is in proximity to Zezolla’s foot, it throws itself onto that foot. Like
mythical swords in stone that yield to the hand of the one true king, the
shoe actively identifies the one true love and queen. Particularly in early
modern tales, Cinderella reclaims her birth right by reclaiming her shoe.
Yet, it is a shoe that has a propensity to fall off—it is designed to be easily
slipped on and off.
Unlike a sword that must be drawn from stone, Cinderella’s foot must
be inserted into the slipper to make her claim. The shoe often becomes
a convenient genital metaphor—too convenient, really. William A. Rossi
in 1977, for example, asserted that “[f]or ten thousand years or more
the shoe has been worn as a sex symbol and an article of sex communi-
cation because it is the housing for the erotic foot.”13 Rossi strings his
theory into a chapter memorably entitled, “Cinderella Was a Sexpot”:
the analysis is, however, misogynist and lacks rigour. Shoes do have a
history of symbolising sexuality, however, and the obsession of princes
and kings with Cinderella’s shoe is not difficult to penetrate. Even the
myth that the glass slipper was originally fur remains persistent in part
because of sex, Kathryn A. Hoffmann describing the spurious fur pre-
decessor as “the popular dirty little secret of Cinderella.”14 The shoe’s
loss, likewise, may even be read as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the
hero’s sexual proclivity, the shoe test leading directly to the wedding.
Shoes are commonly linked to wedding rituals: in the tale “Patty and
her Pitcher; or, Kindness of Heart,” the hero marries a prince and, after
their church wedding, old shoes are tossed at them for good luck.15
Sue Blundell observes classical paintings of shoes in which “[d]iscarded
boots or shoes imply release from normal constraints,”16 including sex-
ual constraints. She further notes the practice of the ancient Greek bride
wearing nymphides, new sandals, to the home of her new husband.17
Desmond Morris records, with appropriate fairy tale allusion, that “[a]
n old French tradition demands that the bride should keep her wedding
shoes and never give them away if she wants to live happily ever after
with her husband.”18 Wilfred Webb notes a 1291 law in Hamburg where
“the bridegroom should give his bride a pair of shoes,”19 also noting
many traditional beliefs that shoes be thrown after a person departing
on a journey for luck, underlying the practice of tying shoes to the

honeymoon vehicle. Within the nexus of superstition, ritual, and sym-
bolism, the shoe becomes saturated with meaning, but to draw back and
view the shoe as described, as an object of fashion, the socially complex
constructions of desire, particularly sexual desire, become evident in the
material and shape of the fairy-tale shoe.
The shoe retains the essence of the hero’s physical desirability—a
correlation of physicality and materiality—something she herself may
claim and utilise, or something that may be offered and ascribed to her.
Benstock and Ferriss posit that “[t]he tension between the foot and shoe
is the origin of shoe fetishism” and that “the female shoe can serve as a
tangible reminder of an absent female wearer or substitute for the body
itself.”20 Thus, the shoe stands for Cinderella in her absence. The shoe
retains her physicality within the material: the shape of her foot, the sug-
gestion of the body that flows into the shoe.21
Analysis of the Cinderella tale often shifts attention from the shoe
to the body, for which it acts metonymically. The smallness of the shoe
thus stands in for the smallness of the foot, highlighting an attribute
that has long been associated with beauty. The smallness of the foot is,
in part, a fashionable trick. Semmelhack notes that “[f ]or women, high
heels expressed status but also made the foot appear dainty, an aristo-
cratic ideal articulated by Charles Perrault’s tale Cinderella published in
1695. Wearing high heels gave the impression of a tiny foot by hiding
the greater part of the foot under the skirt and revealing just the enticing
tip of the shoe at the hemline.”22 However, Cinderella’s proportions are
no trick. The shoe test proves that her foot itself is fashionably small, that
she is whom she claims to be.23 The shoe manifests Cinderella herself.
When Cinderella enters the European literary tradition, she does not
precisely lose her shoe. She loses a chianiello, an item of elevated foot-
wear. From the king’s description, her chianiello, was tall, around 37 cm
tall, with a cork sole. His amazing speech regarding the chianiello, ren-
dered as “patten” in Canepa’s translation, compares the shoe to the tri-
pod of a cauldron, the roots of a plant, and so forth, concluding, “You
made the lady who tyrannizes this life a span and a half taller, and you
make this life grow just as much in sweetness.”24 The metaphors used all
emphasise the elevating principle of the chianiello.
Bottigheimer wryly observes that “he rhapsodizes about the
Neopolitan equivalent of serviceable galoshes.”25 However, it is very
likely that Zezolla’s chianiello is decorative.26 Such shoes may also
be called pianelle 27 or chopines, the platform shoes of sometimes

extraordinary height with cork or wooden soles, often associated with
early modern Italian courtesans, although Semmelhack notes “mis-
conceptions that chopines were simply overshoes and that they were
the exclusive footwear of courtesans.”28 Guarini and Burani, nonethe-
less, note that chianielli were worn by courtesans in Naples.29 Indeed,
the height, so remarked upon by the king, would suggest Zezolla’s
footwear raises her nearer the prostitute, Andrea Vianello positing that
the taller pianelle were “an effective means of personal display in pub-
lic squares.”30 It is not a coincidence that the other reference to pub-
lic space compares Zezolla to a prostitute: she is using erotic and very
public sartorial stratagems. Even her predecessor, the Greek Rhodopis,
was, according to Strabo, a courtesan bathing when an eagle steals her
sandal and drops it into the lap of a Pharaoh, who must then search for
the wearer and wed her.31 Rhodopis may even have been wearing plat-
form sandals.32 Such tall chianielli would have required Zezolla to walk
in a stilted manner, hence she actually loses one while fleeing in her car-
riage rather than on foot. The shoes thus had a history of licentiousness
and spectacle, although pianelle were also worn respectably and, in the
seventeenth century, noblewomen did appear to opt for taller pianelle.33
Indeed, Italian women wore their skirts down over their elevated foot-
wear in order to permit a larger canvas for the display of rich fabrics and
embellishments, thereby celebrating their wealth and status.34 The king’s
panegyric is a gesture of baroque humour, though, one that is unapolo-
getically bawdy and that introduces the metonymic role of the lost
footwear to the European literary tradition. Even in the shoe test, the
chianiello itself flies to Zezolla’s foot, the two being part of a whole.
While Basile’s Cinderella wears chianielli, the French Cinderellas are
shod in mules, which usurped chianielli in fashion.35 These shoes main-
tained erotic associations. Perrault’s “pantoufle” and d’Aulnoy’s “mule”
are almost always translated into English as “slipper”: Zipes even chooses
to translate Zezolla’s chianiello as slipper, observing that pattens are no
longer well-known, although, in actuality, pianelle could refer to slip-
pers.36 The Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise (1694) lists mule as
pantoufle and pantoufle as mule, providing an example of its use as an
overshoe.37 DeJean observes that certainly the pantoufle or the mule
worn to the ball would be a mule with a high heel.38 The Slipper and the
Rose (1976) and Ever After (1998) both show Cinderella wearing such a
mule. DeJean describes mules as exceptionally fashionable in Louis XIV’s
court: they were sexy both because of their origins in the bedroom,
and because of their propensity to easily slip off, DeJean observing that
Fragonard’s famous painting “The Swing” (1767), “portrays the lady’s
dainty little pink mule as a tool of seduction” as it is captured soaring
mid-air, having flown from the woman’s foot.39 The latter visual refer-
ence is absorbed into later tales and re-tellings of Cinderella. The Slipper
and the Rose and Disney’s Cinderella (2015) both pose Cinderella on a
garden swing. The painting formed part of the aesthetic inspiration for
Disney’s Tangled (2010) and made a cameo in Frozen (2013), with Anna
passing a painting of herself upon the swing. Just why a painting with
such sexual connotations has become regularly cited in Disney fairy tales
is unclear, but the persistence of citations is a testament to the underly-
ing operations of fashionable desire so expertly articulated by Fragonard.
In Cinderella (2015), the hero even argues with the prince that she really
shouldn’t sit upon the swing, does in fact swing, and in the process loses
her slipper—a portent of subsequent events when she leaves the palace.
When the prince kneels to return the shoe to her foot, necessitating the
pulling back of her skirts, Cinderella is noticeably breathless. The scene
quite clearly captures the eroticism inherent in the lost shoe and its
return to her foot.
Ostensibly evolving from bedroom attire, the mule especially comple-
mented the déshabillé fashion of which Louis XIV’s mistress, Madame
de Montespan, was a leader. This is the Montespan who likely inspired
many of the fashions in Perrault’s Cinderella, in particular. Her adop-
tion of déshabillé was said to conceal her many pregnancies and, in
Henri Gascard’s 1670 portrait, she is shown reclining in déshabillé, her
golden mules kicked off, her pretty feet resting upon a red cushion, pre-
sumably waiting for the king. In L’Héritier’s tale of Finette, her sister,
Nonchalante, is known for always wearing mules, as she’s too lazy to
put on shoes.40 Her easy seduction by a lecherous prince is thus some-
what intimated by her lax approach to footwear. The French Cinderella
herself walks a thin line between aspiring to king’s mistress or queen in
her mules. Her footwear excites sexual desire, but the French Cinderella
translates this desire into sovereignty. She does not strive for the literal
heights achieved by the raunchier Zezolla, notwithstanding her own
reigning achievement. She focuses instead on the fabric of her shoes to
secure royal status.
D’Aulnoy’s tale is grounded in the fashion and wearing of shoes. Shoe
leather maps Finette’s relationship with her fairy godmother: she wears
out the soles of her shoes travelling to the abode of the fairy Merluche.
The wearing out of shoes is a common motif in fairy tales, usually indi-
cating either the great length of the journey undertaken or a curse
imposed upon the unlucky wearer of shoes. Recent tales continue to
revisit the trope. Amal El-Mohtar’s “Seasons of Glass and Iron” (2016)
features a hero who must wear out seven pairs of iron shoes, a painful,
disfiguring process that she abandons for a happier, alternative fairy-
tale ending. In Theodora Goss’s poem, “Seven Shoes” (2017), a witch
promises to give the hero her desire when she wears out seven pairs of
shoes, the poem in fact describing the shoes that are broken and worn
out during the course of her life. For such heroes, the trope is temporal,
an inflection of the steps taken on one’s particular journey. For Finette,
wearing out her shoes is a particularly tangible indication of her convic-
tion in seeking her godmother’s counsel and d’Aulnoy describes her mis-
ery over her ruined feet, providing a palpable sense of the physicality of
the relationship between shoe and foot. The fairy godmother’s gifts pre-
sumably include new, luxurious shoes, but also a fabulous Spanish jennet
(small horse) who can carry her, thus easing the burden upon her foot-
wear. Later, when her sisters first return from the ball, wearing all her
finery, they insist she take off their shoes, which are really her shoes by
right, and tend their feet. Once again, she has reason to viscerally con-
sider the physical relationship between foot and shoe.
Once she discovers a cache of finery to wear to the balls herself,
Finette’s mules of red velvet, embroidered all over in pearls, are not
noted until one is lost.41 Among her fabulous gowns and jewels, they
rate no special mention. As in Zezolla’s wardrobe, they are not remark-
able in themselves until they stand in for the hero. Finette’s mule is not
lost in fleeing a royal lover, however. Finette hasn’t yet met Prince Chéri.
Finette loses her shoe on the way home from the ball and tries to find it
in the dark. D’Aulnoy is particularly detailed in her articulation of how
Finette berates herself for the loss in vain, returning home with one foot
shod and one naked. The practical and material difficulties faced when
a shoe is lost or worn out are a vital ingredient of Finette’s story. Being
properly shod lent one respectability and status, a particularly impor-
tant consideration for a royal personage. Will Bashor notes that Madame
de Noailles was alarmed at seeing Marie Antoinette, having lost a shoe,
“running in plain sight of a common passersby.”42 Suggests Bashor,
“Madame de Noailles prophetically foresaw the downfall of the monar-
chy with the antics of the frolicsome princess.”43 Indeed, tales of Marie
Antoinette losing a shoe fleeing the Tuileries Palace and, again, as she
went to the guillotine still circulate. The example shows just how risky
the loss of a shoe could be considered for a French Cinderella.
Prince Chéri and Finette have not yet met when the shoe is lost, just
as Pharaoh had not seen Rhodopis when the eagle drops her sandal in
his lap. Chéri is out hunting when he finds the mule the following day,
Finette herself long gone. D’Aulnoy tells us Chéri cherishes the small
and elegant mule, kissing it. Basile’s king might squeeze a chianiello, but
in the understanding that it is a proxy for the woman who wears it. Here,
in d’Aulnoy’s tale, is no rhapsody for the beauty who wears the mule.
Chéri’s passion is entirely for the shoe, prompting him to reject food
and waste away in the vehemency and illicitness of his love, for his fet-
ish begins in secrecy. His parents are understandably alarmed and call for
the best doctors. They diagnose that he is in love, although they assume
it is a woman exciting his passion rather than a red velvet mule. But he
is keeping the mule under his pillow and swears he will marry only the
woman who can wear it. DeJean says that “d’Aulnoy gives us a prince for
whom the mule is the ultimate object of desire.”44 His choice of bride
rests entirely upon her fashionable footwear. Indeed, d’Aulnoy spins
the parodic passion of Basile’s plaudits to Zezolla’s chianiello further to
write a prince who sleeps with a mule, creating “the comic psycholog-
ical interest” Harries describes in “her ingenious, mocking elaboration
of a well-known motif.”45 There is no definitive evidence that d’Aul-
noy knew Basile’s chianiello, in particular, but her version of the tale
certainly seems aware of the joke at the heart of the tale. Much later,
Claude Cahun’s “Cendrillon, l’Enfant Humble et Hautaine” (Cinderella,
the Humble and Haughty Child, ca. 1925), although loosely following
Perrault’s narrative, is likewise unabashed in presenting the prince’s fetish
for shoes, especially those with a red hue. His Cinderella reflects, “What
this royal lover needs is a haughty and dominating mistress, with hard
heels and no pity,”46 and she loses her slipper on purpose for him to find.
The inference of fetishism, and even sadomasochism, is clear in Cahun’s
tale as it is only hinted at in d’Aulnoy’s.
For d’Aulnoy pokes fun at the fetishism of the lost footwear and, as
someone familiar with and oft times embedded in court fashion, she was
in a good position to do so. Red shoes already had a rich history of rep-
resenting sexual desire and power. In the medieval period, for instance,
a red shoe was usual in the Italian courts and, Muzzarelli states, “[t]he
most precious shoes were made of crimson silk and deep red velvet, and
were often decorated. The most common shoes, made of leather and
wood.”47 The tension between red fabric shoes and those of wood is
played out in a variety of fairy tales, where wooden shoes indicate the
hero’s poverty or disenfranchisement. Red velvet pianelle would not be
unusual, meaning that Zezolla’s patten might well have been assumed
red by Basile’s initial readers.48 The mule itself derives its name from
the red shoes of Roman patricians called mulleus, meaning red shoe.49
Popes and kings wore red shoes, alongside courtesans. In the 1670s,
too, Louis XIV insisted that only aristocrats of the court could wear red
heels and, as Semmelhack says, “[r]ed heels immediately became charged
with an aura of status that enhanced their appeal beyond the borders
of France.”50 Louis XIV wore the red heels himself, memorably in the
Rigaud portrait, his legs elegantly elongated. In his youth, he starred in
ballet, undertaking the role of sun in Le Ballet de la Nuit (1653), and
heeled shoes would, during his reign, be worn for dancing at court.51
Even today, the shoes of Christian Louboutin are distinguished by a
red sole that identifies their luxury. Just as Louis XIV restricted the red
heel to his court in order to control and imbue status upon his reign,
Louboutin uses the red sole to control and imbue status upon his brand,
in 2011 filing a lawsuit to assert Louboutin’s exclusive use of the red
sole. Both Louis XIV and Louboutin, in part through their efforts to
render the use of red in their shoes exclusive, are synonymous with
French luxury. Prince Chéri himself co-opts Finette in order to have
exclusive rights over her red mules.
Dancing in Red Shoes: It’s Complicated

Sadly, Finette’s fabulous red mules were toppled in fairy-tale footwear
fame by Hans Christian Andersen’s red shoes. Hilary Davidson observes
that “Andersen’s legacy was to develop and strengthen the ‘power’ that
red shoes already possessed from their expensive color and form, and
from their sacred, courtly and absolutist pre-nineteenth century use.”52
There are actually three pairs of red shoes in “De røde sko” (The Red
Shoes, 1845). Karen lives in poverty, obliged to go barefoot or wear
wooden clogs, which chafe her until her feet turn red. Andersen, like
d’Aulnoy, establishes the pain of wearing cheap or worn out shoes, and
Karen’s poor red feet are a prelude to the fabulous luxury of red shoes.
A shoemaker’s widow fashions a pair of shoes for the child from old
red cloth, which Karen wears for the first time at her mother’s funeral
(see Fig. 5.1). An old lady adopts Karen and promptly burns the ugly
shoes, even though Karen thought she’d been chosen because of her red
shoes. The tale operates on subtle sartorial markers of class and respect-
ability, from the cheapness of Karen’s shoes equating to their ugliness,
to the impropriety of wearing red shoes at a funeral. Karen later wit-
nesses a princess greeting the public from a castle window. The prin-
cess is wearing shoes of red morocco, a supple goat leather. The public
spectacle presented by the red-slippered princess has its effect and Karen
develops a passion for red shoes that would elicit immediate sympathy
from Chéri. When Karen is to receive shoes for her confirmation, there
is a red pair in the shop just like the princess’s. These were made for an
Earl’s daughter, but they didn’t fit, and so are for sale to any customer
who can pay for them. And they fit Andersen’s obsessed, Cinderella-
esque Karen. Davidson points out that “Karen literally steps above her
station into aristocratic shoes inappropriate even for her guardian’s
status.”53 Normally, a perfect fit would be key to fame and glory, pro-
viding Karen with social mobility, but when Karen can think of noth-
ing but her beautiful shoes, even in church, Andersen punishes her
Fig. 5.1 The old shoemaker’s widow makes a pair of red shoes. Hans Christian
Andersen, Andersen’s Tales for Children, trans. Alfred Wehnert and Caroline
Peachey (London: George Bell & Sons, 1874)
severely and in righteous wrath, complete with avenging angel. When

she dances to show off the shoes to an old soldier, she encounters not
Prince Charming, or even a fairy godmother, but a red-bearded old sol-
dier, likely the Devil himself, and now she cannot stop dancing.54 The
shoes become one with her feet. The perfect fit becomes a terrible thing,
the angel assuring her she shall die dancing in her shoes. She has the
executioner cut off her feet, which dance away, and replaces them with
wooden feet, recalling the wooden shoes she wore when the tale began.
Even then she must continue to repent and finally, awarded mercy,
she dies.55
Andersen’s puritanical issues with good shoes and women are per-
sistent in his tales. “The Girl who Trod upon Bread” opens: “I expect
you’ve heard of the girl who trod on the loaf so as not to dirty her
shoes.”56 Again, the little girl is poor, but vain. Albeit, in this case, her
torture of small insects does indicate that her “bad disposition” rests
upon more than her love of shoes. She is sent to visit her elderly parents
with a loaf of bread. However, coming to muddy ground, she chooses
to avoid ruining her shoes by stepping on the bread. In actuality, her
decision has economic merit, but unhappily for Inger, she falls into the
domain of the Old Woman of the Bogs, who, it so happens, sews run-
ning leather into shoes to render their wearers always restive, thus ech-
oing the curse upon Karen’s shoes. Gerda, in “Snedronningen” (The
Snow Queen, 1844) fares rather better. She wears new red shoes to look
for her missing friend, Kay, noting that he has not yet seen them. She
then offers the shoes to the river in return for Kay. The act itself is pecu-
liarly wasteful—what need has a river for red shoes? Yet, the act of point-
less sacrifice is ultimately rewarded as the river at least sets her on her
quest in return for the shoes.
As Davidson indicates, “Andersen’s use of the shoe connects sexuality,
magic and gender in a negative construction.”57 Indeed, interpretations of
even Cinderella’s various shoes have been given a negative slant. Hannon,
for example, argues that Finette’s “fetishistic” slipper heralds her “decline
from active status.”58 In terms of court reality, however, Finette’s mule
allows her political mobility and the mule itself is mobile, going astray and
being found again, tucked under a loving prince’s pillow. People, however,
keep thinking the shoe restricts in a patriarchal sense.
Oddly, among the Brothers Grimm’s tales, red shoes are valued.
The Brothers Grimm’s “Van den Machandel-Boom” (The Juniper Tree,
1812), from Philipp Otto Runge and Daniel Runge, tells of a murdered
brother, now a bird, who sings his sad tale to a shoemaker. The shoe-
maker asks for the song again, but the bird refuses unless he is presented
with a gift. The shoemaker inexplicably presents him with red shoes
from the top shelf. The brother/bird then visits his family and when
Marlene goes outside, he presents her with the shoes and she dances
and skips back to the house. In “Das kluge Gretel” (Clever Gretel, 1819),
from Andreas Strobl, the cook of the title wears shoes with red heels,59
delighting in her appearance whenever she goes about wearing them.
Her delight leads her to eat and drink what she is meant to prepare for
her employer and his guest. Bacchilega notes that “Gretel wears red
and transgressively stands out, inside the kitchen, where she works as a
cook, as well as when she steps out of the kitchen.”60 Notably, she does
not make herself conspicuous, or take pleasure in her appearance, with
thought of marriage or male attention. Her main object, indeed, appears
to be to eat and drink well. Furthermore, she is not punished—she out-
wits and cheats her master without moral retribution here. Her red-
heeled shoes offer a tantalising link to the heels coveted at Louis XIV’s
court, the servant usurping aristocrat privilege post-Revolution.
In Franz Xaver von Schönwerth’s “The Flying Trunk,”61 however,
it is a spoiled prince who wears red boots, demonstrating that not only
women are captivated by their red footwear. Accidentally flown away far
from home on a magic trunk, the prince encounters a shoemaker and
becomes his apprentice, a social and political reversal that nonetheless
follows the logic of the prince’s particular appreciation of shoes. Rather
than simply engaging in consumption of luxury shoes, he learns to be a
shoemaker himself. He soon hears of a princess imprisoned in a tower
by her father and conveniently uses his trunk to fly up and visit her. The
king uses the prince’s trick from the Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella tale—
covering the windowsill in tar in order to discover the interloper, thus
capturing one of the prince’s red boots. He promises a reward to any-
one who fits it. The prince’s foot thus becomes as unique and sought-
after as Cinderella’s but, in this case, it is not a lover seeking the wearer
out of desire, but an enemy seeking the wearer in hopes of retribution.
Nonetheless, both shoe tests “out” sexual passion, revealing a social infil-
trator who has captured the desire of the prince/princess. Both the red-
booted hero and the princess are caught and are about to be burned, but
they escape on the trunk and live happily ever after.
Today, of course, the most famous red shoes belong to Dorothy.
Although silver, with a pointed toe, in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz (1900), the shoes are transformed into iconic ruby slippers
in the 1939 film adaptation.62 In reality, they are pumps covered in dark
red sequins, designed to look more striking against the yellow brick road,
and translating to screen in sparkling glory suggestive of something
rather grander and more luxurious than simply tiny gelatin and plastic
discs stitched to a silk pump. Once Dorothy’s falling house inadvertently
kills the wicked witch, Dorothy is presented with the witch’s shoes—after
the dust of the old witch is shaken out of them, Baum writes,63 a par-
ticularly macabre notion that underwrites the close connection between
physical body and shoe. In Baum’s novel, the Munchkins know the shoes
are charmed, but not what the charm is. Determining her own shoes too
old and worn for a long journey to the Emerald City, Dorothy puts on
the silver shoes, which magically fit perfectly—a common trait of magical
shoes and an indication that she is, indeed, the hero of the tale, since
the shoe literally fits. It is implied that these silver shoes are metal, for
Dorothy specifies that “they could not wear out”64 during her travels as,
presumably, fabric or leather shoes could. As she starts her journey, her
shoes are described furthermore as “tinkling merrily on the hard, yel-
low roadbed.”65 The sound itself suggests the striking of metal on brick
or gravel. The silver shoes are often interpreted as allegory for the pol-
itics of the monetary standard, reinforcing the reading of the shoes as
metal. Dorothy is very proud of her newly acquired shoes but, unlike
Karen, she is not punished for her pride. She also loses a shoe but, unlike
Cinderella, she is not obliged to marry the person who finds it and,
instead, melts a witch. The shoes’ charm is eventually revealed: “they can
carry you to any place in the world in three steps.”66 A variation of the
seven-league boots and Cinderella’s glass slipper, the silver shoes carry
Dorothy home, but are then lost over a desert. Such shoes cannot exist
in Kansas—they are the shoes of fairy tale.
Although the ruby slippers would become iconic, the silver shoes
do make a comeback in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked, in which they are
charmed to help Elphaba’s sister, Nessarose, to walk. Nessarose, however,
turns tyrannical and becomes the witch who is then killed by Dorothy.
Maguire describes the shoes, evoking the gold, silver, and red of fairy-tale
shoe iconography: “They sparkled like yellow diamonds, and embers of
blood, and thorny stars.”67 By the end of the book, Oz is awash with
fashion imitations of the shoes that “cropped up at so many public cer-
emonies that, like the relics of saints, they began to multiply to fill the
need.”68 Maguire hints at a yearning that fuels the passion for shoes; that
desire to step into the shoes of sartorial fame. In the musical adaptation,
Elphaba questions Dorothy’s upbringing by wondering who would wear
the silver shoes of a dead woman. The answer, of course, is a woman
who will usurp her status. Nonetheless, it is ruby slippers that were worn
as Judy Garland’s Dorothy danced her way to the Emerald City and it is
a pair of these ruby slippers in the Smithsonian.
While many scholars argue over red shoes as objects of desire, sex,
passion, sin, and greed, what is largely consistent is that no one simply
walks in a red shoe in a fairy tale. One dances. A red shoe is never a
practical shoe, but a shoe that is designed to be conspicuous. The wearer
is engaging in sartorial spectacle, red shoes choreographing the body in
euphoric movement.
The Brothers Grimm’s Disposable Shoe

The Brothers Grimm took a version of Cinderella from a female patient
at the Elisabeth-Hospital, Marburg, via the wife of the hospital’s direc-
tor, and later mixed it with additional tales, including one from the
legendary Dorothea Viehmann, producing a selection of slippers for
Cinderella, each one matching one of the luxurious gowns she accou-
tres herself with.69 From Maria Anna von Droste-Hülshoff, they took
the story of twelve dancing princesses; princesses who mysteriously wear
out their shoes nightly. The shoes appear in the title, “The Worn-out
Dancing Shoes,” standing in metonymically for the princesses as the glass
slipper does for Cinderella. While the shoes are not described, it is nota-
ble that only one night of dancing is enough to wear holes in their soles.
The tales appear slighter than their French and Italian predecessors in
terms of fashionable detail, but they capture fashions that were slighter.
Fashion had taken a turn toward simplicity after the French Revolution.
Moreover, shoes became more notable as part of an ensemble, rather
than an independent agent of dress. They were of a simpler, more fragile
design and construction, and were more readily made to match a dress
and discarded when all too quickly worn out or damaged. The tales
operate on the demands of the early nineteenth-century’s expendable,
delicate slippers and reveal the devastation wrought upon the women
who wear weak shoes.
The Brothers Grimm’s Cinderella, Aschenputtel, attends the festival
two nights in a row in the 1812 tale. The first night, she has a silver
dress with pearls, silk stockings with silver clocks,70 and silver slippers.
The second night, her gown is gold with precious stones, gold-worked
stockings and golden slippers. The uniformity of her ensembles is con-
sistent with tastes of the time, particularly in respect to silver and gold
ensembles worn by royalty. French fashion was still a force to be reck-
oned with after the Revolution: the trendsetters of Thermidorian/
Directory society, the Merveilleuses, including Marie-Josèphe-Rose de
Beauharnais, wore nigh-transparent, classically-inspired gowns with
straight skirts, high waists, and low bodices. These were worn with flat
sandals and simple slippers. De Beauharnais’s influence increased when
she wed Napoleon Bonaparte, becoming the Empress Josephine in 1804.
Napoleon himself championed more demure—at least in his eyes—yet
luxuriant fashions for women and Josephine wore a number of gauze
dresses embroidered in silver or gold thread along with patterned stock-
ings and slippers.71 Napoleon thus promoted the French luxury textile
industry through instructions to his court, just as Louis XIV had done,
and his active discouragement of women wearing the same gown too
often.72 A quick rotation of new gowns at court promoted textile indus-
tries and this dynamic is something underlying most Cinderella tales.
Much like Aschenputtel, Napoleon’s second wife, Marie-Louise, an
Austrian archduchess, wore a silver wedding gown and silver embroi-
dered shoes—that happened to be too tight—at their wedding in
1810.73 Such regal ensembles closely correspond with the descriptions
provided by the Brothers Grimm. French fashion was certainly an influ-
ence in Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon’s brother Jérôme. The Brothers
Grimm had working relationships with the Napoleonic government
and their sources would plausibly have at least a passing awareness of
Imperial fashion. Furthermore, shortly after the publication of the first
Brothers Grimm’s Aschenputtel, in 1816, Princess Charlotte of Wales
wed her own German prince, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld,
in a wedding ensemble straight from the pages of the tale. La Belle
Assemblée described the princess wearing “silver lama [lamé] on net,
over a silver tissue slip, embroidered at the bottom with silver lama in
shells and flowers.”74 The queen, herself having been a German princess,
was dressed in silver and gold. The royal connections between England
and German were close. Karin A. Wurst notes that German fashion in
the period was increasingly influenced by England, where “‘modern’
fashions of the emergent middle class were perceived as desirable.”75
The Brothers Grimm were middle-class themselves, although French
fashion, too, continued to influence the courts and general population.
Daniel L. Purdy observes, “While affluent commoners in London and

Paris flocked to salons and meetinghouses to learn about the newest
fashions, the German educated elite read about them in fashion jour-
nals.”76 The clothing gifted in “Aschenputtel” would likely be influenced
by French fashion.
Shoes of the period were often made to match the gown. The French
revolution had swept away the shoes of d’Aulnoy and Perrault, and
the classically inspired gowns of the early nineteenth century called for
new shoes. The Brothers Grimm use the term Pantoffeln, which fol-
lows Perrault’s pantoufles, but the shape of the slipper had altered dra-
matically. For evening occasions, women began to wear low or heel-less
shoes, often in silk and tied with ribbons. These were delicate shoes that
were not long or hard wearing, but their simplicity and ephemeral nature
provided greater flexibility for women to match slippers to gowns, just as
the tree does in its gifts to Aschenputtel. Nancy Rexford proposes that
“nineteenth-century women’s shoes descended from the backless slippers
or ‘mules’ that had been worn in the boudoir,”77 being easily slipped off.
It is worth noting, however, that the Brothers Grimm’s prince now has
to use black pitch to prise Aschenputtel’s shoe from her foot.
Aschenputtel’s silver and gold shoes were likely made from fabric deco-
rated with metal thread, possibly with spangles or other embroidery. The
imperial court in Paris favoured such fabrics as gauze and silver lamé for
dresses, and “[f]lat pointed slippers, made of satin and gold or silver lamé
and tied with ribbons, were worn at soirées at the Tuileries.”78 Although
the shoes are described by the Brothers Grimm as being of silver and
gold, they were not intended to be read as being made of inflexible metal,
but as the shoes fashionable at the time among royal and aristocratic
women. Gold shoes are not uncommon in fairy tales. Katie Woodencloak,
from a Norwegian tale, and the Cinder-girl of “The Little Gold Shoe,”
a Swedish tale, for example, both deal with lost gold shoes. Of course,
one of the earliest Cinderellas existing in written form, Yeh-hsien, has
actual solid gold shoes, since the hero comes from the His-yüan prov-
ince, known for its gold mines.79 D’Aulnoy’s tale of Princess Mayblossom,
too, features a hungry protagonist, Fanfarinet, in golden boots. Hedwig
Dohm’s Lila in “The Fragrance of Flowers” (1870) wears a white shift
and golden shoes.80 Gold shoes are always a glamorous choice, suggesting
vast wealth in the material utilised for the shoe’s upper.81
Aschenputtel’s stockings would, like the shoes too, be chosen to
match the gown. Clocks, the embroidery on a gusset, were still a popular
decorative element of stockings. The author of The Mirror of the Graces;

Or, The English Lady’s Costume (1813) advises that the clocks “instead of
displaying fine proportion, confuse the contour” and if “a coloured or a
gold one, as I have sometimes seen, how glaring is the exhibition! how
coarse the association of ideas it produces in the fancy!”82 Aschenputtel’s
stockings would not have met with the author’s approval. In fact, the
author further notes that, upon seeing such garish garments, “your
imagination reverts to the gross and repelling females of Portsmouth-
point, or Plymouth-dock; or at least to the hired opera-dancer, whose
business it is to make her foot and ankle the principal object which char-
acterizes her charms.”83 This might suggest that Aschenputtel enters the
erotic legacy of her forebears by wearing stockings evoking sexual pro-
clivity and even prostitution. However, The Lady’s Magazine notes that
clocks are still fashionable in Paris in May, 1833.84 The silver and gold
stockings worn by Aschenputtel are in keeping with her splendid attire,
but they disappear by the time the story is revised for the 1857 edition.
The Brothers Grimm either refrain from description of more intimate/
mundane apparel, or the incorporation of rival versions dilutes the fash-
ionable detail that enlivens the earlier tale from the Marburg hospital.
Certainly, Aschenputtel does not treat her shoes well through the ver-
sions. In escaping the prince, she subjects them to outside conditions for
which they are not suited, hiding in a pigeon coop with its corrosive fae-
ces and climbing a tree, the bark presumably catching threads and fray-
ing fabric. The prince himself practically ruins the shoes by placing pitch
on the stairs to capture Cinderella. The shoes of the period would not
survive this, thus she requires a constant supply of new shoes.
The Brothers Grimm’s version of Cinderella is best known for its
bloody mutilations as the stepsisters attempt to fit their feet into the
slipper. Mutilation and cosmetic applications are common enough in
fairy tales. Basile’s old women go to extraordinary lengths in “The Old
Woman Who Was Skinned” to appear youthful, sucking their fingers
smooth and tying back sagging skin, the luckless sister going so far as
to have a barber skin her to nothing but blood and bone. Women have
also sort cosmetic aids to attempt to fit Cinderella’s slipper.85 D’Aulnoy
tells us that to fit the slipper of Chéri’s affection, all through the king-
dom women starved, peeled their feet, or applied potions and creams to
their feet to make them smaller. Perrault’s glass slipper, of course, pre-
cludes more deceptive methods of transformation, but his tale of Donkey
Skin has women scraping skin from fingers, others cutting pieces from
fingertips, some pressing and thus squashing their fingers, others apply-
ing acid to eat away the skin, all in order to fit the golden ring. Indeed,
Perrault’s tale is rather more graphically violent in the variety of “cos-
metic” tortures employed than the Brothers Grimm’s use of the knife as
the stepsisters attempt their cosmetic alteration. Their mother gives each
a knife, instructing her daughters in the art of mutilation so that the heel
or toe that won’t fit is simply removed. She admits it will hurt, but tells
them that once queen, they will not be required to walk. Nonetheless,
the birds blow the whistle on the girls: each time a sister rides away with
the prince, the birds sing out that the shoe is bloody, the girl is not the
bride. It is worth noting that with blood all over, the shoe has become
red, an object damning the sisters as fake royal brides. When the shoe
finally makes its way to Aschenputtel, there is no mention of its con-
dition. However, the 1812 version does note that Aschenputtel has to
work her foot into the shoe before it fits perfectly, suggesting that per-
haps it isn’t quite the ideal fit it once was now that it has been squeezed
and bloodied by so many other feet.
The Brothers Grimm’s shoe is thus a series of more delicate, more
mutilated slippers. The twelve dancing princesses are exposed in their
wanderlust, fail to break the curse of their handsome princes, and thus
lose their opportunity to marry by choice. The poor, wounded soldier
who stalked them in an invisible cloak and solved the riddle of their
wrecked slippers is, instead, able to demand the eldest for his bride.
Their agency and status lie in tatters. The shoes of Aschenputtel have not
merely danced, but have invaded the pigeon coop, climbed a tree, and
finally been stuck in pitch, all before the stepsisters wedge their bloody
stumps within the final pair. Where previously the shoe had been the
foundation of Cinderella’s sexual attractiveness and royal status, in the
hands of the Brothers Grimm, it becomes a desecrated husk that just
barely carries the hero to her happily ever after. This Cinderella is not the
active future-queen, but a girl despoiled both by family and prince.
The Iconic Slipper

It is the earlier glass slipper that retains the greatest renown. Perrault
raises the shoe to the title of the tale, “Cinderella; or The Little Slipper
Made of Glass,” treating the hero and her slipper as interchangeable
through the insertion of the “or.” Riello and McNeil note that shoes
maintain their shape in the absence of the wearer, “explain[ing] why they
often stand for something else”86 not there. A glass slipper would be
particularly apt to represent the absent Cinderella, though it truly pales
next to Toute Belle’s wedding shoes, fashioned from diamonds, in d’Aul-
noy’s “Le Nain Jaune” (The Yellow Dwarf, 1697). For Perrault, though,
the shoe is as significant a narrative element as the hero herself. Isobel
Armstrong puts it thus, “Cinderella’s magical transformation became
mediated by glass.”87 Cinderella’s gown, the pumpkin, the mice, and liz-
ards are all transformed into objects of luxury, but the shoes are the one
aspect of her ensemble gifted and do not change back after midnight.
They are the fixed point of the story. Jones notes that Cinderella learns
to articulate her needs and desires with the fairy godmother’s guidance,
assisting in choosing objects to transform, and thus develops rhetorical
agency.88 Theatricality is also learned through the shoe. When the shoe
fits at the final test, only then does Cinderella produce the other slipper,
which she has had all along in her pocket. Yet, there is a larger riddle:
how does Cinderella wear a glass slipper? Many have tried to unlock the
riddle through material means.
Perrault uses the alternative to mule, pantoufle, again playing upon the
shoe’s connection with the boudoir. Mercure Galant in September 1693,
for instance, describes the scene of Femme de qualité en deshabille neg-
ligé, by Mr. de Saint Jean, in which she is wearing pantoufles and a loose
corset.89 This was the fashion in which Cinderella’s glass slippers were
conceived and the slipper or mule is at least a more feasible structure for
wearable glass, allowing the foot to slide into the vamp without resistance.
Yet, glass for a slipper, an item originating in the comfort of the bou-
doir, appears counterintuitive and oddly uncomfortable. Its magic and
appeal is, in part, the suggestion of light and sparkle that glass provides.
Edith Nesbit’s prince in her 1908 version of Cinderella is talking to his
herald after the ball, when the latter inquires, “What’s that sparklety
thing sticking out of the breast pocket of your dressing-gown?”90 This
is the shoe—the sparklety thing that inspires desire across the centuries,
particularly once the shoe reaches film screens. Most glass slippers on
screen sparkle, whether beaded or made of glass or crystal. In The Slipper
and the Rose, the fairy godmother pours silvery glitter into a copper jelly
mould, revealing a lacy, sparkling concoction of glass mules. However, it
is Disney’s slippers that are most well-known. Disney, which drew heavily
on Perrault for the iconic 1950 animated feature, represents the glass slip-
pers not as mules, but as pumps with a tall “tongue” (oreilles in French)
suggestive of seventeenth-century shoes. Sparkles are animated upon the
tongue, the shape of her foot visible within the shoe. Powell took a dif-
ferent approach in the 2015 film, creating court shoes of crystal.91 The
crystal provides a more fragmented refraction of rainbow light, in keeping
with the subtle layers of shifting colour in Cinderella’s gown. Lily James,
who plays Cinderella in the 2015 Disney live-action film, said, “The glass
slippers — no human foot can fit in them,” joking that “[n]o maiden in
the land fits the shoe. So the prince is going to die alone.”92 Indeed, the
Swarovski crystal shoe was not wearable and was treated simply as a prop,
placed upon the foot “magically” through CGI. The foot is invisible,
indeed, absent, within the crystal facets. Powell was inspired by a pair of
1890 shoes with a five-inch heel from the Northampton Museums and
Art Gallery: “I didn’t want her wearing a slipper […] and I thought I
really liked that idea – an impossibly high heel.”93 She inadvertently recalls
Zezolla’s epic feat of chianiello. Her physical inspiration is an 1897 court
shoe in pale green French kid with, aptly enough, a Louis XIV heel, and
decorated with small brilliants, made by John Gooch of Brompton Road,
London.94 In the film, despite the unwearable nature of material and heel,
the Fairy Godmother assures Cinderella of their comfort—she is, after all,
good with shoes. It appears impossible to wear such a sparkly shoe and
so part of the shoe’s magic becomes its illogical comfort. As Mrs. Toquet
(Estelle Winwood) announces in The Glass Slipper, women put up with
a lack of comfort in the name of fashion: “it fascinates men, makes them
marvel at women […] because they know they couldn’t stand it.”95
Perrault doesn’t, in fact, write the shoe as inflexible, as Hoffmann
points out in skewering “those who insist on rationalising a fairy mar-
vel.”96 Hoffmann places the shoes within the context of objects, iden-
tifying their conception in an era of glass innovation, with many fairy
tales including glass objects and features.97 Fantastical glass objects dec-
orated with remarkable animals and figures were much sought after,
Hoffmann referring particularly to a glass table depicting the judge-
ment of Paris and produced for Louis XIV: “Both works of glass – the
literary work and the artistic table – belong to the world of the French
court, and deciding which one is more fanciful would be almost impos-
sible.”98 Scholars often do interpret the literal nature of the material of
Cinderella’s shoes. Zipes dismisses the shoe as intended “most likely as
an ironic joke since a glass slipper was likely to break if it were to fall
off a foot.”99 Betts observes that “[t]he point here is that the slipper is
magic and fits only one foot: fur can be stretched, glass cannot, but it
can be exactly shaped.”100 Hannon claims the slippers indicate “fettered
mobility,”101 even though Cinderella herself elegantly dances and scamp-

ers in her slippers. In fact, the Brothers Grimm’s “Dat Erdmänneken”
(The Gnome, 1815), sourced from Ludowine von Haxthausen and
Fernandine von Haxthausen, ends with a strange reference to the
unyielding glass slippers. The narrator, attending the wedding of the
tale’s protagonists, wears glass slippers which, when tripping over a
stone, break in two, ending the tale. The slippers could be a borrowed
memory of Perrault’s tale, the female storyteller purloining Cinderella’s
shoes, with the breaking of the slippers a symbolic break in storytelling.
Later retellings of Perrault, however, often reject treating the glass in a
literal manner. Nesbit’s retelling, for example, has the fairy pluck true
glass slippers from her pocket, but “they were soft as any kid glove.”102
Emile Bergerat’s “Cendrillon en Automobile” (1909) is most remarka-
ble, on the other hand, in that Cinderella jumps into a pot of boiling
water, to emerge in the glass slippers: “Two tea roses in two Venetian
glasses!”103 The glass is literally heated and formed around her feet.
Hoffmann warns the glass slippers are “a narrated object on which a
reader might usefully stub a metaphorical toe.”104
Fashion itself is driven by innovation, perpetually harnessing new
technologies and materials. The idea of fit is key to the tale, for only
Cinderella can wear the shoe. A good fit was much sought after. Nicolas
Lestage crafted seamless, golden boots for Louis XIV, at the time a
remarkable, unique feat that earned the shoemaker great honour. Indeed,
his feat was celebrated in a collection of poems, Poésies nouvelles sur le sujet
des bottes sans couture présentées au Roy par le sieur Nicolas Lestage, maître
Cordonnier de Sa Majesté (1677), about the boots. In their Histoire de
la Chaussure (1862), Paul Lacroix and Alphonse Duchesne write of hav-
ing the poetry collection—“un livre parfaitement inconnu”105 (a perfectly
unknown book)—before them, quoting verses including:
L’on connait bien que le verrier

Fait son travail d’un coup de souffle,
Mais celui qui fait la pantoufle
Diffère bien de ce métier.106
The verse relates that the glassmaker works with a breath of air, but the
maker of slippers differs in his work. The rhyming of the words here, the
repute garnered by Lestage for the excellent fit of his boots, may plausi-
bly have inspired Perrault.
Charles Giraud’s 1865 edition of Les Contes des Fées implies that
Perrault’s inspiration may be a glass fabric, tissu de verre, in fashion at
the time, but there is no apparent evidence of such a fabric existing
during Perrault’s life.107 There are reports of the Paris International
Exhibition in 1867, though, that do mention this kind of fabric, with
fine glass threads entwined with silk: “What, for instance, could be more
elegant than the Tissue de Verre for silk curtains, couches, and chair cov-
erings exhibited by Messrs. Grant and Gask, of Oxford Street? Of all
the uses hitherto made of glass, this seems certainly the most wonder-
ful.”108 It is possible that Giraud erroneously conflated a recent inno-
vation with Perrault’s tale. During Perrault’s lifetime, however, there
were taffetas glacé, silks so glossy they appeared to shine like ice accord-
ing to Le Dictionnaire de l’Académie Françoise.109 Women’s shoes were
made of silk and such a lustrous confection could be the inspiration
behind the glass slipper. Hill notes that “[p]ristine white shoes, rather
than glass slippers, were regularly associated with Cinderella during the
early years of the twentieth century,”110 which itself could be an inad-
vertent call back to the seventeenth-century silk slippers. In a 1919
Vogue, for example, an editorial asserts that “[i]f Cinderella wore slip-
pers as charming as these of white satin trimmed with oval buckles of
large brilliants and a loop of satin and topped by flesh coloured silk
stockings with Chantilly lace insertions dyed to match – then, of course,
one quite understands the ending of the fairy-tale.”111 The shoe has an
apt Louis XIV heel, and the buckle style and fabric finish is reminiscent
of seventeenth/eighteenth-century French fashion. The lace stockings
also recall the Brothers Grimm’s 1812 version of Cinderella’s ensem-
ble. The references to white satin slippers occur much earlier, though.
George Buchanan Fife’s poem, “That Satin Slipper,” in a 1893 Vogue,
already associates the slipper with white satin: “The tip of a tiny white
satin shoe peeps./What bit of romance shall I weave you about it?/Of
some Cinderella, with Prince as my part.”112 Anne Isabella Ritchie in
1868 also provides her hero with “little white satin slippers, with satin
heels, all embroidered with glass beads.”113 White satin became one of
the materials that subbed for the glass of the slipper and later versions
of the slipper took advantage of the notion of beaded effects. Salvatore
Ferragamo’s glass slippers for Ever After are embroidered in silver and
adorned with Swarovski beads and pearls. The Jimmy Choo Cinderella
Collection (2015) also includes a stiletto encrusted in crystals. Fabric is a
likely choice for a more realistic glass slipper.
Armstrong notes that the term “elastic” also slipped into the tales in
the nineteenth century around the time of Giraud’s reflections on tissu
de verre.114 The Cruikshank Fairy-Book (1911) describes the shoes: “the
soles and lining of these slippers were made of an elastic material, and
covered on the outside with delicate spun glass.”115 In a reoccurring
chapbook version, “[t]he Fairy took from her pocket a most beauti-
ful pair of elastic glass slippers.”116 Although, Henry W. Dulcken nev-
ertheless insists that the glass slipper “would not bend like an elastic
over-shoe.”117 Armstrong observes that this elasticity “emerges from a
literalism that is now sufficiently conscious of the real agony of glass – it
splinters and pierces the flesh – to be uneasy, unable to see it as magi-
cal or symbolic.”118 Just prior to 1830, we see inventions involving the
use of elastic and rubber gums in fabric, although the concept of elastic-
ity simply as stretchable material did exist, too. Just as Perrault absorbed
contemporary developments in glass manufacture so, too, did subse-
quent re-tellings adapt impractical footwear through contemporane-
ous advances in materials and innovations. In The Glass Slipper (1955),
such advances are pragmatically noted for their moneymaking potential,
Mrs. Toquet bringing Cinderella (Leslie Caron) a borrowed gown and
pair of glass slippers, explaining that they’d been invented by a Venetian
and outlining how they were sold from one person to the next for con-
siderable profit.119
There is a celebrated and persistent contestation that Perrault’s shoe
was originally fur. The position assumes an oral source—verre and vair
sound similar—or a printing error. D’Aulnoy’s Finette, however, encour-
ages the ogre’s wife to take off her furs, which make her unfashionable,
making it unlikely that Perrault’s Cinderella would think fur slippers
elegant. Vair (squirrel fur) was often used in royal costume in medieval
courts, and Balzac, in Sur Catherine de Médicis (1830–1842), makes the
infamous claim about Cinderella’s slippers:
In France, as in other kingdoms, not only did royal ordinances restrict the
use of furs to the nobility (proved by the part which ermine plays in the
old blazons), but also certain rare furs, such as vair (which was undoubt-
edly Siberian sable), could not be worn by any but kings, dukes, and cer-
tain lords clothed with official powers. A distinction was made between
the greater and lesser vair. The very name has been so long disused, that
in a vast number of editions of Perrault’s famous tale, Cinderella’s slipper,
which was no doubt of vair (the fur), is said to have been made of verre
(glass).120
Although the link to royal ordinances is consistent with the underlying

regal rights of Cinderella, there is no actual evidence that Perrault ever
conceived the slipper being of fur and, in terms of the contemporane-
ous court, a fur slipper at a ball is unthinkable. Thus, Planché writes, a
decade after Balzac’s claim, “I thank the stars that I have not been able
to discover any foundation for this alarming report.”121 Perrault, articu-
lating so many innovations of the court, would be unlikely to make the
key feature of his tale so incredibly old-fashioned. Hoffmann provides a
comprehensive takedown of the fur position, but it has become so per-
vasive in popular culture, it has practically become a fairy-tale variant in
its own right.122 In fact, Balzac’s influence is evident upon French writ-
ers of the decadent literary movement. Guillaume Apollinaire writes of
Cinderella’s squirrel-fur slippers in “La suite de Cendrillon ou Le rat et
les six lézards” (Cinderella Continued, or the Rat and the Six Lizards)
in 1919, determining that they are catalogued in Pittsburgh museum
as nineteenth-century pin trays.123 Claude Cahun’s “Cinderella, the
Humble and Haughty Child” includes vair slippers, as the prince loves
fur.124 Bergerat’s “Cendrillon en Automobile” (Cinderella Arrives by
Automobile) in 1909, however, playfully teases that the learned men of
Cinderella’s court write of fur slippers when the shoes are glass, actually
playing upon the contention.125 Although the case for fur is thoroughly
debunked, its persistence demonstrates its legendary status.
The glass slippers nonetheless remain iconic, over and above any shoe
of alternative materials. Frances Freeling Broderip’s “The Jewel Princess”
(1869), for example, features the vain Princess Brilliantine who demands
of the fairy “Now, I have all my life longed for a pair of glass slippers,
like those of Cinderella. To a fairy of your power they must be a mere
trifle; please to get me a similar pair.”126 Brilliantine’s metafictional refer-
ence is indicative of the desire the shoes have inspired through the cen-
turies. Even so, many have also satirised the glass slipper. Terry Pratchett,
for example, satirises them in prosaic fashion in Witches Abroad (1991).
A young witch, Magrat, takes the place of Cinderella, but her feet are
ironically too small.127 Granny Weatherwax suggests she put on some
socks to wear them, a practical suggestion, but hardly fashionable.128
The slipper actually—perfectly—fits the ribald, plump Nanny Ogg, again
distorting the parameters of the tale by the shoe favouring the old and
vulgar, rather than the young and virtuous. Indeed, the point of parody
is often to shatter the inflexibility around social constructs of ideal wom-
anhood, the glass of Perrault’s slipper a suitable metonymic device.
Perrault’s glass slippers are a material stratagem, a fashionable riddle

of glass blown from a fairy’s wand. Their impossibility simply fans the
flames of Cinderella’s extraordinariness. For such a delicate material, the
slippers have held up remarkably well over the centuries.
Crafty Cats and Their Beautiful Boots

Perrault’s tales frequently bind the hero to an item of clothing, thus
“The Master Cat; or, Puss in Boots.” The boots are Perrault’s innova-
tion to the tale already in print in editions of Straparola and Basile, but
the latter two tales featuring female felines. The first tale, Straparola’s
“Costantino Fortunato,” features the death of an elderly, poor woman,
whose cat happens to be a fairy. The fairy drives the action, as indeed
does the “ordinary,” female feline in Basile’s “Cagliuso,” despite the
names of shiftless men appearing in the titles. Perrault’s cat is male and
he actually takes the title role once in boots, Jones noting that the cat
becomes “Master” after attaining boots, which not only serve a practical
purpose, but provide “the social clout” to hustle.129 The cat thus attains
a title through the actions he takes once he has boots. This is a tale about
sartorial and social chicanery, with Perrault’s version perhaps the most
calculated.
Straparola’s “Costantino Fortunato” or “Costantino and His
Wonderful Cat” features the youngest son of a very poor woman and the
cat he inherits. The cat conspires to raise her master in the world, hav-
ing an innate understanding of the role of clothes in achieving status. To
make Costantino a rich man, she tells him to remove his peasant clothes
and go into the river. Of course, at this point, the king comes by and
the cat convinces him that Costantino has been set upon by thieves,
and robbed of his clothing and wealth. The king sees that he is a good-
looking lad and clothes him in good clothes. Now there is nothing in
appearance to indicate that Costantino is not himself wealthy. The cat is
well aware that appearances count, so she connives to divest Costantino
of his peasant appearance and re-make him as a lord through sartorial
means.
Basile’s “Cagliuso” likewise stresses the importance of appearance.
Basile’s hero, Pippo, is the younger son of a wretchedly poor man who
can’t even afford clothing, thus going about naked. Once he dies, Pippo
inherits only “Her Royal Catness.”130 Instead of sending Pippo, now
known as Lord Cagliuso, naked into a river, though, she simply tells the
king that his servants have stolen everything, including his clothes. The
king sends clothing, including undergarments, from his own wardrobe.
Pippo is all too aware of the value of his clothes, telling her to mind his
rags, but the cat chides him for worrying about trivial matters. Indeed,
his continued anxiety threatens to undo her deceit, revealing his own sar-
torial and economic anxiety. Finally succeeding in marrying Cagliuso to
the daughter of the king, the cat then pretends to be dead and Cagliuso
is willing to simply throw the body out the window, rather than stuff
and honour it as he had promised. Miffed at his lack of regard, the cat
rebukes him for his ingratitude by referencing his clothing, including
his initial clothing, so threadbare it could be wound on spindles, fuming
over her treatment after conspiring to obtain elegant attire for him, and
reminding him that he was “in tatters, covered with shreds, all patched
up, and coming apart at the seams.”131 Her sartorial eloquence under-
lines the play of appearances and, as Canepa suggests, she “has little
chance of being valorized in a world” in which “power and wealth” are
the chief goal.132 Without her own clothing, she cannot hope to manipu-
late her own appearance and earn her own happily ever after.
So, Straparola and Basile’s cats are cunning, knowing that “clothes
make the man,” but make no effort to obtain clothing for themselves. It
is a maxim Perrault recognises, though, in “Puss in Boots.” The clothes
have, in fact, come straight from the princess’s father, Perrault’s king
having his officiers de sa garde-robe with him, men entrusted with keep-
ing the king’s wardrobe. The peasant literally dresses in the clothing of a
king and thus becomes worthy of a princess. Betts plays up the maxim in
his translation, demonstrating “That elegant clothes on a good-looking
youth [c]an play a distinctly significant part”133 in securing a woman’s
love. Such sentiments flow neatly into the Brothers Grimm’s version,
“Der gestiefelte Kater” (Puss in Boots, 1812), sourced from Jeanette
Hassenpflug, where the princess is not upset at finding herself with
a peasant in her coach, since he happens to be handsome.134 In many
respects, the tale is a counterpoint to a tale such as “The Emperor’s New
Clothes”: where Andersen’s tale exposes the folly of seeking beautiful
clothing to bolster one’s status, the tale of the cat celebrates the wisdom
and success of the strategy. Of course, the hero of these tales requires
a cat to manipulate his appearance, but Cinderella and her female peers
have always been aware of the power of the right dress.
Puss, however, manipulates his own appearance, too, in Perrault’s
tale. He dodges the fate of being made into a muff or, in the Brothers
Grimm’s version, gloves. Such accessories of cat’s fur would be infe-

rior and cheap at that, adding to Puss’s disdain for such an unfashion-
able fate: he is worth much more alive. Therefore, Puss requests boots
be made for him to allow him to traverse brambles. This would be
a notable expense for the straitened hero, since the boots would need
to be custom-made for a paw. The boots elevate the cat into a walking
posture—presumably, he didn’t request four boots for his paws, although
that is not explicitly stated—impelling his anthropomorphism through
sartorial means. The female cats, on the other hand, remain physically
feline, apart from their ability to talk. Puss’s boots are not particularly
splendid boots, either, but they have come to define the cat. It is worth
noting that Lestage, designer of those incredible boots for Louis XIV,
worked under the sign of the Loup Botté, or Wolf-in-Boots. DeJean notes
that “even his shop sign reeks of the fairy tale.”135 Is it coincidence, Loup
Botté and chat botté? It is a possible coincidence, but it does provide evi-
dence for the association of sartorially cunning animals with boots.
An 1844 edition of the tale, appearing to draw upon the Perrault and
Brothers Grimm tales, and illustrated by Otto Speckter, elaborates upon
the occasion of Puss’s boot-fitting. The illustrated plates are accompa-
nied by additional narrative text focusing, interestingly, upon the pleas-
urable sensations of fit and the pecuniary exchange involved. Plate III
(see Fig. 5.2) shows Puss sitting in a chair, being measured for his boots
by the shoemaker, a paw resting upon the shoemaker’s head. The latter,
kneeling before Puss, is utilising his size or measure stick. The text tells
us that puss addresses the youngest son, here called Theophilus:
In taking the measure, the shoemaker strokes Puss’s leg, which sets him
purring with pleasure, and he says, “Good Theophilus, I love you; you
never stroked me the wrong way; you let me sleep quietly in the sun; and
when your brothers wanted to teaze me, and carried me into the dark, in
order to see what they called electrical sparks, from my back, you always
opposed it.”136
The scene is practically erotic, including an odd reference to the cruel sci-
entific curiosity of the brothers. Plate IV shows Puss pulling on his new
footwear by the bootstraps, and the shoemaker even “puts on his specta-
cles to admire their excellent fit; at the same time holding out his hand to
receive the money for them.”137 It is most apt for Puss to be pulling on
his bootstraps, as he pulls himself up from poverty to comfort through
his own effort.
Fig. 5.2 Puss is fitted for boots. Illustration by Otto Speckter. Puss in Boots
(London: John Murray, 1844)
Ludwig Tieck’s odd drama Der gestiefelte Kater (1797), refer-

ring specifically to a booted tom cat, provides the cat’s explanation of
requiring boots: they earn him respect and make him appear more mas-
culine.138 In the Brothers Grimm’s later 1812 version, which shares
the title, the cat desires boots in order to go outside and mingle with
the public. Like Cinderella, he can only go into public space if prop-
erly attired, the right sartorial and gendered appearance allowing him
to interact with human society as a participant, rather than as an ani-
mal.139 The Brothers Grimm pick up the practical nature of the boots,
frequently referencing the cat’s act of putting on the boots before going
about his schemes. Indeed, the commissioning of the boots is itself
effortless since a shoemaker happens to be passing by and is readily
called over to fit the cat’s paws. The boots are neither magical nor, as
articulated in the tales, beautiful. In The Cruikshank Fairy-Book (1911),
a version of the tale does intriguingly suggest that the boots are already
available to Puss, being kept in the lumber cupboard: “a little pair of
boots that fitted Puss like a pair of gloves.”140 The reference, of course,
recalls the descriptions of the shoe fitting Cinderella’s foot. Yet, by and
large, the cat’s requirements have a whiff of the bourgeoisie or even the
working classes about them.
Angela Carter’s Puss in The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979),
on the other hand, is a flamboyant ginger tom. He tells of his caterwaul-
ing and how people throw vegetables and “slippers, shoes and boots”141
at him. His “fine, high, shining leather boots” were thrown at him by a
cavalry officer and “[t]heir high heels will click like castanets when Puss
takes his promenade upon the tiles.”142 Fashion weaves through the tale,
and the baroque language and erotic adventures are in sympathy with
Basile, Danielle M. Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega, reflecting that
“[b]y tarting up ‘Puss-in-Boots,’ Carter celebrates with Basile the vital
energies of life.”143 Carter, by playing upon a cat’s preoccupation with
grooming, allows her feline protagonist his own fashionable experience
and, thus, his own romance. At the end of the story, he has kittens of his
own.
By the time Carter writes, illustrators have for centuries taken Puss’s
practical boots and created objects of beauty. Christopher Betts says the
tale “belongs more to the picaresque tradition in literature, stories of the
enterprising rascal whose tricks are endearing rather than regrettable.”144
Thus, Puss is outfitted in charming style. The boots are most often tall
and most often top boots or cavalier boots, with a flamboyant cuff, as
they appear in the first publications of Perrault’s collections. Nesbit’s tale
in 1908 stipulates that they are “topboots with yellow heels,”145 which,
together with the bag concocted from a blue shirt, provide Puss with
quite a military air, playing off the miller’s son’s initial intention to be
a soldier. Such boots account for Puss’s confidence, Margo DeMello
remarking that “[b]ecause they were so wide, it was difficult to walk

in them; the gait of the men who wore them was called the ‘cavalier
swagger’.”146 Thus, Puss adopts a swaggering posture, making the con
artist an even more charming rogue.
Gustave Doré’s famous illustration of Puss (1862) presents a most ele-
gant chevalier in splendidly cuffed boots and a hat with a great plume;
albeit, a rather macabre chevalier in his necklace of bird heads, a mouse
hanging from his belt. Many other illustrators, including Cruikshank and
Arthur Rackham, provide Puss with an entire costume including a natty
jacket. Indeed, it can be difficult to locate a Puss without at least his cav-
alier boots. In this instance, where the literary descriptions have fallen
short, illustrators have provided the sartorial detail to the iconic boots,
lending Puss swagger.
So, Puss has become inseparable from his fine boots, his boots lending
him charm and agency. Perrault’s sartorial gesture has placed the spot-
light upon the con artist, celebrating Puss’s cunning manipulation of
social and political norms. Once equipped with boots, the cat is able to
lead the way to wealth and fame for the poor miller’s son, ensuring their
survival in a society of appearances.
Suffering in Iron
While many a hero treads a path to renown and riches in their dash-
ing footwear, unlucky and wicked heroes and villains are bound in iron
shoes. The concept of iron shoes is curious. Iron horse shoes are com-
mon and, certainly, a type of iron shoe is incorporated in armour, but the
iron shoe, like the Spanish Boot, remains distinct as an object of torture,
either punishing the wicked or testing the patience and endurance of the
unfortunate hero.
Today, the iron shoe is most often associated with Snow White’s
stepmother. Although the wicked queen thinks she has finally killed
Snow White with an apple, the hero’s corpse is carried off by a prince.
The apple in her throat is dislodged by the jostling she receives on the
road when a servant fumbles the coffin and the prince is consequently
delighted to be able to marry a living princess.147 When the wicked
queen attends the wedding of the princess she thought she’d killed, she
becomes petrified with fright. Iron shoes, hot from the fire, are brought
to her with tongs. Putting on the red-hot shoes, she dances till dead.
The rather macabre death sentence is a response to the underlying
themes of vanity in the tale and many do connect the red-hot iron shoes
with the red shoe motif. Indeed, those dancing red shoes are, here,
utterly horrifying.
Yet, iron shoes are more often placed upon a protagonist forced to
wear them for long periods of time, to even wear them out. Basile’s
“Lo turzo d’oro” (The Golden Trunk) is a forerunner of “Beauty and
the Beast” tales, a tale based on that of Cupid and Psyche. A peasant
girl comes across a spectacular palace and is offered marriage and hap-
piness by a slave. The slave turns into a handsome prince by night, his
skin, in addition, turning from black to white. In this early version, the
beast is simply a black man and the racist construction of the tale mir-
rors that of the frame tale, in which a black slave has fraudulently wed
a white prince. Having looked upon her lover, the girl is banished. To
recover her good fortune, she must, among other tasks, wear out seven
pairs of iron shoes. Laideronnette in d’Aulnoy’s “The Green Serpent”
is also forced into iron shoes for looking upon her beastly lover, this
time a serpent, and discovering a handsome man. The wicked fairy,
Magotine, carries her off and has her wear iron shoes half her size. The
shoes become a punishment, as in the “Snow White” tale, but one that
must be persevered with in order to be released. The iron shoes act as
prison and torture, only one that these protagonists must consciously
take with them as they move through life, as does the hero, Tabitha, in
El-Mohtar’s tale, as she strides the world thinking about shoes until she
finally chooses to take them off. Heroes cannot dance in these shoes—
they must suffer.
Such suffering is not solely for female heroes. Schönwerth’s “The Iron
Shoes” features a boy who is tormented in a house ruled by a woman
who, it transpires, is a cursed princess. Having survived the trials, he
breaks the curse and she marries him. However, when he goes home to
his father, who works for the king, he is feted with a festival, and the
knights are jealous of the handsome boy and disdain his bragging about
having a beautiful wife. So, Hans calls her. Irritated that he’s called her
for such a frivolous reason, he finds himself back in his old clothes with
only a pair of iron shoes. It is only once he wears them out looking for
her that she relents. Once again, the iron shoes are to be endured, test-
ing the patience and faithfulness of an erring lover.
Iron shoes as a motif are not grounded in fashion, neither does their
material magically adjust to the wearer, unless to pinch and rub the foot
better. These are the shoes of fashionable nightmares.
A Moment for Facardin
Hamilton’s “The Four Facardins” parodies the shoe fetish represented in
seventeenth-century fairy tales. Sapinella of Jutland is a reputed beauty
who cannot obtain slippers to fit. Driven insane by ill-fitting slippers, she
demands her father hang all the cobblers. As a result, and quite under-
standably, foreign shoemakers will not supply her, either. The king
decrees that whoever can fit her will wed her, although failure again
results in hanging. It is also revealed that one of the Facardins of the tale
has found a shoe of delicate make with a diamond buckle: “I was tolera-
bly certain, that I had not found the shoe of a goddess; but I determined
to discover the mortal, if it were possible, whose foot could be worthy to
wear so delicately formed a slipper.”148 Facardin reflects at a later point:
“This slipper was in truth a masterpiece, no less in respect to shape than
size and elegance. I could not look at it without emotion, though I was
convinced that it was made solely to display the artist’s workmanship,
and could not have been designed for the use of any human being.”149
The two descriptions suggest that the woman who wears such a shoe
must be a rare beauty—indeed, a work of art. The shoe and the (unseen/
unknown) woman become metonymically associated.
The objectification of the woman through the shoe reoccurs in the
fetishist obsession evident in Cinderella tales. Facardin does locate the
beauty to whom the shoe belongs, a nymph in classic hunting dress, her
petticoat fixed above a knee with a buckle like that of the slipper. The
nymph addresses Facardin, “[y]ou have found my slipper […] and your
presumption in touching it is expiated in some degree by the intrepidity
with which you asserted your claim to it.”150 She has him try the shoe
on her foot to prove her ownership, mimicking the shoe test, but on her
own terms, and accuses him of “gross and sensual desires.”151 In order
to determine his suitability as her rescuer and lover, she charges him to
search the world to find either another foot to fit her shoe, a woman
who loves him, or a high-flying cock. The hero after some failures resorts
to the latter, consequently concealing the shoe in a marvellous helmet he
has made: “this cock enriched with diamonds, clapping his wings, and in
the act of crowing, conceals the wonderful shoe, which I shall now offer
to your admiration.”152 He is later described as someone “who made
himself extremely ridiculous by his admiration of a lady’s slipper, which
he wore in his helmet.”153 He becomes a figure of fun. For Hamilton,
this is a parody of every prince who has desired a shoe for its own sake,
or in the expectation of the beauty of its wearer.
Conclusion: If the Shoe Fits

The shoes of fairy tale are remarkable fashion objects, whose amazing
qualities and materials are able to transform protagonists from barefoot
nobodies into heroes of renown. Fairy tale shoes are capable of inde-
pendent action and can so often provide the hero with all they desire,
or carry them off into damnation. The truly autonomous figures of fairy
tale are, however, the fairies. These are the figures who so often provide
the footwear and other sartorial means. Chapter 6 examines the role of
the fairies in fashion, as patrons, storytellers, and witches, tracing the
intriguing path from beauty and power to old age and villainy.
Notes
1. While Men at Arms is not a fairy-tale novel, it does draw upon fairy-tale
themes, including secret heirs to the throne, apparently magical weap-
ons, and the wedding of an upwardly mobile “peasant”—or, in this case,
watchperson. In any case, Vimes’ theory is particularly relevant to the
concerns of this chapter. Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms (London: Victor
Gollancz, 2014), 28.
2. Pratchett, Men, 27.
3. Stella Gibbons, Nightingale Wood (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 126.
4. Stefania Ricci, ed., The Amazing Shoemaker: Fairy Tales and Legends
about Shoes and Shoemakers, trans. Sylvia Adrian Notini, Darcy Di Mona,
Paul Metcalfe, Lauren Sunstein, and Ian Sutton (Milan: Skira Editore,
2013), 10.
5. Ricci, Amazing Shoemaker, 11.
6. The platform shoe is significant in the history of fairy tale’s shoes, as this
chapter will show.
7. Justine Harman, “Exclusive: Jimmy Choo, Nicholas Kirkwood, and
More Reimagine Cinderella’s Glass Slipper: Dreams Do Come True:
You Can Actually Buy Them in March,” Elle, February 10, 2015,
http://www.elle.com/fashion/accessories/news/g25673/jimmy-choo-
stuart-weitzman-cinderella/.
8. Michael Patrick King, dir., Sex and the City, 2008, iTunes.
9. Once Upon a Time, “The Price of Gold,” dir. David Solomon, writ.
David H. Goodman, 2012, iTunes.
10. Charles Deslys’ Les bottes vernies de Cendrillon (1865) spins the tale in a
rather different sartorial direction by featuring patent leather boots. The
frontispiece shows the fashionable boots, with tassels and pointed toes,
easily resting upon the palm of a hand. Once again, a curious crossover
of Cinderella and Puss in Boots is suggested. Carles Deslys, Les bottes
vernies de Cendrillon (Paris: Librairie Achille Faure, 1865), BnF Gallica.
11. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil, “Introduction: A Long Walk: Shoes,

People and Places,” in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers,
ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 12.
12. Hilary Davidson, for instance, has delivered talks on this topic.
13. William A. Rossi, The Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1977), 13.
14. Kathryn A. Hoffmann, “Perrault’s ‘Cendrillon’ Among the Glass
Tales: Crystal Fantasies and Glassworks in Seventeenth-Century
France and Italy,” in Cinderella Across Cultures: New Directions and
Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Martine Hennard Dutheil de la
Rochère, Gillian Lathey, and Monika Woźniak (Detroit: Wayne State
15. There is no mention of any injuries resulting from the volley. Laura
Valentine, The Old Old Fairy Tales (New York: A. L. Burt, 1902), 25.
16. Sue Blundell, “Beneath Their Shining Feet: Shoes and Sandals in
Classical Greece,” in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed.
Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 46.
17. Blundell, “Shining Feet,” 41.
18. Desmond Morris, The Naked Woman: A Study of the Female Body (New
York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 252.
19. Wilfred Mark Webb, The Heritage of Dress: Being Notes on the History
and Evolution of Clothes (London: E. Grant Richards, 1907), 177.
20. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, “Introduction,” in Footnotes: On
Shoes, ed. Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2001), 11.
21. This is discussed in Hilary Davidson’s chapter, “Holding the Sole:
Shoes, Emotions and the Supernatural,” in Feeling Things: Objects and
Emotions Through History, ed. Stephanie Downes, Sally Holloway, and
Sarah Randles, 72–93 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2018.
22. Elizabeth Semmelhack, Heights of Fashion: A History of the Elevated
Shoe (Toronto: Bata Shoe Museum; Pittsburg: Gutenberg Periscope
Publishing, 2008), 21.
23. There is a distinctive shoe test in Calvino’s “The Bejeweled Boot,”
the heroine actually reversing the impetus of the test. The heroine’s
brother is shocked when his enemy alleges that he has slept with her, an
allegation the brother refutes. The king insists that both men must prove
their case. The heroine purchases just one jeweled boot, which she
wears to confront her brother’s enemy before the king, her other foot
merely in its stocking. She accuses him of sleeping with her and then
stealing her boot. Her accusation tricks him into denying knowledge
of her, which he had previously claimed in a more biblical sense, result-
ing in his death. The king then marries the beautiful sister. This is a
craftier heroine than Cinderella, but she nonetheless still marries a king.
Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales, trans. George Martin (San Diego:
Harcourt, 1980).
25. Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 2009), 89. Andersen’s “Lykkens
Kalosker” (The Galoshes of Fortune, 1838) features a pair of time-and-
space travelling galoshes. Left in a cloakroom by two fairies disguised
as maids, the galoshes pass from man to man. The men are taken to
such times and places as the Middle Ages and the moon before the fair-
ies redeem the galoshes. Where normally such galoshes would provide
escape or opportunity, Andersen’s tale counsels that people should be
content in their current situation, as they’ll only be miserable, or even
die, if they get what they wish—a counsel that runs counter to the spirit
of fairy tale. The galoshes themselves are rather more flexible, and so
can be worn by different feet.
26. In fact, the shoes with bells that Basile’s other hero, Viola, has made are
also called chianelle, their tall, probably wooden soles contributing to
the loud noise made when she stumps about the room. Her wearing of
the chianelle, although in aid of a prank, does also lead directly to the
prince’s capitulation and their marriage.
27. Raffaele D’Ambra, Vocabolario Napolitano-Toscano domestico di arti e
mestieri (A spese dell’Autore, 1873), 120, Internet Archive.
28. Elizabeth Semmelhack, “Above the Rest: Chopines as Trans-
Mediterranean Fashion,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 14,
no. 2 (2013): 120, Taylor & Francis Online. As Semmelhack notes, the
“honest courtesan” of Venice was expected to have the appearance of a
respectable noblewoman (“Above the Rest,” 134). Zezolla herself seems
to embody both the noblewoman and the courtesan.
29. In Basile, Tale of Tales, 87.
30. Andrea Vianello, “Courtly Lady or Courtesan? The Venetian Chopine
in the Renaissance,” in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed.
Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 88.
31. In La Force’s “Fairer Than a Fairy,” on one of the hero’s adven-
tures, her beloved, Phratis, turns himself into an eagle. He takes one
of her slippers (La Force uses the same term, pantoufle, as Perrault
in his Cinderella tale) to carry water of immortality to her friend,
Princess Désirs, likewise served impossible tasks by a wicked fairy.
The occurrence of the eagle may be coincidental—and certainly, there is
no requirement for the hero’s shoe to fit her friend’s foot—however, it
is a notable echo of the tales of antiquity. Charlotte-Rose de Caumont

La Force and Louise de Bossigny Auneuil, Fées, contes des contes: Plus
belle que fée, Persinette, L’enchanteur, Tourbillon, Vert et Bleu, Le pays
des délices, La puissance d’amour, La bonne femme (Amsterdam; Paris,
1785), 15–16.
32. Semmelhack, Heights of Fashion, 5–6.
33. Vianello, “Courtly Lady,” 92.
34. Semmelhack, “Above the Rest,” 133.
35. Vianello, “Courtly Lady,” 92. D’Aulnoy’s hero wears a velvet mule and
it is amusing to note that the Dictionnaire de L’Académie françoise
(1694) lists a proverb, Faire patte de velours, an expression evoking the
image of a cat retracting its claws. Académie françoise, Le dictionnaire
de l’Académie françoise, dédié au Roy, vol. 2. M–Z (Parison: Vve J. B.
Coignard et J. B. Coignard, 1694b), 618. Perhaps she is more like
“Cinderella Cat” than we assume.
Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (New York: W. W. Norton
& Co., 2001), 448. Taylor also chooses this translation. Giambattista
Basile, The Pentamerone, or The Story of Stories, Fun for the Little Ones,
trans. John Edward Taylor (London: David Bogue, 1850), 70.
37. Académie françoise, Le dictionnaire, 175. The pantoufle does also
refer to the house slipper. In a rather wonderful example, The Lady’s
Magazine in 1833 reports on Parisian fashions: “The only chaussure for
the house, digne d’une elégante, are pantoufles, embroidered in tapes-
try work; they are mostly done in fine English lambswool: the dessins
preferred are cachemire patterns, flowers, or scenes from the celebrated
tales of Mother Goose, Little Poucet, le Chat Botté, & c,” describing
this as “trop bizarre, mais le mode fait tout.” The Lady’s Magazine and
Museum of the belles-lettres, fine arts, music, drama, fashions, &c., Paris,
May 21st and 25th, June 1833, 298.
38. Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion,
Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (New York:
Free Press, 2005), 102.
40. Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, Oeuvres meslées (Paris:
J. Guignard, 1696), 235, BnF Gallica.
41. Roger Lancelyn Green re-tells Rhodopis’ story as “The Girl with the
Rose-red Slippers,” in Tales of Ancient Egypt: Selected and Retold by
Roger Lancelyn Green (1967), which provides a curious Cinderella-ish
echo of both Zezolla and Finette’s taste in footwear.
42. Will Bashor, Marie Antoinette’s Head: The Royal Hairdresser, the Queen
and the Revolution (Guildford, UK: Lyons Press, 2013), 37.
43. Bashor, Marie, 36.

44. DeJean, Essence, 101–102.
History of the Fairy Tale (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001),
34–35.
46. Gretchen Schultz and Lewis Seifert, eds. and trans., Fairy Tales for the
Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition
47. Maria Giuseppe Muzzarelli, “Sumptuous Shoes: Making and Wearing in
Medieval Italy,” in Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. Giorgio
Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 62.
48. Muzzarelli, “Sumptuous Shoes,” 62–67.
50. Semmelhack, Heights, 21.
51. Carol Lee, Ballet in Western Culture: A History of its Origins and
Evolution (New York: Routledge, 2002), 104.
52. Hilary Davidson, “Sex and Sin: The Magic of Red Shoes,” in Shoes:
A History from Sandals to Sneakers, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil
(Oxford: Berg, 2006), 288.
53. Davidson, “Sex,” 278.
54. In Chris Roberson and Shawn McManus’ metafictional Cinderella
comic “Fashion Disaster” (2010), Cinderella, now aptly a spy, has been
neglecting her shoe store, Glass Slipper Shoes. In her absence, her
employee, Cordwainer, his name deriving from that of a shoemaker,
does a deal with some elves to produce a range of shoes that act very
much like Andersen’s red shoes, with running shoes, for instance, run-
ning for the wearer. The storyline also, of course, recalls the Brothers
Grimm’s “The Elves.” In the subsequent comic, “Suffregette City”
(2010), Cordwainer is surrounded by angry customers who all appear
to be women and all of whom can’t remove their shoes, some climb-
ing the walls in hiking boots, and a sad ballerina unable to stop danc-
ing. The inherent moral of the tale is altered into one of commercial
greed on the part of the salesman, thus the comics reassign blame from
the victim of the shoes to the economic system that has benefitted from
her desire for shoes. Chris Roberson and Shawn McManus, Cinderella:
From Fabletown with Love (New York: DC Comics, 2010).
55. There is a similar dynamic in the English tale of Goody Two-Shoes.
A young girl and her brother are orphaned but look for work so dil-
igently and behave so well that a noble gentleman befriends them.
Margery, who has been making do with one shoe in her poverty, is
given two shoes and is so pleased by these shoes, she tells everyone to
look at her two shoes, thus earning her nickname. Margery becomes
a veritable paragon of virtue, opening schools, caring for animals,

becoming knowledgeable about science and health care. Her name
is synonymous with an overabundance of virtue, rather than fashion,
for her actual shoes are rarely described—an 1825 edition published
by John Harris mentions they have fashionable strings for tying them
on—and have no further place in the narrative beyond supplying her
famous nomenclature. Goody Two Shoes; or, the History of Little Margery
Meanwell in Rhyme (London: John Harris, 1825), 18.
Co., 1999), 235.
57. Davidson, “Sex,” 276.
59. English translations often refer to red rosettes, indicating instead the
fashion for shoe ornamentation.
60. Cristina Bacchilega, “Whetting Her Appetite: What’s a ‘Clever’ Woman
to Do in the Grimms’ Collection?” in Transgressive Tales: Queering the
Grimms, ed. Kay Turner and Pauline Greenill (Detroit: Wayne State
61. Andersen’s, “Den flyvende Kuffert” (The Flying Trunk, 1839), closely
resembles the tale, but there are significant differences and the prince
leaves with only slippers.
62. Notice that the silver shoes in Baum’s novel have also taken on the
designation of “slippers,” even though they are pumps in the film. This
is possibly the influence of the Cinderella narrative upon Baum’s Oz
fairy tales.
63. L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago: Geo M. Hill
Co., 1900), 25. Internet Archive.
64. Baum, The Wonderful Wizard, 32.
67. Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the
West (New York: ReganBooks, 1995), 3.
68. Maguire, Wicked, 406.
69. Jack Zipes, ed. and trans., The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From
the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Company, 2013), 314.
70. There are various translations of seidene Strümpfe mit silbernen Zwickeln,
concerning how the stockings are worked, but Flügel’s Complete
Dictionary of the German and English Languages (1843) does define
Zwickel as clocks or gusset seams and, as embroidered gusset seams
were, in effect, clocks, this would be consistent with the fashions of the
time. The stockings in “Hans mein Igel” (Hans-My-Hedgehog, 1815),

Zwickelstrümpfe, are referred to more regularly as clocked. Johann
Gottfried Flügel, C. A. Feiling, and A. Heimann, Flügel’s Complete
Dictionary of the German and English Languages (London: Whittaker &
Co; Dulau & Co., and D. Nutt, 1843), 773.
71. See, for example, Dans les armoires de l’impératrice Joséphine: La collec-
tion de costumes féminins du château de Malmaison,  Musée national du
château de Malmaison & Bois-Préau, 2016–2017.
72. Fiona Ffoulkes, “‘Quality always distinguishes itself’: Louis Hippolyte
LeRoy and the Luxury Clothing Industry in Early Nineteenth-Century
Paris,” in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850,
ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1999), 184, 194.
73. Geneviève Chastenet, Marie-Louise, l’otage de Napoléon (Paris: Perrin,
2005), 100.
74. La Belle Assemblée, 12.84, May, 1816, 224–225.
75. Karin Wurst, “Fashion,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850,
vols. 1 and 2, A–Z, ed. Christopher John Murray (New York: Fitzroy
Dearborn, 2004), 339.
76. Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in
the Era of Goethe (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), 26.
Purdy provides an excellent account of the English and French influ-
ence upon German fashion, particularly through Das Journal des Luxus
und der Moden. He even cites the Brothers Grimm themselves in defin-
ing Mode as, in part, “the altering taste in how to dress oneself,” thus
illuminating the Brothers Grimm’s own approach to defining fashion
(Tyranny of Elegance, 54).
77. Nancy Rexford, “The Perils of Choice: Women’s Footwear in
Nineteenth-Century America,” in Shoes: A History from Sandals to
Sneakers, ed. Giorgio Riello and Peter McNeil (Oxford: Berg, 2006),
141.
78. Philippe Séguy, “Costume in the Age of Napoleon,” in The Age of
Napoleon: Costume from Revolution to Empire, 1789–1815, ed. Katell
le Bourhis (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N.
Abrams, 1989), 101.
79. Arthur Waley, The Secret History of the Mongols and Other Pieces (Kelly
Bray: House of Stratus, 2002), 158.
80. Shawn C. Jarvis, and Jeannine Blackwell, eds. and trans., The Queen’s
Mirror: Fairy Tales by German Women, 1780–1900 (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2001), 262.
81. See Davidson, “Holding the Sole,” for her insight into the golden shoes
worn by Cinderellas.
82. The Mirror of the Graces; Or, The English Lady’s Costume: Combining
and Harmonizing Taste and Judgment, Elegance and Grace, Modesty,
Simplicity and Economy, with Fashion in Dress (New York: I. Riley,
1813), 123, Google Books.
83. The Mirror, 123–124.
84. The Lady’s Magazine, 298.
85. Nesbit informs her readers that shoes weren’t ready-made, but custom
fit, at the time, thereby explaining the mechanics of the shoe test. Of
course, her explanation isn’t true—shoes were available from shops and
fit remained questionable—but Nesbit further reflects that such magical
slippers would fit no one but Cinderella “even if the country had been
full of shops selling Rats’ Ready-made Reliable Boots.” Edith Nesbit,
The Old Nursery Stories, reprint (London: Humphrey Milford; Oxford
University Press, 1930), 17. As Nesbit suggests, fit is not simply practi-
cal in the fairy tales, but magical.
86. Riello and McNeil, “Introduction,” 9.
87. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the
Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 205.
88. Christine A. Jones, “Thoughts on ‘Heroinism’ in French Fairy Tales,”
Marvels & Tales 27, no. 1 (2013): 19, Project MUSE.
89. “Modes,” Mercure Galant, September, 1693, 201–210, BnF Gallica.
90. Nesbit, Old, 16.
91. Pumps and court shoes developed from the shoes worn with uniforms
and in court, and properly emerged in the twentieth century.
92. Emily Yahr, “Yes, Wearing That Cinderella Dress ‘Was Like Torture’
for Star Lily James,” The Washington Post, March 16, 2015, https://
www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2015/
03/16/yes-wearing-that-cinderella-dress-was-like-torture-for-star-lily-
james/?utm_term=.43acd97952cf.
93. Lorraine Ali, “Sandy Powell Has a Ball with ‘Cinderella’s’ Gowns, Petticoats
and Slipper,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 2015, https://www.press-
reader.com/usa/los-angeles-times/20150111/283588103736507.
94. Gooch, John, Court shoe, 1897, label: 2000.28.187, Northampton
Museums and Art Gallery.
95. Charles Walters, dir., The Glass Slipper, MGM, 1955; Warner Archive,
2012, DVD.
96. Hoffmann, “Perrault’s,” 61.
99. Zipes, Golden Age, 313.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 203n130.

105. Paul Lacroix and Alphonse Duchesne, Histoire de la chaussure, depuis
l’antiquité la plus reculée jusqu’à nos jours, suivie de l’histoire sérieuse et
drôlatique des cordonniers et des artisans dont la profession se rattache à la
cordonnerie (Paris: Seré, 1852), 189, BnF Gallica.
106. Lacroix and Duchesne, Histoire, 192.
107. Charles Giraud, “Lettre Critique,” in Les Contes Des Fées en prose et en
vers de Charles Perrault, 2nd ed. (Lyon: Imprimerie Louis Perrin,
1865), lvi. My thanks to Hilary Davidson for drawing my attention to
this example.
108. Leone Levi, “Report on Silk Manufactures, Shawls, Lace and
Embroidery, Hosiery, Clothing for both Sexes and Dress in Different
Countries—(Classes, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, and 92),” in Reports on the
Paris Universal Exhibition, 1867, Vol. 3, by Royal Commission for
the Paris Exhibition (1867) (London: George E. Eyre and William
Spottiswoode, 1868), 88, Internet Archive.
109. Académie françoise, Le dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, dédié au Roy,
vol. 1, A–L (Parison: Vve J. B. Coignard et J. B. Coignard, 1694a), 523.
110. Colleen Hill, Fairy Tale Fashion (New Haven: Yale University Press;
New York: The Fashion Institute of Technology, 2016), 50.
111. “Fashion: New Shoes for Cinderella,” Vogue, March 1, 1919, 47. Hill
also cites this example as evidence.
112. George Buchanan Fife, “That Satin Slipper,” Vogue, December 28,
1893, 320.
113. Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, Five Old Friends and a Young Prince
(London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1868), 66.
114. Armstrong, Glass Worlds, 205.
115. George Cruikshank, Illustrator, The Cruikshank Fairy-Book: Four Famous
Stories (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), 172, 175, Internet Archive.
116. The History of Cinderella; or the Little Glass Slipper (Glasgow, 1852), 9.
117. Henry W. Dulcken, Our Favourite Fairy Tales and Famous Histories: Told
for the Hundredth Time (London: Ward & Lock, 1858), 281.
118. Armstrong, Glassworlds, 207.
119. The slippers resemble those of Disney’s Cinderella (1950). They are the
shape of a fashionable pump, popular at the time of the film’s release,
but with the raised tongue. Like Disney’s animated pump, they are
transparent, though the glass is engraved with patterns.
120. Honoré de Balzac, Catherine de’ Medici, trans. Katharine Prescott
Wormeley (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1894), 53–54, Internet Archive.
121. James Robinson Planché, trans., Fairy Tales, by Perrault, de Villeneuve,

Routledge & Sons, 1869), 521.
122. Hoffmann, “Perrault’s.”
126. Frances Freeling Broderip, The Daisy and Her Friends: Simple Tales and
Stories for Children (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1869), 31.
127. Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (London: Corgi, 1992), 272.
128. Pratchett, Witches, 272. Inevitably, however, a fashion trend for socks
worn with heels emerged around 2013 and continues strongly into
2018.
133. Perrault, Complete Fairy Tales, 125.
134. Perrault’s other anthropomorphised animal is the wolf who, while
“undressed” in Perrault’s tale of Little Red Riding Hood, over time
adopts drag, as in the Jeanette and Marie Hassenpflug version of
“Rothkäppchen” (Little Red Cap, 1812) collected by the Brothers
Grimm. The Hassenpflugs had a Huguenot background and it is
notable that Jeanette Hassenpflug is also the source for the Brothers
Grimm’s Puss in Boots.
136. Puss in Boots (London: John Murray, 1844).
137. Puss in Boots.
138. Ludwig Tieck, Tiecks Werke, vol. 1, ed. J. Minor (Berlin: Verlag von W.
Spemann, 1900), 10–11.
139. The sex change undergone in the tales speaks, perhaps, to the greater
agency men had in financial and political matters. The earlier female cats
could contrive much through cunning, but the swagger of the male cats
in the patriarchal halls of power assures their own interests, as well as
those of their mentees.
140. Cruikshank, Cruickshank, 10.
141. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (London: Vintage
Books, 2006), iBook.
142. Carter, Bloody.
143. Danielle Marie Roemer and Cristina Bacchilega, “Introduction,” in
Angela Carter and the Fairy Tale, ed. Danielle Marie Roemer and
Cristina Bacchilega (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 15.
144. Perrault, Complete, xxxiv.
146. Margo DeMello, Feet & Footwear: A Cultural Encyclopedia (Santa
Barbara: Greenwood Press, 2009), 46.
147. In the 1812 version, the prince carries the coffin and the dead princess
to his castle, where his servants carry it about so that he is never apart
from it. This annoys them so much that a servant lifts Snow White out
of the coffin and shoves her so that the apple is dislodged. The prince
and Snow White then eat dinner. The treatment of Snow White’s corpse
is highly irregular.
148. Anthony Hamilton, Fairy Tales and Romances, trans. M. Lewis, H. T.
Ryde, and C. Kenney (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), 16.
151. Hamilton, Fairy Tales, 23. The relation between shoes and sex was far
from subtle and not uncommon. James Gillray’s print, Fashionable
Contrasts; -or- The Duchess’s Little Shoe yielding to the Magnitude of the
Duke’s Foot (1792) from later in the century, for example, illustrates
the feet of the Duke and Duchess of York in a copulating pose, the tiny
red shoes with their gold and gemstone decoration, positioned either
side of large, black shoes with gold buckles. James Gillray, Fashionable
Contrasts; -or- the duchess’s little shoe yielding to the magnitude of the
duke’s foot (London: Hannah Humphrey), January 24, 1792, British
Museum Satires 8058 (http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/col-
lection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1477519&par-
tId=1). It is worth bearing in mind that this was a satirical print,
mocking the smallness of the Duchess’s feet and its sexual connotations.
CHAPTER 6
What the Fairies Wore: Sartorial Means

and Darkest Villainies
Sartorial wherewithal is the fairies’ largesse. Finding a fairy to provide

appropriate clothing to attend a ball, appear at court, or simply to appear
upon the public stage is a sensible strategy for an upwardly mobile
hero, or a hero seeking to reclaim their status. Angela Carter describes
Perrault’s fairies as “women of independent means who’ve done quite
well for themselves, one way and another, and are prepared to help along
a little sister who finds herself in difficulties, personages as worldly-wise
and self-confident as Mae West.”1 Perrault’s fairies are not atypical: fairies
across the tales are powerful, independent, female entities, sophisticated
and shrewd. They are not the ethereal fairies in gossamer gowns and
wings popularised since the Victorian era.2 These are fairies of physical
passion and material power.
Scholars have often observed that fairy tales set women against
women; Zipes, for instance, attributing this to patriarchal framing.3
This position, however, understates the pervasiveness of powerful
patronage offered by the preponderance of female fairies in the early
modern tales: patronage, in turn, reflecting the relationships between
authors and their patrons and peers during the French fairy-tale vogue.
The society of women at court and in the salons was marked not only by
privilege, but also by ties of mutual affection, respect, and good offices
that extended beyond the domestic sphere. The relationships between
women that exist beyond family are significant, and are evident in the
tales of Straparola and Basile, too. In many tales, heroes rely upon the
wealth and advice of women outside the home and it is when these

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4_6
powerful benefactors are erased or sidelined that female heroes, in par-

ticular, are forced into more passive roles. The fairies exist in a political
realm of their own, allowing them to disrupt patriarchal power structures
that they encounter in their dealings with their protégées. The fantastical
wardrobes of fairy tale are in the hands of fairies, too: they control trans-
formation through the allocation of fashion. Yet, the sartorial appearance
of the fairies themselves is rarely examined in any depth, despite their
unique position as fashion influencers, the Diana Vreelands and Carmel
Snows of fairy tale. In the sartorial games of power and display, the fair-
ies hold unique cards and this chapter turns from the main protagonists
to examine how and what the fairies wear.
The conteuses viewed their fairies as fashionable, both in attitude and
in dress. It was a direct rebuke to patriarchal critique. D’Aulnoy’s sec-
ond 1698 collection places the fashionable fairies in the title. Duggan
observes that while fashion was regularly censured in the works of
authors such as Perrault, Fénelon, and Maintenon, “d’Aulnoy has pos-
itive characters guiltlessly adorn themselves.”4 Murat argues in the
Histoires sublimes et allégoriques preface to her peers that the old fair-
ies were ill-dressed compared with the gallantly and richly clothed new
fairies.5 The modern fairies were creatures of fashion and Murat’s use of
galant in terms of dress, a term also used by her peers, indicates not only
graceful and adept dressing, but also a coquettish woman, or a gesture
providing pleasure.6 The modern fairies made of themselves a specta-
cle, a sartorial stratagem in common with royalty: it is not for nothing
that Murat added that the modern fairies live in the courts of royalty
and enchanted palaces.7 Rich, luxurious dress was the privilege of class
and wealth and, as Hunt indicates, “[u]nder the ancient fashion régime,
extravagance in clothing signified aristocratic power and privilege.”8
By wearing and dispersing sartorial extravagance, the fairies control the
sartorial power of the universe. This chapter examines how the fairies
exerted this control and those fairies who rejected “mainstream” fashion
in an awesome rebellion against cultural norms.
The Sartorial Gift of the Fairies

The fairies actually draw upon the medieval roots of what Heller speaks
of as “gift fantasy.”9 In such texts, magical women fall in love with insol-
vent men and so provide them with the wherewithal to gain status, thus
“[n]ew clothes make the man, pleasing the generous lover as well as
6 WHAT THE FAIRIES WORE: SARTORIAL MEANS AND DARKEST VILLAINIES 227
guaranteeing status at court. However, at this point in the later twelfth

century, the effective way to imagine a man shopping for himself was to
provide him with a wealthy fairy lover.”10 Or a cat. Such a dynamic is evi-
dent in d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat,” in which the powerfully enchanted
princess, the titular White Cat herself, gifts great wealth and miraculous
treasures to the young prince, a youngest son who must compete with
his older siblings on multiple quests, such as referenced in Chapter 3,
in order to inherit his father’s throne. The prince arrives by chance at the
White Cat’s château, wet through from his travels. Her servants remove
his wet things and dress him in a shirt of superior quality—fit for a wed-
ding day, the day on which one’s richest clothing would be worn—
and a dressing gown of gold taffetas glacé, embroidered in figures of
small emeralds.11 Once they have completed his toilette, they dress
him in much richer clothing than he had been wearing (see Fig. 6.1).
The prince sojourns periodically in the château of the White Cat.
Each visit she lavishes him with affection and luxury, and provides him
with a wondrous object to fulfil his latest quest. While not a fairy her-
self, the White Cat is enchanted and her circumstances are the work of
the fairies, who punish her with a feline form while, at the same time,
installing her in extraordinary luxury.
The gift culture in fairy tale is, however, most often based upon the
relationship between women, and the fairies themselves use sartorial
stratagems in their role as benefactors. Their assistance can be actively
sought. Early Cinderellas such as Zezolla and Finette provide some ser-
vice, or make suitable gestures of respect to the fairies, drawing upon
already established relationships outside their immediate family circle.
Fairy tale’s gift culture extends beyond established relationships, though,
and here a fairy may observe and test women she happens to encounter,
slipping into disguise before opening her wardrobe.
The fairies frequently make their first impressions as lowly animals or
poor, elderly women. They present themselves as humble, even abject
figures. It is a calculated move, their humble state repelling the selfish
and greedy, but attracting the generosity of the kind and self-effacing.
Goodness is so often presented as an innate quality of high birth, par-
ticularly in d’Aulnoy’s tales, with Duggan arguing that, by re-writing the
peasants and working class heroes of Straparola and Perrault as aristo-
crats, d’Aulnoy represents nobility as “a stable and absolute concept pro-
tected by fairy magic.”12 However, goodness itself is not inevitable, as
in “Belle Belle; ou, Le Chevalier Fortuné” (Belle-Belle; or, the Chevalier
Fig. 6.1 The Prince is dressed in the château of the White Cat. Contes de Fées
(Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1875)
Fortuné, 1698). When a king institutes conscription, a poor, elderly

nobleman is unable to serve, or even to pay the fine for not serving. His
three daughters conspire in attempting to masquerade as men and each
sets out to join the army in his place. When Belle-Belle’s older sisters
encounter along the way an old shepherdess in trouble, they fail to assist
her and, in light of their heartlessness, she puts an end to their adven-
tures by calling out their fraud. The sisters are all beautiful, all sympa-
thetic to their father’s financial misfortunes, all content to live a rustic
life, and all willing to save their father by masquerading as a soldier. All
that separates the equally high-born sisters is the fairy’s test. Only the
youngest, Belle-Belle, stops to help the poor shepherdess retrieve her
sheep. Once she has passed the test, the fairy lets the old skin fall and
presents her true, youthful, and stunning form. Her clothing of blue
velvet is lined in ermine and her hair is arranged with pearls beneath
a crown. The Rigaud portrait of Louis XIV (1701) shows the king in
blue velvet lined with ermine, bearing out that, together with her crown,
the fairy’s “ordinary” face is absolutely regal. In return for her charita-
ble service, Belle-Belle receives a horse with luxurious tack and a trunk
containing abundant clothing and swords to maintain her disguise as a
chevalier. Belle-Belle’s willingness to dive into a ditch to save a sheep for
a poor shepherdess provides her with the best resources to secure her
fortune. The fairy’s disguise thus allows her to detect the crucial ability
to serve and empathise with the poor and abject, and the fairy bestows
her largesse accordingly.
This use of disguise has re-emerged in Disney films, fairy godmothers
first appearing as poor, old women, their transformations into regal fig-
ures commensurate with the revelation of their true power. A fairy god-
mother arrives at the castle door and appeals for shelter in the guise of
an old woman during the prelude of Beauty and the Beast (1991). When
the prince dismisses her gift of a rose and turns her away, she transforms
in order to pronounce his curse. She is a regal figure, splendidly gowned
in green with long blonde hair and a crown. In Cinderella (2015),
the fairy godmother appears first as an inconspicuous, hooded, elderly
woman, who then asks for something simple to eat. Cinderella, denied
the opportunity to go to the ball, wipes away her tears and offers the old
woman a cup of milk. The fairy godmother has a drink, a good burp,
and then decides to “slip into something more comfortable.”13 Just
like the fairy who chooses Belle-Belle, her usual dress is magnificent: a
cross between the robe à la polonaise with its billowing looped skirts, fit-
ted bodice, and tight sleeves, and Elizabethan dress with its great ruff at
the collar. The dress is alight with crystals and LED lights, and she has a
tiara and crystals in her hair: this fairy godmother literally sparkles. Her
costume absorbs centuries of fairy tale, from the royal prestige of ancien
régime fairies to more recent fashions for sparkles and wings, the latter
de rigueur in a fairy’s ensemble since the Victorian era. In both films,
the protagonist is evaluated through their treatment of an old peasant
woman: the fairies have the power to physically and materially transform
those they encounter according to their judgement.
Fairies do not only disguise themselves as old women, however, and
D’Aulnoy’s fairies also choose zoological forms. The half-fairy of “La
Grenouille Bienfaisante” (The Benevolent Frog, 1698) appears as a
coquettish amphibian, unable to assume human form, but nonetheless a

figure of goodness who repays the Queen’s kindness in rescuing her from
a raven. A fairy tests the heart of the queen in “The Good Little Mouse”
by appearing in her prison in mouse form. The queen’s generosity, such as
in feeding the rodent her meagre dinner, assures the fairy that she can act
without selfish motivation and, thus, she is aided and abetted. The fairy
of the fountain of d’Aulnoy’s “The Doe in the Woods” is a much more
complicated creature. She positively delights in appearing as a large cray-
fish, “l’écrevisse” sometimes translated as “lobster” in English editions.14
A lamenting queen, unable to have children, is somewhat perturbed to
be addressed by a speaking crayfish, so the fairy reverts to the form of an
old lady.15 Her white clothing is lined with crimson, green ribbons deco-
rate her grey hair, and she thus presents a rich, colourful display. Mansel,
in accounting for the splendour of Louis XIV’s court, indicates that
“[t]here was a fashion for ribbons in France: the French wore them on
hats, sleeves, petticoat breeches, canes, swords and high-heeled shoes.”16
In “The Good Little Mouse,” Joliette’s dress is decorated with one
thousand yards of ribbon, something that wouldn’t be unimagina-
ble. The fairy of the fountain’s beribboned coiffure thus establishes her
well in regal and fashionable style. Her air is also gallant, coquettish.
She freely advises the Queen to follow her to the fairies’ palace to enlist
their aid in solving her fertility woes. The scene at the palace is some-
what atypical: the fairies offer curtsies to the queen and do not test her,
simply promising her a daughter. However, when the fairy of the foun-
tain’s good favour is spurned—the queen fails to invite her to celebrate
the princess’s birth—she again appears in her crayfish form: in fact, she
is a crayfish so large she can barely pass through a door. She knows how
to make a statement in her monstrosity. She informs the queen that she
had some inkling of her bad manners, which prompted her to appear in
her zoological state in the first place. Her sisters seek to mollify her by
appealing to her coquettish side, asking that she quit her current form so
that they can see her charms, but the fairy resists. The test comes later in
this tale and the queen fails it, the failure rebounding upon her daughter,
Desirée, now cursed to turn into a doe if sunlight touches her.
The fairy may have simply been ahead of fashion: the iconic
Schiaparelli lobster dress (1937) was, in fact, included in the trousseau
of Wallis Simpson when she wed the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward
VIII. Nonetheless, as the tale’s queen has proven unworthy, failing to
show due diligence in issuing an invitation, the fairy retains her abject
form. The tale itself presents a rather more complex construction of fairy
patronage. Prince Guerrier, who falls in love with the grown-up Desirée,
is already betrothed to the Ethiopian Black Princess. The fairy of the
fountain happens to be the latter’s fairy godmother, placing her, again,
in conflict with Desirée. D’Aulnoy’s tale is undoubtedly informed by
the racist attitudes of her time here, the Black Princess deemed vindic-
tive for being jilted, her passion for the prince treated as excessive even
though the prince himself falls ill in his immoderate expressions of love
for Desirée. When the Black Princess insists that she is surely beauti-
ful enough for the prince, having a black complexion, a crushed nose,
and big lips, there is an uneasy element of pathos. The Black Princess,
in fact, asserts a code of beauty distinct from that of Prince Guerrier
and Princess Desirée, pleading to be judged accordingly. Does d’Aul-
noy intend the princess’s code to be inferior, even ridiculous? In Travels
into Spain, D’Aulnoy provides a similar description of her nine-year-old
slave, Zayde. Zayde “is as black as jet, and would be reckoned in her
own country a wonderful beauty, for her nose is quite flat, her lips pro-
digiously thick.”17 Racial bias is certainly evident, but the matter-of-fact
tone of the latter description suggests that d’Aulnoy may not be simply
ridiculing the Black Princess.18 She is, after all, considered an entirely
plausible wife for a future king who is, presumably, white. Moreover,
the Black Princess presents her fairy godmother with presents to ensure
her good favour, a gesture that, in the gift culture contrived by d’Aul-
noy and her peers, is that of the virtuous and wise. Indeed, Fairy Tulip
later becomes annoyed that her own advice is ignored by the queen
and Princess Desirée, leading to their misfortunes. The Black Princess
disappears from the tale, only partially avenged, for Desirée and Prince
Guerrier have a happy ending. The tale’s shifts, which incorporate
racial bias, complicate the rules of this gift culture through competing
narratives of patronage and courtesy.
Fairy tales, particularly in the ancien régime, often operate on the
principle of innate nobility, but they also wind up promoting aristocratic
empathy for, even service to, the poor and abject. Perrault’s dedica-
tion to the youthful mademoiselle, a young woman of the highest royal
blood, suggests that tales of apparently humble origin instruct royal
personages: “The desire for this understanding has driven heroes, and
heroes of your race, into huts and cabins to see up close and for them-
selves the most peculiar happenings; which seemed a necessary part of
a complete education.”19 The fairies occupy a compelling position in
this education. They are more powerful than kings and queens, able to
freely arrange the fates of their progeny, and they also preside over their
own independent kingdoms and interests. They become the midwives
and guardians of future generations of royal children, and the guide and
matchmaker for royal lovers—and the occasional non-royal. They are, in
effect, more powerful than royalty itself.
As time passed, these fairy godmothers did occasionally lose some of
their independence, influence, and magnificence. In The Slipper and the
Rose (1976), the fairy godmother (Annette Crosbie) can do no magic for
herself and complains of her hectic schedule. In The Glass Slipper (1955),
the fairy godmother has fallen on hard times. Mrs. Toquet was a lady of
consequence, but read so much she “stuffed her head full of ideas and
now she’s a bit addled.”20 Despite her straitened circumstances and
loss of reputation, she retains her knowledge of the world and is able
to materially assist her protégé, Ella, by making deals and “borrowing.”
The film’s conclusion hints that she is an actual fairy. Indeed, her literary
reputation recalls the seventeenth-century salonnières, and she exhibits
their sophistication and shrewdness, even though she is reduced to drab,
frayed clothing. Even the fairy of Beauty and the Beast (2017) appears to
be reduced to begging. Notwithstanding this, they remain autonomous.
As they exist outside the social and political constructs that constrain the
heroes, they are able to help them.
Authorial Cross-Dressing in Mother Goose’s Skirts

Perrault, as previously discussed, attributes his tales to Mother Goose:
the title belongs to the first incarnation, the 1695 manuscript, also fea-
tured upon the frontispiece of the 1697 collection, Histoires ou Contes
du Temps passé. The frontispiece features an elderly woman in plain dress
before the hearth, spinning and telling tales to a group of young peo-
ple. Above her, a sign is nailed to the wall reading “CONTES DE LA
MERE LOYE.” The plain surroundings and the simple garments, includ-
ing what appear to be wooden clogs or mules worn by the teller as she
spins, suggest that she is working-class. She is not shabby, though. The
audience of young people appear to be better dressed, but the etching
does not provide great detail. The young woman, in particular, is likely
noble: she carries a fur muff, wears a laced gown, and her hair is elab-
orately arranged in a fontange. The frontispiece produces an image of
what Catherine Velay-Vallantin calls “factitious orality,”21 an orality with
repercussions that have been discussed in the Introduction. It likewise

becomes the standard for later printed collections, Tatar referencing the
images of the old woman and her young listeners as “the visual entry
point to the world of printed fairy tales.”22 The frontispiece renders
Mother Goose respectable—a neat, working-woman—placing her in ser-
vice to her social superiors. A 1777 edition reconceptualises the engrav-
ing: Mother Goose is in the same pose, although she does appear to
have a rather more prodigious mop cap upon her head and more mal-
leable shoes upon her feet, but the young man reclining in his chair is
now standing and the children are overtly kneeling and looking up at the
storyteller.23 The children’s clothing is consistent with Mother Goose’s
now, the young girl, particularly, in a plain cap, rather than an elaborate
coiffure. Mother Goose has returned, here, to her own social milieu.
She continues to subtly transform, along with her audience, through the
centuries, but the basic organisation of the scene remains persistent.
Mother Goose tales were already in the public vernacular: the
Dictionariarie de l’Académie françoise includes the phrase as one of those
used to describe stories that are told for the amusement of children.24
Warner observes that “Mother Goose conceals many ancestors beneath
her skirts.”25 The figure of Mother Goose became, in a sense, a costume.
Male authors such as Straparola, Basile, and the Brothers Grimm, uti-
lised the female storyteller to dress their tales, simulating a feminine, oral
tradition through either their cast of characters in the framing tales, or
through their acknowledgements of source material. Male storytellers,
in effect, had a habit of hiding behind the skirts of the elderly female
teller. Or even in them, so to speak, a trick the wolf later plays to lure
Little Red Riding Hood. And Mother Goose has a long history of being
played by male actors in the theatre, Samuel Simmons one of the early
actors cross-dressing for the role in Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, The
Golden Egg (1806). These male authors and actors themselves appear
to masquerade to trick children into listening to their blandishments,
though with perhaps noble intentions. The re-occurrence of Mother
Goose in the print culture of fairy tale is certainly a testament to the trust
placed in the invented tradition of the old, female storyteller by authors,
publishers, and readers.
English tales and re-tellings frequently appealed nostalgically to
a fabricated folk past.26 Mother Goose, in particular, enjoyed a cer-
tain respectability in English children’s literature as the purveyor of
fairy tales, nursery rhymes, and nonsense. The figure of Mother Goose
continued to adorn many fairy tale collections. Her honorific gained

such power it began to transform the old woman in her simple gown,
spinning by the hearth. Mother Goose became an elderly woman in
decidedly witchy garb, astride a broom or goose, or sometimes anthro-
pomorphised fully into a goose.
In England, the tradition of the elderly wise woman and female story-
tellers was well-established. Key figures alongside Mother Goose include
Mothers Shipton and Bunch, who were also famed ale-wives. D’Aulnoy’s
tales were, on occasion, ascribed to Mother Bunch; for instance, Mother
Bunch’s Fairy Tales (1773), published by Francis Newbery. Gillian
Lathey concludes that “Newbery probably chose the title by analogy
with Charles Perrault’s ‘Mother Goose’, although Mother Bunch, ale-
wife and purveyor of tall tales and love charms, was an overpowering and
frightening rather than a domestic figure in English folklore.”27 These
were not uncomplicated figures and many of the old women had particu-
larly vulgar, ribald, even felonious histories before they took to the stage
in pantomime and appeared on children’s books. Mother Bunch was a
wise old woman and sometime fortune teller immortalised in Pasquil’s
Jests and Mother Bunch’s Merriments (1604) and Mother Bunch’s Closet
Newly Broke Open (1685). The former tells us that she sold strong ale
well proportioned, ſweet complexioned, and moſt delightfull Hoſteſſe

in Cornehill. The 1629 edition describes her as “dainty, welfauoured,
of England,”28 who enjoyed telling tales and whose laughter could

be heard from Algate to Westminster. Margaret Spufford asserts that
“Mother Bunch is the most magnificent teller of tall stories amongst
the alehouse keepers.”29 The latter volume, Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly
Broke Open, features Mother Bunch as newly widowed and ready to
proffer romantic and sexual advice. Jennifer Schacker thus notes that
“d’Aulnoy’s specificity as a talented, influential, innovative woman writer
is erased in this fantasy of Mother Bunch’s body as a wellspring of liq-
uid enchantment.”30 D’Aulnoy is, in effect, cross-class-dressed as one of
England’s bawdy ale-wives.
Mother Goose and her fellow ale-wives and wise women were well-
established, but male authors began to buff away their bawdy advice,
crimes, and rhymes and turn them to the service of children’s publish-
ing and pantomime. The figure of the old female storyteller was all too
popular. The 1839 edition of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Edgar
Taylor, for instance, concocts such a German storyteller for English
consumption in Gammer Grethel; or German Fairy Tales, and Popular
Stories. Under the Gammer Grethel name—“Gammer” an epithet for old

women—the Brothers Grimm’s tales appear repeatedly through to the
early twentieth century. The preface confesses that Gammer Grethel is
a fiction based upon Dorothea Viehmännin (Viehmann), the Brothers
Grimm’s most famous source, and editions utilise Ludwig Grimm’s por-
trait of the storyteller, which appeared in the 1819 German edition, as
an “authentic” Gammer Grethel. Taylor depicts a nostalgic vision of
the good farmer’s wife, rooted in the Brothers Grimm’s own mythol-
ogising influence upon the very real character of Viehmann, who was
raised in an inn, actually situating her within the ale-wife legacy. Taylor
depicts his Gammer Grethel, on the other hand, as “an honest good-
humoured farmer’s wife, who, a while ago, lived far off in Germany. She
knew all the good stories that were told in that country.”31 Gammer
Grethel’s storytelling during Christmas provides the frame for the col-
lection, mimicking the framing devices of earlier authors. Taylor purports
to merely write down the narrator’s memory of these evenings, evok-
ing the oral tradition so favoured by the Brothers Grimm and Perrault.
The illustration of her in the first chapter, “Who she was and what she
did,” mimics the Perrault frontispiece: Gammer Grethel in her cap and
sensible shoes, sits on a chair before the fire, surrounded by children
(see Fig. 6.2). However, she is not spinning. She simply rests upon her
walking stick, although a spinning wheel, vestige of the old way of life
for an old peasant woman, does occupy the room, and a cat does sit by
the fire. Gammer Grethel is a more comfortable, idle Mother Goose.
The wise old women, who patrol the edges of story, are still evoked
into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
series showcases Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, wise old witches
both: Granny is a childless, single woman whose honorific indicates her
status and relationship to the Mothers, Nanny being an actual grand-
mother, but her appellation likewise indicating the relationship to folk-
lore. Madeleine L’Engle’s Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which,
from A Wrinkle in Time (1962), also evoke the old women, their appel-
lations recalling the Mistress Quicklys, Dames, and Mothers who have
gone before. The slippage between the heritage of wise old women and
fairy tale’s old women goes beyond the central figure of Mother Goose.
Fairy godmothers, witches, and grandmothers, too, draw upon this par-
ticular tradition. Indeed, one of the most iconic fairy tale heroes, known
for her sartorial flair in red headgear, has a close relationship to the wise
old women.
Fig. 6.2 Gammer Grethel. Illustration by George Cruikshank. Edgar Taylor,

German Popular Stories and Fairy Tales, as Told by Gammer Grethel, from the
Collection of MM. Grimm (London: Bell & Daldy, 1872)
Under the Red Chaperon

Along with glass slippers and boots, a red chaperon distinguishes yet
another of Perrault’s fairy-tale heroes. Indeed, the young girl’s name is
silenced by her dashing red accessory. In Jones’ view, the original lack of
capitalisation of le petit chaperon rouge suggests it isn’t a proper name32
and, indeed, the grandmother, mother, and wolf all lack proper names.
The tale operates in material and physical specificities: the red chaperon,
the galette, the butter, the door pin and latch, the wolf’s big arms, big
legs, big ears, big eyes, big teeth.
The young hero is pretty and doted upon by both mother and grand-
mother, centring the tale within matriarchal relationships. Perrault
emphasises that the grandmother is crazy about her granddaugh-
ter and crafts a perfectly fitting chaperon for her to wear. The tale does
not treat the chaperon as particularly fashionable or sumptuous: it is a
gift from the hands of the grandmother, here in the role of homespun
fairy patroness. It suits the girl so well, it metonymically performs her
identity. The chaperon, also chaperon in English, is a type of cap with
loose drapery attached, which had been out of fashion for about a cen-
tury when Perrault is writing: it is unclear whether the tale itself is set
at a time when chaperons were commonly worn, or whether the chap-
eron is an unfashionable note.33 Chaperon is also the word for an older
woman accompanying a younger woman, perhaps, according to Jones,
indicating that it acts metonymically for the grandmother’s guardian-
ship, too.34 The chaperon was worn in the Middle Ages and into the
Renaissance; more often, it appears, associated with men in the lat-
ter case, though Planché notes a “revival” among women whereby
“in the latter days of Charles VII, one of his fair favourites was called
‘Madame des Chaperons,’ from her mode of wearing them.”35
The Madame was, of course, a mistress, and there is scope to ponder
whether the story was in circulation at Perrault’s time and whether
her name played upon Perrault’s mind. Zipes suggests that the female,
middle-class hero’s adoption of the style “signified that she was individ-
ualistic and perhaps nonconformist.”36 There is a common inclination to
see the chaperon as distinguishing the hero, rendering her singular, but
it is notable that her identity comes down to her from the hands of her
grandmother-patroness.
There are examples of the chaperon and other red caps in d’Aulnoy’s
work, too, which suggests that Perrault’s hero is not quite as singular
as she appears. Duggan argues that d’Aulnoy’s references to red chaper-
ons and similar headwear are “allusions”37 to the chaperon of Perrault’s
tale. There’s no evidence that it is d’Aulnoy alluding to Perrault and the
idea that she “destabilizes Perrault’s signifier by attributing to it vari-
ous signifieds”38 may be a stretch, particularly as chaperons, even though
old-fashioned, even antique, weren’t unknown. Duggan treats the red
chaperon primarily as a sign, rather than an item of clothing, and prior-
itises Perrault’s use for its symbolic value. Indeed, her approach exhibits
the thinking Ziolkowski describes: “The title character of the Little Red
Riding Hood story has grown so important that her name has become a
common noun […] the hermeneutic pressure of a name that seems on
an intuitive level to have a meaning, to offer a key that will unlock the
true significance of the whole story.”39 The red chaperon is frequently
read as a sign of the hero’s sexual awakening, especially in terms of its
colour, supported by Perrault’s moral warning young women against the
sweet tongues of “wolves.” D’Aulnoy, however, adorns her protagonists,

principally fairies and such supernatural creatures, unfashionably in chap-
erons, including red chaperons that have no overt connection to sexual
awakening. D’Aulnoy’s chaperons have a magical aspect largely uncon-
nected to sexuality or other such explicit symbolism.40
D’Aulnoy’s amphibian half-fairy, the benevolent frog, has a chap-
eron of vermilion roses in which all her power lies. Her abject status as
a frog living in a marsh and her reliance upon a magical item of clothing
both act to reinforce her inferior fairy status. Nonetheless, her chaperon
is extraordinary in itself: after a bewildering ceremony of croaking and
burning wood, capers and peas, for example, it can speak through the
fairy as an oracle. Even more astounding, it provides a prince with a flex-
ible armour made of just one impossibly large diamond. Just as Perrault
asserts the chaperon suits his pretty hero so, too, does d’Aulnoy tell us
that the chaperon of roses renders her fairy the prettiest in the world. In
fact, the fairy is a coquette who uses rouge and mouches to improve her
appearance and, when sent on an urgent mission to tell the king of his
wife’s plight—she is in the clutches of the Lion Fairy—she takes a year
to put together a cortège in order to make a suitably splendid appearance
at court. Perrault’s hero is not explicitly vain, though the attention to
her chaperon in the story’s opening and the story’s moral warning sug-
gest that she might be so. The frog’s chaperon is so much more than a
becoming accessory, however, and its magical nature is reflected in how
it is crafted from living, blooming roses, rather than fabric.
The wicked fairy of the desert and the fairy queen, Benigne, also wear
chaperons, but these are quite ordinary and old-fashioned, even antique.
At Toute Belle’s aborted wedding in “The Yellow Dwarf,” the fairy of
the desert appears as an old woman, walking on a crutch, wearing a red
velvet chaperon with a black ruff and ragged farthingale.41 The ragged-
ness of her farthingale bespeaks her abject and sartorially antiquated
state, in this case an indicator of villainy rather than low status. Walter
Crane illustrates her in her full majesty, flanked by turkey-cocks, wear-
ing her black ruff and red chaperon—in fact, she resembles the turkeys.42
The fairy queen, Benigne, in “Le Rameau d’Or” (The Golden Branch,
1697) mirrors her sartorial appearance when posing as an old shepherd-
ess: she wears a ruff, a farthingale, a chaperon—though the colour of the
latter isn’t specified—and her white hair is brushed up over a roll. In
both cases, the fairies appear in antique clothing that may indicate the
story’s period or their own old-fashioned tastes, but the tales themselves
tend to play fast and loose with historical fashion. “The Yellow Dwarf ”
begins with Toute Belle dressing as Diana, suggesting a classical Roman
ensemble, but, on her wedding day, she is covered in diamonds down
to her shoes and her silver brocade dress is decorated in expensive sun-
beams, an ensemble more akin to the gowns of d’Aulnoy’s own lifetime.
The specific clothing worn by the old women, however, does suggest the
stiffly formal and unnatural, particularly in the wearing of the ruffs and
the use of padding to achieve and maintain the desired feminine shape.
The fairies’ own antiquity and fixed attitudes are reflected in the antiq-
uity of their costume, including chaperons.
The key to d’Aulnoy’s chaperons appears to be their supernatural con-
nection. Indeed, in “Le Prince Lutin” (Prince Lutin, 1697), when the
unfortunate hero comes across a jewel-bedecked fairy, Gentille, she
favours him, turning him into Lutin, a supernatural being, and presents
him with a red hat, decorated with parrot’s feathers, that renders him
invisible when worn. It is a hat, rather than a chaperon, but its colour
does allow a little leeway in rating it among the chaperons.43 If we turn
Duggan’s assumption around, could it be that Perrault bestowed d’Aul-
noy’s re-occurring red chaperon upon his hero, tucking away its super-
natural potential in a tale of symbols?
The chaperon undergoes a major re-modelling as it passes into
English, and this re-modelling perhaps does have a supernatural impe-
tus. Robert Samber translated the tale in 1729, rendering it “The Little
Red Riding Hood.” The term “chaperon” is English, too, but Samber
chooses a more common item of clothing, worn by women while trav-
elling. “Little Red Cap” does appear in English translations, too, but
often connected with the Brothers Grimm’s version of the tale, in which
the hero and her grandmother are both rescued by a woodsman and, in
a repeat of their encounter, both conspire to kill the wolf. “Little Red
Cap” does have unfortunate allusions in English, however. Red caps
are a form of fairy, associated with the English/Scottish border, Robin
Redcap being one of the more famous. There is also the legendary
Mother Red Cap, a tavern owner in London in the seventeenth century
associated with murder and sexual misdeeds. It is plausible that Samber
avoided the association with Mother Red Cap. Unlike Mother Bunch,
Mother Red Cap never achieved fairy-tale fame and remains, in legend,
associated with murder and vice, hardly a good association for the Little
Red Riding Hood. Likewise, the story’s focus on the hero’s journey sug-
gests the wearing of the riding hood.
Samber uses the translation of the hero’s name to further engage in

extended alliteration and today it is difficult to distinguish the item of
clothing in fashion history from the fairy-tale riding hood. A 1650 dic-
tionary offers “hood” as an English equivalent of chaperon, riding hood
also appearing listed in the entry, although defined specifically as barb-
ute.44 The riding hood was an established item of clothing in the English
wardrobe. There is a letter in the December 7, 1711, Spectator written
by “Rebecca Ridinghood” who encountered “a rude fellow in a stage-
coach, who entertained two or three women of us (for there was no man
besides himself) with language as indecent as ever was heard upon the
water.”45 At least Rebecca Ridinghood shares Perrault’s concerns about
the “wolves” one might encounter while travelling. Anne Buck indicates
that long cloaks with a hood “were then called riding-hoods,” further
noting that “[c]loaks of scarlet cloth, which at this time [1710] were
worn by the fashionable gentry, remained a much prized garment of
the unfashionable for their Sunday wear until the early 19th century.”46
Red cloaks are common in Diana Sperling’s 1812–1823 watercolours of
country life in Essex, for example.47 As time passed, such cloaks become
somewhat inseparable from the fairy tale.
Illustrations of hoods and capes are common in English illustra-
tions. Through the nineteenth century, portraits and photographs of
girls in red hoods/caps, often carrying baskets, were popular. Continental
European artists, such as Louis Ammy Blanc (German), Harriet Backer
(Norwegian), and Gustave Doré (French), tended to focus more upon a
cap or cap-adjacent construction for the hero’s famed headwear. English
artists, including John Everett Millais, Edward Frederick Brewtnall,
William M. Spittle, Maria Cosway, John Hoppner, John Opie, Thomas
Lawrence and Thomas Sully, painted young girls in red hooded cloaks.
Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), pho-
tographed Agnes Weld in a cloak as the fairy-tale hero in 1857. The fas-
cination with the figure swelled, her image appearing in advertising, too,
and Little Red Riding Hood was soon ubiquitous.
Harriet L. Childe-Pemberton’s “All my Doing; or, Red Riding-Hood
over again” (1882) has a particular fascination with fashion, though it
begins with a child announcing the tale “is one of the stupidest of all the
nursery tales.”48 Talairach-Vielmas refers to the tale as “Pussy and the
Wolf.”49 Childe-Pemberton’s narrator is known as Pussy, who couches
her own version of the tale in fashion:
My story, said I, is of more than twenty years ago, at a time when the fash-
ions in dress were just the reverse of what they are now, when crinolines
could hardly be worn large enough, when the pork-pie hat was the rage,
and when, instead of the sage-greens, the peacock-blues, and rhubarb-reds
of the present day, bright scarlet, crude violet, and two new colours called
mauve and magenta, found favour in the eyes of those who pretended to
taste in the matter of dress.50
Childe-Pemberton, here, cites the invention of the synthetic dye, mauve,

first synthesized by Sir William Perkin in 1856. Magenta was patented
shortly afterward. Pussy thus dates her tale according to scientific inno-
vations that transformed fashion, as well as through styles such as the
wide crinoline, though she notably scorns these old fashions in favour of
current fashions, which featured darker, more sombre hues.
The narrator then situates herself as a young woman, again through
fashion: “I wore red stockings, and a violet dress, and a scarlet cloak,
and nobody ever thought, as they would now, of calling my taste vul-
gar,” noting “[t]hat scarlet cloak in particular was my great pride.”51
As before, the fashions of the past are treated as rather more vulgar,
with their bright colours. Pussy dwells particularly on the details of
her cloak, which is, after all, the key sartorial identifier of the fairy-tale
hero: “Cloaks at that time were made in a particular shape, a sort of
double cloak, the upper one being shorter than the under, and drawn
in at the waist with a rosette—Connemara cloaks I think they were
called.”52 These cloaks were often red, although Pussy mentions that
they were made in other colours and, despite the other “hideous” fash-
ions of the time, were not “unbecoming.”53 She thus establishes herself
as the hero through her description of dress: “Trotting about in this
cloak, with a pair of red stockings, just showing above laced boots, the
smallest of small black hats on my head, and my hair drawn back into a
chenille net—such was the monstrous fashion of the moment—I must
have looked not very unlike Red Riding-Hood herself.”54 The rest of
the tale frequently introduces a character through a detailed examina-
tion of their dress, even a lady Pussy views as “unprepossessing”55 rat-
ing a description. The fashions of the past are derided—as ever, the flux
of fashion must establish the immediate fashion of the past as old and
outmoded—but Perrault’s tale itself appears to evoke outmoded fashion
in the chaperon. Thus, like Perrault, Childe-Pemberton uses the strik-
ing description of fashion to place the tale in the past. The characters
are distanced from the fashionable reader, even a little bizarre in their
bright colours and old-fashioned headwear. However, rather than the
wolf dressing in Granny’s bonnet, here, the wolf—a quite human thief—
dresses in Pussy’s cloak, terrifying the grandmother who sees a murder-
ous face, rather than that of her Pussy. Moreover, Red Riding Hood
herself becomes a middle-aged Mother Goose, “a lonely old maid,”56
telling tales to her niece.
Despite the iconic status of the original chaperon, Perrault’s hero dies.
The wolf devours her grandmother and patroness, takes her place in the
bed, and then devours the girl herself. Jones notes that the characters
at this point are in states of en son déshabillé, referring to their public
undress—the wearing of informal clothing or nightwear—rather than
literal undress, but points out that parts of the grandmother’s body are
visible that usually would not be.57 The hero, we infer, removes her
chaperon, thus losing the key to her personal and social identity. She
becomes a body, readily devoured, the sartorial markers of civilisation
destroyed in the act of consumption. In the Brothers Grimm’s version,
provided by Jeanette and Marie Hassenpflug, the wolf is revealed under
the covers, hiding his face in the grandmother’s bonnet. The effect is
startling. The wolf is masquerading in the markers of the grandmoth-
er’s identity and this cross-special-gender-dressing is of interest to many
later authors. Laura Valentine’s Victorian version includes poetic jus-
tice: the wolf becomes tangled in the nightgown he clothes himself in,
and the girl is able to call for help.58 Warner writes to the obscuration
of difference between wolf and grandmother, the latter being “kin to
the forest-dwelling witch, or crone.”59 The wolf’s appropriation of the
grandmother’s clothing nonetheless mirrors that of the male authors,
editors, and publishers masquerading as the wise old women, and the
devouring of grandmother and hero, as Warner suggests, could easily be
a comment upon oral storytelling.60 It is sartorially played out in dress,
too, and, notably, the red hood or cape features prominently in the cos-
tuming of many a fairy godmother or Mother Goose.
The Hassenpflugs, being educated, middle-class, young women of
Huguenot family, were implicated in authorial cross-dressing, them-
selves, when they contributed to the Brothers Grimm’s project. Marie,
a young woman at the time of her contribution, became, Heinz Rölleke
argues, “Old Marie” when Herman Grimm re-attributed Marie’s tales to
“Old Marie” in 1890.61 A housekeeper for the Wild family, the Brothers
Grimm’s near neighbours and in-laws, “Old Marie” was the epitome of
a good, peasant, Hessian source for fairy tale.62 Rölleke argues, however,
that the housekeeper never contributed to the collection: her identity
was simply used to clothe the contributions of Marie Hassenpflug and to
produce another more “authentic” vision of the wise old woman.63 The
desire to cloak tales in the garments of the old wise women consumed
even the real women who told and wrote fairy tales.
Witch Dressing
In the nineteenth century, a particular fashion appears to catch on
among the wise old women. The wise old women as archetypes were
always a little “witchy.” Robert Thurston argues that “‘Mother Goose’
represents the triumph in western European consciousness of the harm-
less old woman; the malicious ugly witch has been tamed and relegated
to the world of fairy tales.”64 As Warner and others suggest, however,
the witch, Mother Goose, the gossip, the wise old woman, the sto-
ryteller, and others like them were always related, co-existent, and,
at times, interchangeable. Their relationship, in part, pivots upon the
wearing of ruffs, mob caps, and tall, black hats. The sartorial conflation
is inspired by the flair of the country or working-class woman, evolving
over centuries.
D’Aulnoy’s aristocratic fairies, for example, were re-attired early in
their English publication history. The frontispiece to d’Aulnoy’s The
History of the Tales of the Fairies, published by John Harris in 1716,
declares that the old wives and nurses tell the tales of the fairies—not
the aristocrats of Louis XIV’s court—and shows the King and Queen of
Hearts overlooking a fairy circle in which fairies wear simple dress and a
range of tall hats, some conical, some more rounded or stubby. These,
of course, suggest witches’ hats to a twenty-first century eye, but tall,
black hats—such as the copotain in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, and later the sugarloaf or steeple in the seventeenth—were gener-
ally worn by both men and women. D’Aulnoy’s fairies do not wear such
hats in the tales, although the ambassador in “Babiole” (1697) does wear
a pointed hat, translated as “sugar-loaf hat” by Annie Macdonell and
Elizabeth Lee.65 However, d’Aulnoy stipulates that he is not fashionably
dressed. Worn by the fairies in The History of the Tales of the Fairies, the
hats draw upon long-standing English traditions of wise women, rather
than d’Aulnoy’s fashionable tales.
The History of Witches and Wizards: Giving a True Account of All

Their Tryals in England, Scotland, Swedeland, France, and New England
(1720) features a variety of images of witches in the archetypal black,
pointy hats. Ale-wives such as Elynour Rummynge and Mother Louse
were also depicted in tall, black hats in seventeenth-century prints.
Mother Shipton, a prophet whose persona evolved after her death
into a pantomime dame, was frequently illustrated in a pointed hat,
too. Schacker points out that often the “Mothers,” including Mothers
Bunch, Shipton, and Goose, evoke witches, but also good fairies, point-
ing to nineteenth-century pantomimes where Mothers Goose, Bunch,
Shipton and Hubbard are witches “who embody the spirit and energy
of pantomime itself.”66 Tsurumi suggests that Mother Goose’s role in
Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg (1806), as she aids the
young lovers, likewise “easily remind[s] us of the fairy godmother’s role
in ‘Cinderella.’”67 There really isn’t a great deal of difference between
the Mothers, the witches, and the fairies, particularly if they all wear sug-
arloaf hats and caps.
Ryoji Tsurumi observes the particular proliferation of witch-garbed
Mothers Goose in the nineteenth century and dates the trend to
Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg, a pantomime written by
Thomas Dibdin and performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane from
December 29, 1806. Mother Goose, actually a cross-dressed Samuel
Simmons, is explicitly described as a witch in the pantomime. George
Cruikshank, very early in his career, illustrated Simmons as Mother
Goose for the frontispiece of Fairburn’s Description of the Popular and
Comic New Pantomime, called Harlequin and Mother Goose, or the Golden
Egg (1806). The frontispiece shows Mother Goose with a large, hooked
nose and jutting chin, just the sort of features for a witch, although her
garb is not particularly witchlike with its cheery goose border on her
skirts. She has a red hood or scarf over her cap, red stockings, and buck-
led black shoes. John Harvey notes that witches often didn’t wear black
gowns.68 Their dress actually drew upon that of—particularly rural—
working and peasant women of the time. For these women, fashion
was a less volatile thing and moved out of synch with more cosmopoli-
tan trends driven by the middle and upper classes. Yet, for all their con-
siderations of function, such women still developed and enjoyed a clear
sense of style. Danae Tankard, for instance, notes that poor “women
endeavoured to present as colourful appearance as possible: the most
popular colour for petticoats was red, although some were green or blue;
stockings were described as ‘grass green’, blue or yellow; aprons could

be coloured or striped.”69 While the practices of colouring plates did
involve the use of bright, primary colours, Cruikshank’s Mother Goose
nonetheless presents her own abundantly colourful appearance.
A framed writing blank, produced by Robert Laurie and James
Whittle, 1807, depicts the female protagonists of the pantomime in
contemporary Regency gowns, but Mother Goose is here in a black,
old-fashioned gown, with a black, steeple-crowned hat and clunky shoes.
Here, she fits more closely the dress of the witch, the style of her gown
and her choice of hat outmoded next to the sylph-like creatures of fash-
ion also featured. There was a brief fashion for black, high-crowned
beavers among women in the immediate past, in the early 1790s. They
were often quite ornate, but less elaborate hats were worn by the sans-
culotte during the Revolution, as in the famous 1790 print, “Françaises
devenues Libres.” Women such as the subject of the latter print were from
the poor, working classes and included the many market women, who
likely perpetuated the practical fashion for high-crowned hats of the
early eighteenth and even seventeenth centuries. Peasant women in rural
Wales and other areas of Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies, too, often wore men’s hats, many with high crowns, over their
head scarves or caps, and their general dress is consistent with these rep-
resentations of Mother Goose from Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the
Golden Egg publications and merchandise.70 As Christine Stevens notes,
the practice of wearing a man’s hat seems to have evolved into the high-
crowned, black hat later associated with Welsh national dress, along with
red shawls or cloaks over short bedgowns and heavy petticoats, often
with a fitted jacket.71 The clothing of the common working or peasant
woman continued to influence the costume of Mother Goose, in keeping
with the social roots of the wise old women.
John Wallis’ board game (1808), based on the pantomime, shows
Mother Goose in Cruikshank’s colourful regalia with her red hood, pos-
sibly a permutation of the riding hood itself, since she is, in effect, travel-
ling upon her flying goose, appearing to wear at least one patten. Flying
also appears in Fortey’s chapbook, Mother Goose and the Golden Egg
(1860), which seems loosely based upon Harlequin and Mother Goose;
or, the Golden Egg. The image of Mother Goose flying on her gander is
accompanied by the text “Old Mother Goose, When she wanted to wan-
der, Would ride through the air, On a very fine gander.”72 It is a par-
ticular image of Mother Goose that reverberates through that century
and into the following centuries. While Tsurumi aligns Mother Goose’s
practice of flying on a goose with flying on a broomstick,73 it is worth
bearing in mind that many fairies in earlier French tales flew in carriages
drawn by dragons, snakes, bats, dogs, frogs, swans, or other creatures.
A profusion of later images show Mother Goose flying upon her goose:
Frank Adam’s cover for The Story of Mother Goose (ca. 1920) is particu-
larly interesting in that Mother Goose closely apes the dress of Welsh
countrywomen in her red cloak, large black hat and frilly cap, down to
the early nineteenth-century practice of tying the shawl across the body
and at the waist.74 She also has formidable bifocal glasses that look
almost like flying goggles.
Tsurumi’s argument—that one of the more iconic images of Mother
Goose derives from a man cross-dressed in her skirts, cap and hood—
though, is absolutely fitting for the history of male authors invoking
Mother Goose to dress their own authorial ambitions. Nonetheless, the
sartorial slippage between Mothers Goose, wise old women, fairy god-
mothers, fairies, and witches in pantomimes, illustration, and even fancy
dress suggests that the answer is not as simple as a character and costume
choice made for Harlequin and Mother Goose; or, the Golden Egg. Ardern
Holt’s Fancy Dresses Described: or, What to Wear at Fancy Balls (1887),
for instance, notes that Mothers Hubbard, Shipton, Bunch, along with
Nance Redfern, Dame Trot, Enchantress and Witch, as well as Fairy
Godmother, “are all dressed much alike” in:
quilted petticoat touching the ground; a chintz tunic open in front,

bunched up; muslin apron; low velvet bodice with deep point, laced across
the front; sleeves to elbow with ruffles; muslin kerchief, close ruff; specta-
cles, mittens, and stick; a lace mob cap, and a high-pointed velvet sugar-
loaf hat with peacock’s feather over it; high-heeled shoes with rosettes.75
Holt does provide pertinent, alternative options including “small stee-

ple-crowned hat” and “red cloak with hood”76 that especially evoke the
witch/Mother Goose style convergence. The details of quilted petticoat,
the bodice, the kerchief, mob cap, and other sartorial accruements are all
evinced in varying degrees in the dress of these figures of fairy tale and
lore, based upon women’s dress in the latter eighteenth century. Their
old-fashioned dress is both a nod to fairy-tale antiquity and a somewhat
histrionic reflection of how actual working and peasant women dressed,
even into the twentieth century.
Mother Goose’s rustic dress appears to have a particular influence

upon the illustration of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, especially in the
nineteenth century. A copy of the tale, Cinderella; or the Little Glass
Slipper, published by J. Harris in 1808, for example, shows the fairy god-
mother at full height, wearing simple country garb with a large straw
hat over her cap and a red cloak. She wields a particularly long wand.
Harris’ 1817 edition of The Celebrated Fairy Tales of Mother Goose: Now
Republished with Appropriate Engravings, For the Amusement of Those
Little Masters and Misses, Who, By Duty to their Parents, and obedience to
their superiors, are likely to become great lords and ladies shows the fairy
godmother in a simple mob cap, draped in a shawl, leaning on a walk-
ing stick. Cinderella, or, the Little Glass Slipper, published by J. Harris in
1827, shows the diminutive fairy godmother in a simple gown and ruff
with a pointy hat, hand-coloured yellow, riding a cloud, her long wand
held like a lance; an edition published in French by Audot fils in 1833
features the same illustrations. The Curious Adventures of Cinderella,
or, The Hstory [sic] of a Glass Slipper, published by R. Harrild in the
early nineteenth century, does give the fairy godmother a black pointy
hat, which she wears with her gown, apron, and fichu. Cinderella, or,
the Little Glass Slipper, embellished with neat engravings, published by
H. & E. Phinney in 1824, again provides the diminutive fairy god-
mother with a pointed hat, cap, cape, and rather more decorative gown.
The 1911 edition of The Cruikshank Fairy-book: Four Famous Stories
(1854) includes Cruikshank’s illustration of the fairy godmother, pub-
lished almost half a century after his pioneering Mother Goose. She
wears a pointy hat over her frilly mob cap, a cape, and a country gown
that has pockets, useful for keeping glass slippers. She is also tiny—she
is called a dwarf !77—also common in illustrations of the fairy god-
mother. It is worth noting that Cruikshank’s 1854 oil painting depicts
the fairy godmother in a red-ribboned hat and cape, the hat itself look-
ing less witch-like with its trimming and cheerful hue. The prevalence of
fairy godmothers illustrated to resemble witches and/or Mother Goose
is conspicuous, their often diminutive status a plausible outcome of a
decline in their political agency. Warner even captions Arthur Rackham’s
famous 1933 illustration of Cinderella: “[t]he fairy godmother as benign
witch.”78 By this point, the fairy godmothers had long been sharing sar-
torial tricks with the witch, yet, rather than becoming emboldened, she
became a more modest figure.
The sartorial conflation is even evoked in Childe-Pemberton’s “Lilian

Lane: A Modern Version of Cinderella” (1882), a tale grounded in a
realistic portrayal of English life. Miss Plunket, Lilian’s fairy godmother,
is a rich, eccentric old woman with a deformity: “the deformity was not
much more than a head somewhat out of proportion to her very dimin-
utive stature.”79 Called a dwarf and witch, Childe-Pemberton draws
on the physical articulation of the character so popular in illustration,
including Cruikshank’s work, with which it is not inconceivable she was
familiar. Miss Plunket also sprinkles fairy-tale motifs through her conver-
sation in a habit of metafictional self-awareness.
Lilian’s young brothers demand stories from Miss Plunket as though
she is also a Mother Goose. Miss Plunket begins, “Once upon a time the
king and queen of the woods and fields gave a ball to all the flowers.”80
For all the sentimentalisation of fairy-tale telling, Miss Plunket is actu-
ally, archly, referring to Lilian’s mother and twin sisters going to the
ball and leaving her, “the lily,” behind. Miss Plunket carries Lilian off to
her home and then goes shopping, ordering new dresses for herself and
Lilian. When Miss Plunket pronounces that they are going to the ball
and points to Lilian’s ball gown, she looks “for all the world like a witch
in a fairy tale!”81 Childe-Pemberton is not subtle:
And it was, the children thought, for all the world like a fairytale or a scene
in a play, when half an hour or so later the door opened and Lilian and
Miss Plunket stood before them – Lilian in her soft white trailing dress,
with lily-blossoms in her shining golden hair, and a single row of beautiful
pearls […] and Miss Plunket herself as they had never in their lives beheld
her, in a red velvet dress, with a marvellous arrangement of lace and beads
upon her head, and an ebony stick with a crutch-handle in gold!82
Miss Plunket’s ensemble prompts one of the twins, Bella, to declare,

“what a guy she did look!”83 The term “guy” here derives from the effi-
gies of Guy Fawkes, indicating someone of misshapen appearance. At the
ball, Sir Charles enquires about the young beauty and also her chaper-
one, “a dwarf lady of untold wealth, clad in red velvet.”84 Miss Plunket
enjoys the spectacle she and Lilian create: “Isn’t she pretty enough and
ain’t I ugly enough to make a sensation between us? Pity it isn’t a fancy
ball, my dears, and then we could have come as Beauty and the Beast,”
following up, “one would think we had come on a broomstick together,
to hear the fuss folks make about us.”85 Miss Plunket’s great nephew,
Alberto Plunketto di Campobello, the son of an Italian prince, falls in

love with Lilian and, when she loses her white fan, rather than a slip-
per, he keeps it as a token. There are more adventures and, of course,
Lilian marries Alberto, who becomes a prince. However, the immediate
Cinderella scenario casts Miss Plunket perfectly in terms of the nexus of
fairy godmother, witch, and Mother Goose, complete with her choice of
red gown.
The slippage between figures characterised stories in the twentieth
century, too. L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) drew
upon the fairy-tale tradition explicitly, Baum attempting to write a fairy
tale for the children of his era. He had already published Mother Goose in
Prose (1897) and Father Goose: His Book (1899). His male storyteller is
elderly, with only a little white hair on his head, and on the cover wears
eighteenth-century masculine garb, pieces of paper tucked into his com-
modious greatcoat, paper and quill in his hands as he engages in appar-
ent conversation with a goose. Here, the storyteller is clearly literary.
In internal illustrations, he sits in a winged-back chair and wears
Victorian attire and slippers as he smokes a pipe and regales two chil-
dren with tales. A cat wearing a large bow is featured in the foreground.
Father Goose, here, replicates much of the Mother Goose imagery.
Baum writes: “Old Mother Goose became quite new, And joined a
Woman’s Club; She left poor Father Goose at home, To care for Sis
and Bub.”86 Father Goose is thus contextualised in a situation of role
reversal. Baum’s mother-in-law was actually the suffragette and feminist
Matilda Gage, and it is unlikely Baum is reproaching Mother Goose for
becoming a “New Woman.”
In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy first arrives in Oz,
she encounters a little old woman who wears a pointed white hat—the
pointed hat appears to be an Oz fashion staple—with a white gown dec-
orated in shining stars, reminiscent of the gowns in ancien régime tales.
W. W. Denslow’s original illustration, however, shows her in a volumi-
nous white gown with huge ruffled collar and cuffs, somewhat resem-
bling the Mother Hubbard dress worn by nineteenth-century women.
In fact, as Stamper and Condra observe, the gown is named after the
hero of Sarah Catherine Martin’s The Comic Adventures of Old Mother
Hubbard and Her Dog, which had long been in circulation.87 An 1819
edition features a portrait of Mother Hubbard—“From an Original
Painting”—as one of the wise old women, wearing a red cape, frilly mob
cap and pointed hat, in this edition the hat being yellow and green with
red flowers.88 She closely resembles Cruikshank’s Mother Goose, in

fact, with a long nose and chin. The ubiquitous cat before the hearth is
also present.89 In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the wise old woman is
the Witch of the North and she presents Dorothy with the silver shoes.
The fairy godmother, the wise old woman, has become an actual witch.
Glinda, the Witch of the South, is also a good witch and wears a white
dress. She, however, is forever young, seated upon her ruby throne, and
recalls more closely the elegant fairies of ancien régime tales. Indeed, as
in those tales, she orders the happy endings for Baum’s protagonists.
Baum’s wicked witches are, in contrast, more “traditionally,” sartorially
witch-like, as will be discussed.
In actuality, a profusion of good witches emerged in the follow-
ing century, often still wearing the black pointed hat and black gown.
It is really in the twentieth century that the image not only becomes
popular,90 but that the witches themselves more often become good.
Madeleine L’Engle’s wise and good Mrs. Which in A Wrinkle in
Time, for instance, appears as an old woman with a black pointy hat,
robe, and even a broomstick.91 In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
(1997–2007), a pointed hat is part of the wardrobe for witches and wiz-
ards attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and adults,
good and bad, likewise wear them. In Jill Murphy’s The Worst Witch
series (1974–2013), the students of Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches
also wear pointy black hats and long robes, irrespective of their moral
perspective. Particularly in children’s literature, in fact, witches and their
hats have become ensconced as not merely the preserve of the wise old
women, but of younger generations, too.
Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, like Baum’s Oz books, fea-
tures witches who absorb characteristics of the fairy godmother. In
fact, Witches Abroad (1991) focuses upon the three main witches of
the series, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat, on a quest
to stop a fairy godmother, Granny’s own sister, Lily. Lily (or Lilith)
uses her powers to force people into acting out fairy tales. Another
fairy godmother, Desiderata, has recently died and bequeaths her wand
to Magrat, entrusting her to go to Genua and stop the wedding of the
prince and Ella, the Cinderella couple. The novel tangles with fairy-tale
tropes, particularly those of the fairy godmother and her role in con-
trolling stories, an aspect shared with Mother Goose. The witches attend
the ball to defeat Lily and Granny Weatherwax wears a white gown
with a bustle and a tall wig, lamenting that witches should wear black.92
Granny’s preference is not inspired by fashion but, rather, by her remorse-

less pragmatism and ideas about what is respectable according to one’s
position. She disdains an ensemble that recalls the glory of the French
fairy-tale vogue in preference for simple, muted clothing that makes
her instantly identifiable as the witch, and which can be worn doing the
under-appreciated dirty work—attending births, nursing the sick and
elderly, caring for animals, assisting the dying—required in any commu-
nity. The distinction plays upon the white/black, good/evil dichotomy,
but complicates it through Lily’s own propensity to authoritarian fairy
godmothering and Granny Weatherwax’s determination to do the right
thing, regardless of people’s feelings. What witches wear—and why—is
important, as it provides signals regarding their intent in the world.
Granny’s protégée Tiffany Aching is the main protagonist of her
own arc of five novels in the series. Notably, two of those novels fea-
ture aspects of witch costume in the titles: A Hat Full of Sky (2004)
and I Shall Wear Midnight (2015). Tiffany, who is nine at the start of
the first novel, The Wee Free Men (2003), immediately recognises that
Miss Tick is a witch, despite her wearing what is, to all intents and pur-
poses, a straw hat decorated with flowers. The complicated relationship
between witches and their costume is continually negotiated as Tiffany
encounters young witches who are invested in archetypal witch accesso-
ries and others who prefer a more practical remnant that allows them to
do their work more easily. In A Hat Full of Sky, she is given Granny’s
hat for a time, but ultimately returns it, deciding she must find her own
hat. She clings to green and blue dresses for some time before, in I Shall
Wear Midnight, she is gifted a beautiful black dress made expressly for
her, the cuffs snugly buttoned to stay out of her way while she attends
the sick and needy.93 At the arc’s conclusion in The Shepherd’s Crown
(2015), Pratchett’s last novel, she inherits Granny’s very solid working
boots, but chooses not to walk in them, giving them away and wearing
her own boots to tread her own path as witch. Tiffany ultimately decides
not to accept the gifts of her “fairy godmother”—though Granny would
disapprove of such an appellation being attached to herself—and, in
choosing her own clothing, she ultimately determines her own approach
to the role of witch.
The sartorial backgrounds of fairy tale’s wise old women continue to
inform the evolution of witches, Mothers, and fairy godmothers. From
their black sugarloaf hats to their practical skirts, these characters are very
much historically based in the world of working-women.
Villainy Is the Awesome Black

“Black,” Valerie Steele writes, “is a uniquely powerful, mysterious, and
seductive color.”94 Harvey writes, “Instantly dramatic, the black dress
made its mark in the performing arts.”95 Black is theatrical, black is the
uniform of the fashionable. It is not for nothing that L’Héritier’s “La
Robe de Sincérité” (Robe of Sincerity, 1705) features an enchanted dress,
made of a black, transparent fabric, identified by L’Héritier as gauze,
elaborately embroidered.96 In fact, Sévigné had written about “transpar-
ents” in a November 6, 1676, letter to Madame de Grignan thirty years
earlier: “They are complete dresses of the finest gold and azure brocade
you could ever see and over them transparent black dresses, either of
fine English lace or chenille velvet on gauze.”97 In L’Héritier’s tale, the
embroidery, according to the wizard Misandre, is only visible when the
dress is worn by a virtuous, faithful woman. Misandre’s con—he abso-
lutely is ancestor to Andersen’s swindlers from “The Emperor’s New
Clothes”—actually backfires upon the king, revealing far more about
the men who lie about what they see.98 Warner refers to the tale as the
“erotic version” of Andersen’s.99 The choice of black for the dress, albeit
in keeping with the older fashion, emphasises its duplicitous purpose
and faux mysticism. Although the black dress is implicated in the polic-
ing of women’s sexuality and men’s sexual insecurity, black itself was not
then a “sexy” colour for clothing, as it later became in Western cultures,
particularly in the twentieth century.
Black is often a morally difficult, or even outright wicked, colour in
the fairy-tale tradition. In early tales, in particular, black was treated as
a sign of evil. The protagonists who wore black were inevitably corrupt.
D’Aulnoy’s wicked king in “The Good Little Mouse” only wears black—
perhaps a barb aimed at the Spanish court, where black had predomi-
nated, Philip IV making black the colour of court dress in 1623. Louis
XIV’s wife, Maria Theresa, was Philip’s daughter. It may particularly ref-
erence King Charles II of Spain, a misshapen, dirty, and likely mentally
ill king, the son of Philip IV, who wed one of France’s most beautiful
and unlucky princesses, half-sister to the mademoiselle to whom Perrault
dedicates his book. The wicked king, after all, has greasy hair and dies
fighting his son, the same son the beautiful Princess Joliette absolutely
refuses to wed. Black clothing was, nonetheless, an indicator of luxury,
evident in the quality of the black dye itself.
As Harvey observes, “[f ]oreign visitors to Spain registered as remark-

able the constancy and ubiquity of black.”100 D’Aulnoy’s Relation du
voyage d’Espagne (1691) contains some such critical references to black.
She notes the costume of the Marchioness de los Rios, who wears a black
serge gown and black taffeta mantle, describing this as the costume of
widows and duennas, and reflecting that she does not like it and would
be shocked to meet a woman so dressed in the night.101 She notes that
“they are obliged to bewail the death of an husband whom they could
not endure when living.”102 A correlation between a perceived excess
of mourning remnant and counterfeit emotion informs her portrayal
of the scheming widow in “The Blue Bird.” She appears, first, in black
crepe, including a mantle much like the Marchioness’s, full-mourning
regalia that she dons to hustle the king into marriage, after which she
appears in gowns of green and pink.103 However, the White Cat herself
appears in deep-mourning, wearing a long black crepe veil. She mourns
her dead lover, devoured by a dragon, and this is not represented as
excessive. Princess Moufette in “The Benevolent Frog” is about to be
made into a pie for a dragon and her people dress in black, the princess’s
own hair tied in crepe, again without a suggestion of excessive emotion.
D’Aulnoy presents no unequivocal position on mourning dress in the
tales themselves.
While black is not a common, fashionable colour in d’Aulnoy’s tales,
there is a suggestion of black glamour in respect to some of her fairies.
The Queen of the Meteors, a wicked fairy in d’Aulnoy’s “The Golden
Branch,” is grotesque in appearance: old, tall, and gaunt, with fingers
like spindles and a skin like black leather over her skeleton.104 Despite
her abjection, rooted in casual bigotry towards her age and other fea-
tures, she is dressed regally and richly in a manteau of silver brocade and
wears a diamond crown. She wears rouge, mouches, and pink and green
ribbons, because she is a coquette and has no compunction in attempt-
ing to seduce Prince Peerless from his pretty shepherdess-princess. His
rejection of her is profound, suggesting that, instead, she look among
the meteors and natural elements for love. Indeed, her abjection is ren-
dered sublime, Julia Kristeva observing that “[t]he abject is edged
with the sublime. It is not the same moment on the journey, but the
same subject and speech bring them into being.”105 While many a
princess may indulge in sartorial abjection to rebel against patriar-
chy and to reclaim sovereignty, the fairies never surrender sovereignty.
Their appearance can inspire horror and fear that shares much with the
abject, but they exist beyond the mortal realm and, more frequently,
project the sublime, particularly in terms of sartorial spectacle. Ulrich
Lehmann argues that “[w]ithout the sublime in fashion’s dialectical aes-
thetic, the ephemeral as its opposite and predecessor cannot exist; with-
out the connotation of antiquity, modernity loses its raison d’être.”106
Thus, fairies such as the Queen of the Meteors evoke the majestic gran-
deur of antiquity, Lehmann observing the relation between the majes-
tic and sublime.107 Indeed, the fairies represent the truly sublime or
awesome in the sense of inspiring fear and revulsion as well as acclaim,
holding them above the ephemeral nature of fashion itself.
On a less awesome note, as with the Black Princess, the actual abjec-
tion of the Queen of the Meteors also lies in her racial features, particu-
larly her black leathery skin. While not sartorial, the representation of
“othered” skin colour presents a racial context that is just as significant
as that of class or gender. In particular, the visibility of race underpins
constructions of patronage and villainy that, in turn, contribute to sarto-
rial expression. Thus, the prince fears the otherworldly body despite the
Queen of the Meteors’ regal regalia. Black skin has literal racial implica-
tions, but is also symbolically invoked in terms of death, curses, and evil.
Characters with black skin in d’Aulnoy’s tales are often wicked or subser-
vient, almost always rendered supernatural, subhuman, or simply inferior.
The fairy Carabosse is a hunchback with skin as black as ink who takes
wicked—though, in some measure, justified—revenge upon a king who
once put sulphur in her broth in “Princess Mayblossom.” Merveilleuse,
in “The Ram”, has a Moorish slave called Patypata who sacrifices her-
self for her princess, giving her tongue in place of the princess’s, though
her tongue is too black to pass as that of the white princess, rendering
her sacrifice meaningless. Her black tongue is a nonsense, of course,
but exemplifies the racial ignorance and prejudice underlying the tales.
Patypata’s sacrifice is presented alongside that of the princess’s dog
and monkey, her humanity debased in being grouped with pets equally
capable of speech. Yet, the princess does insist that Patypata’s life is as
precious to her as her own, intimating a possibly more complex rela-
tionship. In writing of her own slave, Zayde, d’Aulnoy relates that her
daughter “hath made her governess of her marmoset.”108 D’Aulnoy even
observes, “I do assure you that Zayde and the marmoset are well met,
and understand one another very well.”109 In her assertion that Zayde
and the marmoset have mutual understanding, much as Patypata and
the talking monkey share affection for the princess, d’Aulnoy appears
to draw a parallel between fairy tale and her own experience, further
illuminating the racism so readily accepted at the time.110 The Ram,
Merveilleuse’s eventual paramour, also refers to a beautiful slave, mur-
dered by the wicked fairy Ragotte. French slavery of the period was
well-established, with a large number of slaves taken from the African
continent, though it is unclear in the fairy tale whether this particular
slave is black. D’Aulnoy was a seventeenth-century, French aristocrat and
her representation of race reflects this, though it is worth addressing that
race is clearly articulated, rather than obscured, in her fairy tales.
Kimberly J. Lau describes d’Aulnoy’s work, taking account of vari-
ous human-to-animal transformations contextualised by colonial empire,
thus: “That d’Aulnoy’s contes resonate with a number of different—
potentially contradictory—ideas about race highlights the fact that she
was writing during a transitional moment in the development of race as a
modern concept.”111 Indeed, Lau’s assertion that “race has been critical
to the development of the fairy tale as a literary genre despite its nearly
complete invisibility”112 offers much potential to explore the wider
implications of race in the genre. Nonetheless, do d’Aulnoy’s black-
skinned fairies, yellow-skinned dwarves and pagodes, the latter with flat
noses and crossed eyes (Macdonell and Lee refer to “squint eyes”113)
offer a further glimpse of racial diversity? Gordon Browne certainly illus-
trates the pagodes, characters in “The Green Serpent,” in Chinese dress,
with long moustaches and pigtails.114 Pagodes are porcelain figures that
appear to have originated in China, thus d’Aulnoy does not represent
Chinese persons but, rather, these figures of precious stones, metals, and
plainer materials. Centuries later, Browne humanises the pagodes as small
Chinese men. Basile’s frame tale features a black slave, as does Galland’s
Arabian Nights, obviously along with a variety of Asian and Middle
Eastern characters. These were fairy-tale collections that reflected the
cosmopolitan realities of empire, written with a view to a world in which
ethnic diversity was visible.
In the Brothers Grimm’s collection of tales, however, blackness takes
on a more symbolic than racial note. Ann Schmiesing’s study of black-
ness in the Brothers Grimm’s collection of tales notes the prevalence
of blackness as a curse or sign of wickedness, arguing that “the empha-
sis is placed on the moral inferiority, behavioural transgressions, and/
or physical undesirability that blackness signifies—traits, however, that
at the time the Grimms published their tales were not only symbolized
in an abstract sense of blackness but also literally associated with black

people.”115 Yet, there is rarely any suggestion that the blackness of the
characters in the Brothers Grimm tales explicitly relates to race. Apart
from the fascination with Orientalist tales—which becomes a distinct
phenomenon—it isn’t properly until Disney animation in the 1990s that
representations of race and ethnicity began to consistently evolve once
more in Western fairy tale. In the context of a global entertainment
empire, such representation in Disney animation has always been prob-
lematised by appropriation, tokenism, and cultural authenticity. Disney’s
shift from traditional European fairy tales led to Pocahontas (1995),
Mulan (1998), Lilo and Stitch (2002), and Moana (2016). Even the
Brothers Grimm’s “The Frog King, or Iron Henry” was adapted into a
tale of 1920s Southern America, with a black hero, Tiana, and a trickster,
East Indian Prince Naveen. Turning Tiana into a frog recreated many
of the problems already apparent in d’Aulnoy’s easy elision of blackness
with animals, but there has nonetheless been increased visibility of diver-
sity in Disney productions in roles where race is not abjectified.
In fact, the release of Marvel’s Black Panther (2018), with its pre-
dominantly black cast and crew, including director, writers, and cos-
tume designer, fulfils much of this promise and goes a step further in
also drawing fashion inspiration from Zulu, Nigerian, Maasai, and other
African cultures. Costume designer Ruth E. Carter created a sartorial
expression of Afrofuturism that goes beyond simply representing diverse
cultures in traditional or Western dress. Set in Wakanda, a hidden, tech-
nologically-advanced, utopic nation on the African continent, the film
relates a superhero story involving the new king and “Black Panther,”
T’Challa, whose powers derive from magical purple flowers. Like
many superhero stories, there is certainly an element of fairy tale: Erik
Killmonger, estranged cousin of T’Challa, remembers his father’s tales
of his homeland unambiguously as fairy tales. Marvel had also become
a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios in 2009, laying the groundwork for
the claim that Shuri, Wakanda’s teenage princess and T’Challa’s sister, is
a Disney princess.
Shuri is a genius, designing and developing much of Wakanda’s tech-
nology. Her brilliance in the STEM field is enhanced by her innovative
approach to fashion: she rejects her brother’s traditional sandals, replac-
ing them with stylish, hi-tech “sneakers” she designed herself.116 Fashion
innovation is nonetheless drawn from sartorial tradition, producing a
richly textured evolution of African fashions for Wakanda grounded both
in historical accuracy and the fantastic. When T’Challa must be chal-

lenged before ascending as king, for instance, the audience is dressed
more traditionally, more ceremonially, Shuri joking that they should
hurry up since she is wearing an uncomfortable corset, one that cites
the corsets worn in the Dinka culture. In her laboratory, she wears not
a lab coat, but a very contemporary white dress with mesh fabric over-
lay and neckline, a dress that typifies high, cosmopolitan fashion even
as she develops and trials technology. Shuri has come a long way from
d’Aulnoy’s Black Princess, which is in no small part due to the increasing
agency of, in this instance, black artists in telling their stories internation-
ally. There is consequently no hint of abjection in the representation of
Shuri and her sartorial innovations.
Beyond racial connotations, however, blackness and “othered” skin
colour continued to suggest a curiously abject, yet awesome sartorial
aesthetic in fairy tales through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
E. Nesbit elaborates upon Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty,” particularly
upon the wicked fairy, who is simply dismissed as old—presumed dead—
by Perrault. Given the name, Malevola, the fairy is a paean to abjectified
glamour: “She had a cruel, ugly, yellow face, shiny bat’s wings, which
she pretended were a fashionable cloak, and a bonnet trimmed with live
snakes. Her scarf was tied together with a bunch of earthworms, and she
wore a live toad for a brooch.”117 She relishes a flair that, fifty years later,
is fully realised in Disney’s Maleficent. Like Nesbit, Disney draws upon
the French language in naming the fairy: mal indicating evil. Maleficent’s
green face, heavily made up with lavish purple eyeshadow and scarlet lip-
stick, is framed in her black headdress—a headdress topped magnificently
with two horns. Her gown is also black, lined in purple, and she has a
crow familiar, and a crowd of grotesque “goons” to do her bidding and
reap her abuse. She is, nonetheless, a glamorous and arresting figure on
film—even “sublime,”118 as Raymond Knapp attests—and readily trans-
forms herself into a screen-dominating dragon. She is an apt descendent
of such fairies as the Queen of the Meteors.
Enchanted, in turn, evoked Maleficent in its portrayal of Queen
Narissa, an evil diva in luminescent, beetle-esque jewel tones, wear-
ing a large winged collar, a silver crown, and a translucent, spiky black
cape, all carried upon platform boots. Mona May, the costume designer,
describes the ensemble as “still Disney, but it could be high fashion, like
something John Galliano or Thierry Mugler might design” so that, in
Manhattan, she is “strutting, looking hot.”119 Narissa’s dramatic green
eyeshadow and dark red lips, too, recall Maleficent’s bold cosmetic
use. Finally, just like Maleficent, she transforms into a dragon. Both
Maleficent and Narissa, played by Susan Sarandon, harness mature glam-
our, rendering the potential for abjection through their ages and skin
tones into the sublime. The live-action Maleficent (2014) capitalised fur-
ther upon the character’s glamour by casting Hollywood star Angelina
Jolie in the lead role. The scarlet lips are present, but her skin is pale, and
the black and purple robes are now black and leathery.120 The costume
designer, Anna B. Sheppard, worked with designers including Manuel
Albarran and Justin Smith, though the skin and bone inspiration for
the costumes shifts a little toward the abject rather than the awesome or
sublime.
The animated Maleficent’s green face mirrors that of the Wicked
Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Although their fea-
tures are Caucasian, their green skin renders them supernatural, prac-
tically inhuman, and, in light of the use of Technicolor in both films,
sublimely vivid onscreen. When The Wizard of Oz’s witches are adapted
in Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1996), itself adapted as a stage musical
by Stephen Schwartz (2003), the witch, now called Elphaba, retains the
MGM green and it becomes key to her identity. Stacy Wolf addresses
her green skin as “a synecdoche for her other differences” from the stu-
dent population, but suggests any reading of her skin as an indicator of
her race is “emphatically foreclosed,” as she is singular or, rather, oth-
ered.121 Alissa Burger indicates of the 1939 film, too, that “Hamilton’s
character is not disfigured but powerfully Othered nonetheless, through
her green skin and abnormally sharp features.”122 In Baum’s novel,
the Wicked Witch is not apparently green: she has only one eye and
Denslow illustrates her as an elderly woman, her hair in beribboned
plaits, wearing an old fashioned ruff, a double-breasted jacket over
a skirt patterned with frogs and moons, and spats, thus drawing on a
kind of gendered and period cross-dressing that evokes the sartorial
history of Mother Goose. Her tall canonical hat, decorated with gar-
goyles and bat wings, elaborates the witch iconography of children’s
books and costumes. There is, yet, a hint of early modern fairy wealth,
both in the Wicked Witch of the East’s silver shoes and the Wicked
Witch of the West’s Golden Cap, which is decorated with diamonds
and rubies, and allows the wearer to call for the Winged Monkeys
(although only thrice). However, she is largely abjectified; Baum’s witch
literally dissolved in water like dirt. It is when Elphaba transforms the
witch iconography into something awesome, particularly in the musical

adaptation, that things become sartorially interesting.
Unlike the book, steeped in environmental and social equity themes,
the musical turns its attention more fully—more visually—to the sar-
torial spectacle of Galinda and Elphaba’s transformation into Oz’s
witches. Early in their relationship, Galinda duplicitously gives Elphaba
a pointed black hat to wear to the ball, insisting on its fashionability,
only for everyone to laugh at Elphaba’s perverse style.123 Elphaba then
comes to “own” the hat, which she wears at a fashionably tilted angle,
pairing it with an ostensibly “black” gown of darkly coloured flounces.
The costume designer, Susan Hilferty, describes the earthy approach to
Elphaba’s clothing: “The dress isn’t black, it has many colors in it—the
same way that mica or coal or jewels, when you think of mining into the
earth, so that’s why the dress is designed to feel like it’s planted or com-
ing out of the earth.”124 The notion of Elphaba coming from the earth
evokes the earlier sublime witches of d’Aulnoy: the most capricious of
fairies are identified with the underground, with vegetative and decaying
matter. They are frightening and awesome in their decomposition, even
as Elphaba ostensibly dissolves in water.
Elphaba’s earthy, dark, jewelled tones are consistent with Disney
animation of such villains as Maleficent, Lady Tremaine, Ursula, and
Yzma. Good fairies and witches tend to wear white, pink, and blue, col-
ours evoking purity, goodness, femininity, and the sky. Glinda, origi-
nally bedecked in white in Baum, appears in the 1939 film costumed in
the ultimate fairy godmother dress of pink tulle covered in silver stars,
a sparkling crown upon her head. During the stage version of Wicked,
Glinda goes from white ensembles, to pink and yellow dresses, to a blue
gown that appears probably to be inspired by Christian Dior’s Juno
Ballgown (1949), with layers of sparkling, sequined scallops forming the
skirt.125 In Disney animation, too, these colours become quite common,
though not uniformly so. The good fairies in Sleeping Beauty wear red
(though often presented as pink), blue, and green, and while the fairy
godmother in Cinderella (1950) wears blue and pink, the 2015 film
adaptation features Helena Bonham Carter in resplendent white. The
dominance of white and blue, in particular, alludes to the air and sky.
Most fairies in d’Aulnoy do fly, albeit they take their carriages into the
air. Over time, the fairies, particularly the good fairies, themselves began
to fly. In Maleficent, it is the removal of Maleficent’s wings that grounds
her and inspires her to be “wicked.”
In The Little Mermaid (1989), the feature that heralded the second
golden age of Disney animation, Andersen’s original sea witch also
became wicked and sublime. Andersen’s sea witch has no name and,
while not evil per se, she is clearly abject: “There sat the sea witch let-
ting a toad feed out of her mouth, just as we might let a little canary
come and peck at sugar,” and the water snakes “sprawl about her great
spongy bosom.”126 Andersen’s witch is a grotesque who lives in a home
of slime and skeletons. She is not apparently driven by ambition or
desire. She takes the mermaid’s voice, observing that she can use her
physical gracefulness and expressive eyes to win the prince, and leaves
the little mermaid in terrible pain, every step she takes upon her human
legs a torment. The witch’s warnings are pragmatic and she appears to
have no interest in the outcome of the mermaid’s dreams beyond the
transaction. Although she provides the sisters with a dagger to help
save the heartbroken mermaid, the mermaid nonetheless succumbs to
a dismal fate. As Warner notes, the tale “seems to gloat on the morbid
outcome.”127
Disney’s Ursula is by contrast awesome, her abjection rendered sub-
lime in a spectacular, calculated production. Like Maleficent and the
Witch of the West, her skin colour, a light mauve, is beyond the human
spectrum. Although like the wicked fairy and witch, she is of mature
years, she has a rotund figure exuding sexuality: she is a cecaelia, the
lower half of her body flowing into plump tentacles, allowing her to
slink and bounce. She has the power to physically emulate a slim, stere-
otypical Disney princess: in fact, she masquerades for a time as Vanessa,
enthralling Prince Eric in order to frustrate Ariel’s amatory efforts.
Ursula chooses to enjoy her own corpulent body, fitting it into a tight,
strapless, little black dress. This is her sexy “LBD,” the popular term for
the dress.128 The LBD grew in influence from approximately the 1920s,
breaking from associations with mourning,129 but an iconic black dress
associated with sexuality was already in play in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X” (1883–1884) portrays the
socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau in a black gown. The com-
bination of the gown’s colour and revealing neckline, the pale, almost
lavender tones of her skin, and her bold stance have become iconic in a
way relevant to the representation of Ursula’s hedonistic sexuality. The
little black dress and Ursula’s body merge, her tentacles and the train of
her skirt indistinguishable. The fashionably black dress and the sublime
body move as one.
Her make-up is equally as dramatic as Maleficent’s with thick teal eye-

shadow, scarlet lips, and either a mole or mouche, her short, white hair
sculpted.130 The pronounced make-up of Disney villains is a counter-
point to the impression of natural beauty embodied in the Disney hero:
even Mulan, made up for her visit to the Matchmaker, wipes off the
paint in an effort to see herself for who she truly is. Cosmetic use has,
for centuries, equated to artifice. In the ancien régime tales, cosmetics
are used by coquettes, predominantly the more mercurial or pernicious
fairies. In the eighteenth century, Morag Martin argues that “[w]earing
cosmetics became linked to two different types of corruption: aesthetic
deception and moral degradation,”131 that, while not new criticisms,
were becoming more prevalent. However, the extensive use of cosmetic
enhancement on the Disney villains sharpens their unnaturalness, their
awesome inhumanness.132 Ursula and her peers are attractive and sex-
ual, evoking the Hollywood femme fatale. However, this performance of
sublime sexuality is often read as a parody of female sexuality, a hyper-
femininity that is not sublime per se, but camp. The depiction of Ursula
was inspired by Divine, a famous drag queen. The tradition of plus-sized,
ugly, or old women being performed by men is itself of longstanding
in pantomime. Drag is seen as disrupting dominant codes: Ursula is all
about disrupting dominant codes, particularly those upheld by the white
merking, Triton.
Feminine excess and sexuality—the abject into the sublime of the
female—is often represented as beyond the capacity of a heteronorma-
tive female, traditionally virtuous and demure. Yet, Ursula is to all intents
and purposes female—she is simply miraculously female. Laura Sells
argues that “she schools [Ariel] in disruptive reconstructions of gender
and harbors her voice in the feminine home of jouissance.”133 Ultimately,
for these villainous ladies in black, the performance is about their own
female sexual and sartorial confidence: they are literally dressed to kill.
They actually do become fashion icons.
Perhaps the clearest line of descent from the Queen of the Meteors
to contemporary Disney villains is Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove
(2000). Zipes repines that the film “repeats the totalitarian message”
in which peasants restore royalty to their rightful position, whereby
they “rule more graciously.”134 While Zipes states that it is “a stale
approach to fairy tales,”135 it is an approach deeply embedded in the
fairy-tale code of ethics. The fairies “test” future royalty for compassion
and humility—the malevolent fairies rather more enthusiastically and
irrevocably. Yzma isn’t a fairy, of course. She is simply the incredibly old
advisor to the emperor, one with a great deal of ambition for the throne
herself. Lacking magic, she has a secret underground laboratory in which
she concocts potions, reiterating the evil queen’s use of a laboratory to
concoct various poisons and transformations for her prey in Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs. Their underground laboratories reflect the earthy
nature of the more apoplectic, volcanic fairies. Yzma is not precisely test-
ing the youthful emperor, Kuzco, but her efforts do, indeed, test him.
When he flippantly fires her, her plans for retribution are rather more
personal than political, although she uses the opportunity to make her-
self empress.
Like Maleficent and Ursula, Yzma’s skin is not quite a human shade,
being a grey-lilac.136 She also wears dramatic eyeshadow and a
bold lip colour, together with some stupendous, insect-like false eye-
lashes and long, varnished nails. Her dresses are in jewel tones of black,
purple and green—she does on one occasion dispense with her mourn-
ing robes to reveal a slinky, sparkly, hot pink dress—set off with turbans,
long conical headdresses, and splendid plumes, statement earrings, and
feather boas. Her cape has a dramatic, skeletal frame. She enjoys creating
a sartorial spectacle and clearly does regard herself as sexual, at one point
teasingly raising her gown over her thigh to reveal a dagger. She applies
cold cream and cucumbers to her face at night to retain her complexion.
She is waited upon by Kronk, a buffoonish, but muscular henchman who
likes to make spinach puffs and talk to squirrels. The relationship plays
entirely into queered performances.
She is old, so old that the Emperor, Kuzco, refers to her as a dinosaur.
She is also painfully thin, a creature of odd, elongated, bony angles, her
breasts droopy in her halter-necked gowns, her spine visible, her shoul-
ders, elbows and hips pointed. Like the Queen of the Meteors, she is
unworldly in her venerability and macilent physicality. Like Ragotte, she
transforms people into animals, including Kuzco. Their relationship mir-
rors that of the prince and the fairy godmother. In an act of revenge,
Yzma plans to poison him, but the potion is mistaken and he is trans-
formed into a llama instead. Her guards are accidentally transformed into
various animals and Yzma, finally, unexpectedly transforms herself into a
kitten, the form in which she remains at the feature’s end. The kitten is
an apt form, since Eartha Kitt, voicing Yzma, herself played Catwoman
in the 1960s Batman television show. Yzma is no longer even in a sem-
blance of human form, but her sexuality is aptly embodied in feline form,
a form which, as this book has contended, is the repository for sexuality
and magic in the fairy-tale tradition.
The villains in black are awesome and they enact fashion as sarto-
rial spectacle just as readily as the more traditionally “good” fairies.
Villainous fairies, witches, and vixens use fashion to disrupt patriarchal
normalisation of female virtue and diffidence. These are villains unafraid
of making sexual and political overtures and, today, Disney’s villains har-
ness the powers of the little black dress to provoke and bewitch.
What the Wise Wear: Conclusion

The female villains—and more complicated moral types—of fairy tale fre-
quently transcend abjectification and become the sublime, emerging as
truly awesome figures. Theirs is a victory in sartorial stakes. The wise old
women have fared worse, their costume ossifying in the old-fashioned
dress of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century working-women, even then
their garments often purloined to disguise a male player or storyteller.
Nonetheless, the fairies still hold the keys to the fairy-tale wardrobe and
can be formidable fashion influencers. The conclusion closes the book
upon fashion in the fairy-tale tradition by looking at the corsets, shifts,
and even drawers that sometimes emerge beneath a fairy-tale hero’s
dress.
Notes
1. Angela Carter, ed. and trans., The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault
(London: Penguin, 2008), 77.
2. Nicola Brown identifies the first winged fairies in Alexander Pope’s “The
Rape of the Lock” (1714), arguing that the evolution of winged fair-
ies “represents ideas about the transcendence of materiality and the
superhuman capabilities of the human body.” Nicola Brown, Fairies
in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 45. The popularity of these fairies necessarily
shifted attention from the material aspect of the fairies’ patronage and
the fairies own secular investment in fashion and power.
Press of Kentucky, 1994), 89.
5. Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, comtesse de Murat, Histoires sublimes

et allégoriques (Paris: Florentin & Pierre Delaulne, 1699), n.p., BnF
Gallica.
6. Académie françoise, Le dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, dédié au Roy,
vol. 1. A–L (Paris: Vve J. B. Coignard et J. B. Coignard, 1694a), 508.
7. Murat, Histoires sublimes, n.p.
8. L ynn Hunt, “Freedom of Dress in Revolutionary France,” in From the
Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century France, eds. Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn
Norberg (Berkeley: University California Press, 1998), 236.
9. Sarah-Grace Heller, Fashion in Medieval France (Cambridge: Brewer,
2007), 128.
10. Heller, Fashion, 131.
11. The original text is “une robe de chambre d’une étoffe glacée d’or, brodée de
petites Emeraudes qui formoient des chiffres.” Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy,
Contes nouveaux ou Les fees a la mode, vol. 2 (Paris: Vve de T. Girard,
1698), 93, BnF Gallica. The “icy/iced” fabric does seem likely to indicate
taffetas glacé, I believe, and is interesting in light of the argument in
Chapter 5 that Perrault’s glass slippers may have been inspired by shoes
made of such a fabric.
12. Duggan, Salonnières, 238. On the other hand, the poor and working
classes largely exist to be, in effect, patronised by royalty, where in Basile
and Straparola, they frequently act in their own best interests.
13. Kenneth Branagh, dir., Cinderella, Walt Disney Pictures, 2015; iTunes.
14. See, for instance, Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne
d’Aulnoy, The Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy, Newly Done into English,
trans. Annie Macdonell and Elizabeth Lee (London: Lawrence &
Bullen, 1892), 322.
15. While, at first glance, she is quite unique in her true form being that of a
beautiful old woman, her ambiguous nature in the tale does somewhat
account for her form. Many wicked fairies do appear as old, though
ugly, women.
16. Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV
to Elizabeth II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 1.
17. Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, Travels into Spain: Being The Ingenious and
Diverting Letters of the Lady—Travels into Spain, trans. R. Foulché-
Delbosc (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1930), 322.
18. Of Zayde, d’Aulnoy writes that she begs to return to her country and she
would aid her, but for doubting she would be Christian there. She adds
“I would fain understand her, for I believe she is witty” (Spain, 322).
She provides an account of the kinds of religious and moral justifications
that perpetuated slavery, but also of her own attitudes. Her full account
of Zayde is worth consulting for further insight into her conceptualiza-

tion of slavery and race. It is also worth noting that the name Zayde
may be a reference to the 1670 novel of that name by Marie-Madeleine
Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de La Fayette.
2012, DVD.
21. Catherine Velay-Vallantin, “Tales as a Mirror: Perrault in the
Bibliothèque bleue,” in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print
in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia B. Cochrane
22. Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 2nd
ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 109.
23. Charles Perrault, Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec des Moralités
(La Haye, Liège: Basompière, 1777), BnF Gallica.
24. Académie françoise, Le dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise, dédié
au Roy, vol. 2. M–Z (Parison: Vve J. B. Coignard et J. B. Coignard,
1694b), 166.
26. See, for example, Harries’ chapter, “The Invention of the Fairy Tale in
Britain,” in Twice Upon a Time.
27. Gillian Lathey, The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible
Storytellers (New York: Routledge, 2010), 51.
28. Pasquils Jests: With The Merriments of Mother Bunch, Wittie, pleasant, and
delightfull (London: M[iles] F[lesher], 1629), A2, EEBO.
29. Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction
and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), 66.
30. Jennifer Schacker, “Fluid Identities: Madame d’Aulnoy, Mother Bunch,
and Fairy-Tale History,” in The Individual and Tradition: Folkloristic
Perspectives, ed. Ray Cashman, Tom Mould, and Pravina Shukla
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 260.
31. Edgar Taylor, German Popular Stories and Fairy Tales, as Told by
Gammer Grethel, from the Collection of MM. Grimm (London: Bell &
Daldy, 1872), xi.
33. The chaperon could also refer to a band of satin, velvet, or camelot, worn
by women who were no longer desmoiselles. Académie françoise, Le dic-
tionnaire T1, 168.

35. James Robinson Planché, A Cyclopædia Of Costume or Dictionary of Dress
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1879), 127.
36. Jack Zipes, ed. The Trials & Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, 2nd
ed. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 76–77.
39. Jan M. Ziolkowski, Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval
Latin Past of Wonderful Lies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2009), 111.
40. There are also a number of chaperons, for instance, in Anne-Claude de
Caylus’s Féeries nouvelles (1741), including a blue one in “Cadichon.”
Anne-Claude de Caylus, Féeries Nouvelles, seconde partie, Œuvres Badines,
complettes, du Comte de Caylus, vol. 9 (Amsterdam, 1787), 425. Laura
Valentine actually translates it as a blue riding hood in “Septimus,” as the
tale is titled in her collection, thus echoing the “riding hood” translation
of Perrault into English. Laura Valentine, ed. The Old, Old Fairy Tales
(London: Frederick Warne & Co., ca. 1889), 466.
41. D’Aulnoy refers to the vertugadin, a farthingale, but here the fairy is wear-
ing it outside. The vertugadin could be in the form of a hoop, bum roll,
false rump, or garde-Infante. Like the ruff, the farthingale here belongs
largely to the Renaissance, although, in Travels in Spain, d’Aulnoy notes
that, until recently, women wore large farthingales: “This fashion was
very troublesome to themselves as well as others.” Spain, 199. Murat also
places the very short, white-haired Fairy Mordicante in a standing collar
and farthingale in “Jeune et Belle” (Young and Beautiful, 1698). There
does seem to be a fashion trend for the wearing of old-fashioned farthin-
gales among old, ugly wicked fairies who enjoy seducing young men.
42. Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, The Yellow Dwarf (London: George
Routledge & Sons, 1875), Internet Archive.
43. Red hats or caps of various forms were, however, quite common items of
apparel in the early modern period.
44. Randle Cotgrave, A French-Englißh Dictionary, Compil’d by Mr Randle
Cotgrave: with Another in English and French. Whereunto are newly
added the Animadverßions and Supplement, &c. of James Howell Eßquire
(London: W. H. for Luke Fawne, 1650), Google Books.
45. Rebecca Ridinghood, “Friday, December 7, 1711,” in The Spectator:
Stereotype Edition (London: Isaac, Tuckey, & Co., 1836), 275.
46. Anne Buck, Clothes and the Child: A Handbook of Children’s Dress in
England 1500–1900 (Carlton: Ruth Bean, 1996), 193.
47. Diana Sperling and Gordon Mingay, Mrs Hurst Dancing and Other
Scenes from Regency Life 1812–1823 (London: Victor Gollancz, 1981).
48. Harriet L. Childe-Pemberton, The Fairy Tales for Every Day (London:

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1882), 223.
50. Childe-Pemberton, Fairy Tales, 228–229.
51. Childe-Pemberton, Fairy Tales, 229.
58. Valentine, The Old, Old, 98.
61. Heinz Rölleke, “New Results of Research on Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” in
The Brothers Grimm and Folktales, ed. James M. McGlathery, Larry
W. Danielson, Ruth E. Lorbe, and Selma K. Richardson (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 106.
62. Rölleke, “New Results,” 105. She is also identified as a servant or nanny,
the latter, of course, reinforcing the image of a Mother Goose figure
as a children’s nurse. There has been debate about Rölleke’s iden-
tification, which is, for instance, summarized by Zipes. Jack Zipes,
The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 73–77.
63. Rölleke, “New Results,” 106.
64. Robert Thurston, The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in
Europe and North America, rev. ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), xvii.
65. Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, The Fairy Tales of Madame D’Aulnoy: newly
done into English, trans. Annie Macdonell and Elizabeth Lee (London:
Lawrence & Bullen, 1892), 216.
66. Schacker, “Fluid,” 256.
67. R yoji Tsurumi, “The Development of Mother Goose in Britain in the
Nineteenth Century,” Folklore 101, no. 1 (1990): 29, JSTOR.
68. John Harvey, The Story of Black (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), n.5,
323.
69. Danae Tankard, “‘A Pair of Grass-Green Woollen Stockings’: The
Clothing of the Rural Poor in Seventeenth-Century Sussex,” Textile
History 43, no. 1 (2012): 10, Taylor & Francis Online. As Tankard
notes, however, the bright colours could also vary according to the spe-
cific, often natural, dyes. Yellow could simply indicate a mellow, straw
hue, for instance.
70. Christine Stevens, “Welsh Peasant Dress—Workwear or National

Costume?” Textile History 33, no. 1 (2002): 66, Taylor & Francis Online.
71. Stevens, “Welsh,” 64–67.
72. Mother Goose and the Golden Egg (London: W. S. Fortey, 1860). Internet
Archive.
73. Tsurumi, “Development,” 31.
74. Stevens, “Welsh,” 76.
75. Ardern Holt, Fancy Dresses Described; or, What to Wear at Fancy Balls,
5th ed. (London: Debenham & Freebody, Wyman & Sons, 1887), 114,
Internet Archive.
76. Holt, Fancy Dresses, 115.
77. George Cruikshank, illustrator, The Cruikshank Fairy-Book: Four Famous
Stories (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911). 168, Internet Archive.
78. Warner, From the Beast, n.p.
86. L. Frank Baum, Father Goose: His Book (Chicago: Geo M. Hill Co.,
1899).
87. Anita Stamper and Jill Condra, Clothing Through American History:
The Civil War Through the Gilded Age, 1861–1899 (Santa Barbara:
Greenwood, 2011), 309.
88. Sarah Catherine Martin, The comic adventures of Old Mother Hubbard,
and her dog: in which is shewn the wonderful powers that good old lady pos-
sessed in the education of her favourite animal (London: J. Harris & Son,
1819), 2, Internet Archive.
89. Martin, Old Mother Hubbard, 7, 22.
90. Harvey, Black, 302.
91. Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time (2018), adapted from the novel, casts Oprah
Winfrey in the role of Mrs. Which. Mrs. Which wears much more silver
in the film.
92. Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (London: Corgi, 1992), 285.
93. Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight (New York: Harper, 2010), 345.
94. Valerie Steele, The Black Dress (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 8.
95. Harvey, Black, 266.
96. Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier de Villandon, La tour ténébreuse et les jours
lumineux, contes anglois (Le Cabinet des fees; ou Collection choisie des con-
tes des fees et autres contes merveilleux, vol. 12) (Amsterdam, 1785), 182,
BnF Gallica.
97. Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, Selected Letters,

trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin Books, 1982), iBooks.
Coincidentally, Sévigné mentions Montespan’s gold dress, made by fair-
ies, in this same letter.
98. Denis Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels, 1748)
describes the adventures of a sovereign, Mangogul of the Congo. He
conjures the genie Cucufa, so that he can arrange for the women of his
court to tell him of their “amorous adventures.” Denis Diderot, The
Indiscreet Jewels, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Marsilio, 1993),
12. The genie gives him a ring, which, once he points it at a woman,
will cause her “jewels”—genitals—to speak of her sexual activities. The
story is misogynistic, unlike L’Héritier’s, who was also coincidentally
the author of “The Discreet Princess.” Diderot’s novel opens with the
birth of Mangogul, making reference to Scheherazade’s grandson and
noting that “[h]is father, Erguebzed, did not summon the fairies around
the cradle of his son, for he had observed that most of the princes of
his time, whom these female intelligences had educated, were no better
than fools” (5). It seems likely that Diderot’s novel is a direct response
to the past fairy-tale vogue. Even Mirzoza, his favourite lover, is
described as having the “uncommon talent of telling a good tale” (10).
Only, the novel overturns the proto-feminist thrust of the fairy tales.
Where L’Héritier employs a sartorial swindle, driven and ultimately
confounded by the clever fingers and wit of the con artist’s wife and
daughter, Mongogul and his genie use jewellery to compel the “jewels”
of women’s physical bodies to inform against their will.
100. John Harvey, Men in Black (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 80.
101. D’Aulnoy, Spain, 88.
103. The dullness of crepe as a fabric leant to its use for mourning. Rather
than presenting a rich, vibrant black, the crepe presents what would be
considered an appropriately subdued appearance for mourning wear.
104. Une peau de chagrin noir can refer to horse, donkey or mule leather.
Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, Contes des Fées, Édition critique établie,
repr., ed. Nadine Jasmin (Paris: Champion Classiques, Honoré
Champion, 2008), 327. There is, therefore, a great temptation to link
the queen to the abject status of Donkey Skin.
105. Julia Kristeva, The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver, updated
ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 238.
106. Ulrich Lehmann, Tigersprung: Fashion in Modernity (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2000), 9.
107. Lehmann, Tigersprung, 43.

110. The representation of relationships between black slaves/servants and
monkeys is embedded in historical racism. D’Aulnoy’s titular princess,
Babiole (1697), is even turned into a monkey upon her birth, the work
of a vexed fairy. Her face is black, her form viewed as shameful. Her
plight—among other things, she is dressed to amuse the court in fash-
ions that physically tire her—is still heroic and provides further opportu-
nity to explore how race in the early modern tales is articulated.
111. Kimberly J. Lau, “Imperial Marvels: Race and the Colonial Imagination
in the Fairy Tales of Madame d’Aulnoy,” Narrative Culture 3, no. 2
(Fall 2016): 161, JSTOR. Lau also provides an account of Babiole,
mentioned in n.110.
112. Lau, “Imperial,” 143.
113. D’Aulnoy, Fairy Tales, 254. Of course, this is casually racist, but not
unexpected at the time the translation appears.
114. Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Barneville, Baronne d’Aulnoy, D’Aulnoy’s
Fairy Tales, trans. J. R. Planché (London: George Routledge & Sons,
1888), 245.
115. Ann Schmiesing, “Blackness in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” Marvels &
Tales 30, no. 2 (2016): 214, Project MUSE.
116. Her naming of the shoes is a play upon the ubiquitous American sneaker,
with her design, incorporating stealth capability, technologically and
arguably fashionably superior.
117. Edith Nesbit, The Old Nursery Stories, repr. (London: Humphrey
Milford; Oxford University Press, 1930), 113.
118. Raymond Knapp, “Medieval ‘Beauty’ and Romantic ‘Song’ in Animated
Technirama: Pageantry, Tableau and Action in Disney’s Sleeping
Beauty,” in The Disney Musical on Stage and Screen: Critical Approaches
from ‘Snow White’ to ‘Frozen’, ed. George Rodosthenous (London:
Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017), Kindle.
119. Nadine Kam, “Pouf ! Costume magic,” Star Bulletin, November 15, 2007,
http://archives.starbulletin.com/2007/11/15/features/story01.html.
120. Maleficent has a range of costumes in the live action film. She is earlier
seen in a brown, earthy dress, decorated in feathers. Here, I am simply
focusing upon the costume that corresponds most closely with that of
the animated feature.
121. Stacy Wolf, Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway
Musical (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), Kindle.
122. Alissa Burger, The Wizard of Oz as American Myth: A Critical Study of
Six Versions of the Story, 1900–2007 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.,
2012), 168.
123. Oddly, the hat comes from Galinda’s own wardrobe, though it’s unclear
why an object so unfashionable would be owned by such a fashion-
conscious hero. In Maguire’s Wicked, when Elphaba knocks over some
hat boxes, Galinda insists she tries on one that is so extravagantly fem-
inine that it could be worn by a pantomime dame. Gregory Maguire,
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (New York:
ReganBooks, 1996), 77–78. Maguire’s reference evokes the history of
the dame, often assigned to fairy godmother, witch, or mother goose
roles. The hat actually suits Elphaba, who, of course, will grow into the
role of witch herself, but she and Galinda go on to discuss the nature
of good and evil, rather than fashion. Elphaba later puts on the tradi-
tional witch’s hat, which is not described as such, but simply as “wide-
brimmed” and having “a crown like a cone” (215). Her choice of
headwear, however, is driven by her mission to kill Madame Morrible,
rather than by a desire to make a sartorial statement; thus, the witch’s
hat becomes not a marker of her identity, but anonymity, operating
counter to its traditional sartorial purpose.
124. Erin Blasco, “Five questions with Susan Hilferty, costume designer for
‘WICKED,’” O Say Can You See? Stories from the National Museum of
American History, November 30, 2012, http://americanhistory.si.edu/
blog/2012/11/five-questions-with-susan-hilferty-costume-designer-
for-wicked.html.
125. Her green costumes are a nod to the Emerald City.
Co., 1999), 225.
128. The LBD is usually shorter than Ursula’s dress, but Ursula’s body is
non-normative and her dress certainly captures the spirit of the LBD.
129. Steele, Black, 24.
130. It is likely to be a mole, but the mouche would link Ursula back to her
fairy heritage, particularly those fairies who made up their faces and
were dubbed coquettes.
131. Morag Martin, Selling Beauty: Cosmetics, Commerce, and French Society,
1750–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 77.
132. Cosmetic lines by such companies as ELF and Wet n Wild, in conjunc-
tion with Disney, have celebrated the glamour of Disney villains with
bold colour palettes and false lashes. The style of the villains is thus mar-
keted as fashionable.
133. Laura Sells, “‘Where Do the Mermaids Stand?’ Voice and Body in
The Little Mermaid,” in From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film,
Gender, and Culture, ed. Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 182.
134. Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale

Films (New York: Routledge, 2011), 30.
135. Zipes, Enchanted, 30.
136. In this case, there are racial implications. The characters are ostensibly
from Peru, but the voice of Yzma is provided by Eartha Kitt, an African
American singer, actor, and activist. Other voices are largely provided by
white actors. Certainly, earlier films such as Mulan and Pocahontas were
more thoughtfully, though not faultlessly, cast in light of the characters’
ethnicities. Unlike these films, The Emperor’s New Groove doesn’t strive
to portray Peruvian culture in any meaningful way: indeed, theme park
allusions, chain restaurants, and Looney-Tunes style comedy abound in
the film.
CHAPTER 7
Conclusion: The Fairy Tale Undressed
When you take away fashion, what do you have in fairy tale? Often you
have a naked Emperor and some rather successful swindlers. The rep-
resentation of fashion in fairy tale has not only assured our identifica-
tion of the princess at the ball, the clever cat, or the little girl about to
be devoured by a wolf, but has also elaborated how tales have evolved
through time and place. The representations of fashion reveal hidden lay-
ers in the history of our negotiation of status and agency, revealing how
recognition of characters such as Cinderella, Puss in Boots, and Little
Red Riding Hood relies upon a foundation of previous garments, all
with their own histories.
If we remove all those sartorial layers, the protagonists of fairy tale
simply die or disappear. Their transmogrifying bodies rely upon the stuff
of fashion to spin their identities and their histories.
Unmentionable
It seems apt in the conclusion to mention just one element of fash-
ion not often represented in fairy tales. Underwear is rarely mentioned
in early modern fairy tales, for clothing was layered and the underlay-
ers were often not entirely concealed, but simply provided the founda-
tion of dress. Basile does mention undergarments on occasion, as befits
his bawdy approach to fairy tale, and the delight he takes in mixing the
low and abject with the luxurious. Indeed, when Semmelhack observes
that the practice of wearing skirts over chopines indicates that “chopines

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4_7
were closely aligned with undergarments and were typically only visible
in images of women in states of undress,”1 the appearance of Zezolla’s
chianiello becomes even more erotically significant. Basile’s female pre-
decessor of Puss in Boots works to improve the lot of her indolent
protégé, claiming to the king that even his shirt has been stolen by his
servants in order to avoid him being seen in his tattered clothing. The
shirt also performed as underwear for men so, when the king supplies
clothing, including undergarments, from his own wardrobe, it suggests
a certain premature intimacy between the men. Moreover, Cagliuso is
literally dressed in regal clothing, from the most intimate layers to the
most publicly ostentatious. It is consequently a short progression to his
marriage to the king’s daughter. In Basile’s “Sun, Moon, and Talia,”
the hero removes her clothing before being burnt alive and is about to
remove her petticoat when they take her away. She was likely still wear-
ing a shift, stays and stockings. Plainer undergarments of hardier fabrics
such as linen were worn close to the skin, as these could be more easily
laundered. It is unlikely Talia would have stripped to nothing at all, but
the process does add to her humiliation and abjection, just as it under-
scores the violence done to her as she is about to be reduced to ash. For
Basile, the mention of unmentionables embellishes the thinness of the
layer between the undressed and dressed body, the private and the pub-
lic, the physical and the material. This is the layer that stands between
the physical body and social and political identity.
The shift—or chemise if discussing French garments—made rare
appearances in later tales. Hamilton’s parody of fairy tale just at the
dawn of the eighteenth century contains a cheerful, ribald reference to
a princess’s chemise, referred to as a “shift” in the English translation.
Moussellina is an earthy princess, dirty and sweaty after her hunt. She
undresses to bathe, but her attendants are quickly consumed by a croc-
odile and she flees in just her shift.2 The translated tale loses the word-
play of the French, in which Mousseline, the princess’s name, translates
directly as Muslin. At this point in fashion, muslin is not used extensively
in outer dress. Hamilton is writing before Marie Antoinette made the
gaulle or chemise à la Reine fashionable and shocking: she was painted by
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in her simple, loose muslin gown in 1783, but
the gaulle, designed by Rose Bertin and adapted from the shifts worn
by women in the Caribbean colonies, was viewed as a private garment,
rather too like underwear, and certainly too informal and “classless” to
be worn by a queen for her portrait, the queen meant to represent the
7 CONCLUSION: THE FAIRY TALE UNDRESSED 275
wealth and authority of the throne.3 By the end of the century, simple
white muslin gowns would dominate fashion. Hamilton was scarcely
prescient of forthcoming eighteenth-century fashion, yet Mousseline’s
tale does, in a sense, foreshadow the future of muslin in French fashion.
The tale, by chance, characterises the significance of thin muslin and
of the chemise itself. Too modest to expose herself in just her shift to her
male attendants, Moussellina chooses to swim to safety, taking off her
shift in order to swim faster. The crocodile is distracted by the muslin
and takes it as his trophy, rather than the princess. However, the prin-
cess discovers that all three hundred and seventy-four dozen shifts that
she had owned are gone and she cannot find any others to suit her, all
new shifts being “bewitched” so that those she wears in the daytime take
away her appetite and those she wears during the night subject her to
insomnia.4 The shifts are charmed to screw up the physical operations
of her body, their close proximity to the body providing the logic of the
charm. Moussellina is thus forced to dress without a shift, resulting in a
rather odd appearance. She lacks grace and ease of movement, the nar-
rator supposing that this may have something to do with how cloth of
silver, in which she is adorned, feels against her skin without the bar-
rier of a shift. The cloth of silver—fabric woven with silver thread, the
metal itself wound round a core of fibre—would abrade bare skin. As
Wilson observes, linen shifts “protected the bodies of the rich from the
stiff, scratchy material of which clothing was often made, and at the same
time protected the sumptuous costumes from the dirt of the bodies they
adorned.”5 Hamilton’s tale, for all its fancy and parody, captures the
material use of the chemise.
The chemise did make another appearance in Ever After (1998). The
film places the Cinderella tale in the sixteenth century—or, at least
loosely, during the Renaissance—and, although ostensibly set in France,
the costumes by Jenny Beavan have a decidedly Italian influence. When
Danielle and the prince become lost in the forest, Danielle takes off her
expensive dress in order to climb a tree to find out where they are, sen-
sibly bunching the fabric of her shift to enable greater movement. Set
upon by robber gypsies, Danielle is caught up the tree in just her shift.
The leader casually taunts her that his wife will appreciate the dress.
Danielle falls from the tree to knock down one of the gypsies and then
issues orders to the leader, who promises she can take with her what-
ever she can carry. Still in her plain shift and bodice, she picks up the
prince and proceeds to carry him off before the gypsy, laughing, relents.
The scene highlights that Danielle puts the prince before her own
modesty: indeed, she puts finding a way out of the forest before ques-
tions of modesty. Such pragmatism aligns her with working-women
rather than princesses—working-class women, for instance, were more
likely to wear their stays visibly when performing tasks—and Danielle
herself emphasises her status as a servant. This Cinderella is fully
grounded in her social reality.
Little Red Riding Hoods perhaps undress more than any other fairy-
tale hero, sometimes in a semblance of the striptease, as in “The Story of
Grandmother,” originally told by Louis and François Briffault (Nièvre,
1885). The hero takes off each item of her clothing and casts it into
the fire upon the wolf’s instructions.6 The wolf’s remarks that she’ll no
longer require her clothing underscore the threat to the hero’s iden-
tity: she is reduced to her physical body in preparation for consumption.
Perrault’s hero also takes off her clothes, observing her grandmother
“en son déshabillé,” Jones pointing out the expression simply refers to
garments worn in private, including for sleep.7 The very act of undress-
ing for the youthful hero is risky, even as she is invited into her grand-
mother’s bed. As in other tales in which enchanted men and women
“undress” from bestial forms, there is a perfectly obvious sexual mean-
ing. In a more literal sense, however, Little Red Riding Hood without
her hood ceases to exist and becomes simply a tasty morsel for a crafty
wolf in granny’s bed.
The removal of clothing necessitates the removal of one’s social status
or identity, leaving the body exposed in its corporeality. In many tales,
such as Perrault’s “Little Thumbling” and “Molly Whuppie,” ogres put
golden crowns or chains upon their sleeping children, and the erstwhile
hero slips these onto their own bodies and those of their siblings so that
the ogres eat their own children by mistake. Without sartorial markers,
the body is only so much meat.
The Fairy Tale’s Cinched Waist

While most underwear is unmentionable, fairy tales do feel disposed to
mention the lengths that women will go to achieve a small waist and tiny
person. The corset has long been a vexed issue, Steele going so far as
to name it “probably the most controversial garment in the entire his-
tory of fashion.”8 In The Glass Slipper (1955), the fairy godmother even
remarks, “a corset is a fine thing invented by the Devil.”9 It is common
to negatively view the corset as an object constraining women’s bodies

and, in the wearing of which, women themselves as having become the
fashionable victims of patriarchy, but the reality is far more complex.
Stays and corsets evolved from the tight-lacing of gowns, making bod-
ices, in particular, more fitting, providing support and enhancement for
the breasts. Women did not necessarily lace their corsets to achieve a
smaller waist, however, certainly not on a day-to-day basis.
In Perrault’s Cinderella, for example, the stepsisters break more
than a dozen laces in the effort to more tightly cinch their stays. They
work to achieve the smallest possible waist for the ball. Letters writ-
ten by Madame, Elizabeth-Charlotte, Princess Palatine, in the years
after the publication of Perrault’s work evince her frustration with the
women of court who actually wore no stays. On December 14, 1704,
she writes that women “have become lazy, and walk about without
stays all day long. This makes their bodies grow thick; waistlines have
disappeared.”10 Steele suggests this is merely “an exaggeration,”11 but
it does indicate that women did not always tight-lace. In the context of
the tale, it seems clear that the sisters are tight-lacing for the occasion of
the ball, rather than as an everyday practice. In the Brothers Grimm’s
“Little Snow White,” the evil queen tempts Snow White with colourful
silk lace, remarking how slackly she is laced and offering to lace her up
properly—actually pulling so tightly Snow White loses consciousness. In
an alternative version collected by the Brothers Grimm, the lace itself is
poisoned.12 Steele actually cites the case reports of Ambroise Paré that
mention a 1581 incident of tight-lacing perhaps resulting in death.13
However, in the decades preceding the Brothers Grimm publication in
1812, diaphanous gowns did not define the waist and, while corsets and
stays were still worn, they tended to be lighter; women also wore alterna-
tive foundation garments.14 Indeed, as the Brothers Grimm publish, men
begin to wear corsets, too, prompted by the body-conscious fashions of
the dandy. The tight-lacing in “Little Snow White” may reflect the ear-
lier eighteenth century, but certainly depicts the vanity and peril involved
in tight-lacing. The two tales, in fact, both represent the harmful nature
of stays/corsets and their influence upon female vanity. It’s perhaps
no coincidence that these two tales, having become the most popu-
lar versions, are written by men. However, there is a vexed relationship
between the corset and patriarchy, whereby it is both assumed women
adopt corsets to objectify themselves for the male gaze, and that women
foolishly injure themselves through their obsession with fashion.
The live action Disney Cinderella (2015) re-enacts the scene of the
stepsisters’ tight-lacing, Drisella demanding Cinderella pull ever harder
upon the laces of her corset. The bold colours of the stepsisters’ under-
wear, with its gold trimming and ruffles on their drawers, situate their
costumes as fanciful, rather than strictly historical fashion,15 particularly
as their hoops are made from a flexible of series of circles that in no way
resemble the farthingales and crinolines of history. Cinderella is, as usual,
magically transformed and there is no suggestion of efforts to tight-lace
her into a corset.
However, Cinderella’s consequent “magical” waist measurement
did engender controversy when the first images of the film came out,
with critics claiming her small waistline promoted an unattainable body
image, even though the director, Kenneth Branagh, and actor, Lily
James, insisted the waistline was not altered by CGI and was the result
of wearing a corset. The Guardian, for example, observed that the film
was “criticised for putting clock back to a time before fairytale hero-
ines became feisty and strong – and for the severely tight waistline on
Cinders’ gown.”16 The perceived link between the small waistline—
produced via a corset—and a lack of female agency is long-established,
embedded in the patriarchal discourse of female victimhood through
fashion. Of course, the dress itself enhances the effect of the corset
through optical illusion: the excessive volume of the skirts together
with plumped drapery at the shoulders make the waist itself appear even
smaller.17 Certainly, James likely found the corset uncomfortable, but
women today do not wear corsets to the extent that they were worn in
the past and so wearing a corset tight-laced for a role would certainly
add to the discomfort. In fact, during the bulk of the film, in which she
is wearing a simpler gown and apron, her waist is slim, though unre-
markable. The corset was used to escalate the sartorial spectacle of the
ball gown, and she does still dance and run and swing in the corset.
Elsewhere in the film, Ella is seen riding a galloping horse, cleaning, and
tending to farm animals. Movement is not impossible with the corset.
Powell, the costume designer, remarked in an interview, “There are no
visual effects and there’s no cruelty. We don’t harm the actors with cor-
sets.”18 Whether or not there were visual effects, the use of the corset in
the contemporary film became an issue of female agency. That the cos-
tumes drew on various historical periods where such undergarments were
commonly worn was disregarded. Essentially, an understanding of the
lived experience of women in their undergarments was ignored and the
corset was treated as a patriarchal tool for female restriction.
It is unsurprising, then, that in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast

(2017), Emma Watson’s rejection of wearing a corset as Belle became
news. Costume designer, Jacqueline Durran explained, “She did not
want a dress that was corseted or that would impede her in any way.”19
Of course, this ignores the history of active women wearing corsets,
prioritising the discourse of the corset as restrictive and patriarchal.
While Durran’s costume design is largely faithful to eighteenth-century
France, Belle’s costumes become deliberate anachronisms: contempo-
rary attitudes to female dress leave her dress literally unsupported by
eighteenth-century undergarments. In the opening scenes, Belle wears a
blue dress, the bodice laced, but in such a way that would have been
unsupportive before the invention of the modern bra. The skirt of her
dress is hitched up on one side, caught at the waist, revealing drawers.
Working women, in particular, would tuck their skirts up, revealing pet-
ticoats, when necessary to prevent wear and dirt and for ease of move-
ment. However, they would not reveal such garments as Belle’s loose
drawers, gathered in at the calf, and made of a light fabric like muslin. In
the early 1800s, women could wear pantalettes or trousers visible below
their skirts but, by the 1830s, it was only younger girls who would wear
lacy pantalettes under their shorter skirts. Women did increasingly adopt
such garments—pantalettes, drawers, trousers, bloomers—over time
but, by and large, these would be either largely concealed beneath skirts
or, if constructed to be seen publicly, made of sturdier fabric, as were
the bloomers appearing in the mid-nineteenth century. Belle’s drawers
are an anachronism, further exasperated by their fine fabric, and hitch-
ing up one’s skirts to publicly display revealing and strange undergar-
ments would have cast Belle not simply as eccentric, but as indecent.
Women, in fact, wore “trousers” and breeches in the eighteenth century,
when the film is ostensibly set—for horse-riding, physical labour, the-
atrical costume—but these were constructed from less delicate fabrics.
As Dauphine, for example, Marie Antoinette on occasion rode in mas-
culine dress, including form-fitting breeches or trousers, painted in such
an ensemble by Louis-Auguste Brun de Versoix (Marie Antoinette on
Horseback, 1783), and earlier aristocratic women had also worn breeches
under their skirts for “vigorous outdoor activities.”20 However, drawers
in a light fabric would be unlikely to survive too many athletic activities
and Belle is exposing her drawers merely on a walk to return her book,
rather than in any form of strenuous exercise or physically taxing task.
The costuming choice is one of contemporary optics, rather than one
based in an understanding of the real lived history of female fashion.21
Perhaps most strange of all is Belle’s reckless ride to the Beast’s aid
when Gaston rouses the village against him. Belle is not only able to con-
veniently take off her ball gown at full gallop, discarding the expensive
garment and probably ruining the fabric, which would have been care-
fully remade once the dress was outmoded, but Belle rides in under-
garments. The light muslin or linen undergarments are impractical for
horse-riding and climbing castles, providing little support or textile
strength and flexibility. The rationale for Belle’s appearances in under-
garments is undercut by the material nature of those garments. A woman
in appropriate clothing for the eighteenth-century bourgeois or working
class was able to be active and comfortable. P. and R.A. Mactaggart, for
instance, observe that thinking of stays “merely as aids to a fashionable
figure, is to miss much of their importance,” noting that stays were worn
by servants, farmers, and even those on parish relief in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.22 There is a fundamental misunderstanding of
how and why clothing was worn by women and this misunderstanding
informs a range of contemporary adaptations of fairy tales that recreate
historical costumes, but tend to impose contemporary feminist fash-
ion politics anachronistically upon them. Hence, in Snow White and the
Huntsman (2012), with costumes by Colleen Atwood, the hunter rips
Snow White’s gown in such a way that, rather than the seams giving,
the dress is “altered” into a perfectly serviceable minidress with leg-
gings underneath. The alteration is achieved by ripping, rather than what
would have been a woman’s work in cutting and re-stitching, thus eras-
ing that effort and skill. There appears to be a perception that women in
historical fashions were virtually immobilised by their clothing and that
underwear needs not only to be contrived, but also worn publicly, thus
“liberating” an active, feisty princess.
Wilson locates undergarments in “a transition between the distant
epochs when cleanliness was a rarity and ‘true’ underwear an impossi-
ble concept, and the late twentieth century when it is assumed, how-
ever inaccurately, the everyone can afford to be clean” and where the
“deliberate visibility” of underwear “parallels the late twentieth century
ambiguity surrounding privacy, intimacy and sexuality.”23 By ditching
the gown, the fairy-tale heroes expose themselves in a way that actu-
ally mirrors contemporary fashion and its negotiations of ambiguity. As
fairy-tale heroes ditched gowns and corsets to reveal undergarments so,
too, were couture collections revealing the underpinnings of the gown.
Christian Dior’s Spring/Summer line for 2017, for example, features

branded bras and knickers either fully exposed, or worn under translu-
cent gowns. The layers closest to the skin have historically never been
absolutely unseen, but contemporary trends focus on revealing the
body beneath the gown. Rather than make the heroes more active, the
re-tellings simply re-dress them in line with contemporary couture,
mistaking high fashion as a feminist statement. The problem is not the
anachronism itself—anachronism works well in Cinderella (2015) where,
for instance, the 1940s influence on the costumes of the evil stepmother,
Cate Blanchett, highlights her status as a classic Hollywood femme
fatale—but in the promoted rationale.
In reproducing the fashions of the past and simultaneously
re-imagining them in the service of feminism and contemporary fash-
ion, such fairy-tale re-tellings unpick the long material culture of fash-
ion in favour of a superficial expression of feminist theory and ideology.
The problem is that, without understanding how fairy tale has histor-
ically represented fashion, those fashions are misunderstood in a con-
temporary vacuum. In particular, as Wilson also points out, corsets and
their rigidity gradually evolved into contemporary underwear that relies
upon elastic and stretch fabrics to produce support and still form the
body into fashionable shapes.24 The myth of the corset continues to
haunt the fairy-tale princess, suggesting that only in the past was she
confined and restricted, ignoring that, even today, women use under-
garments to help shape and support their bodies both for fashion and
practicality.
The situation doesn’t really improve for those tales looking to
the future. The most famous fairy-tale princess in science fiction, for
instance, is Princess Leia, played by Carrie Fisher. In Star Wars (1977),
the princess is dressed in a loose, white gown. This is the ensemble she
wears as she escapes prison, swings through the air, and fires weap-
ons. Fisher recalls that the director, George Lucas, insisted that she did
not wear a bra “[b]ecause… there’s no underwear in space.”25 Lucas
later explained his rationale that the physical body would expand in
space and thus a woman would be strangled by her bra. Fisher conse-
quently penned her desired obituary: “I want it reported that I drowned
in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”26 Basic misconceptions
about female undergarments—and the belief in their life-threatening
properties—seem to invade even tales of the future.
Why It Matters What Cinderella Wore

In not understanding how fashion has been shaped by female experience,
by commercial practices and industries, by the friction of aristocratic,
bourgeoisie, and peasant bodies in society, today’s storytellers misrep-
resent the sartorial spectacle of the fairy-tale tradition. What Cinderella
wore matters because the shoes she has lost, the gowns layered beneath
her latest sartorial scoop, reveal how Cinderella exists in living culture,
how she has evolved, and just why those glass slippers are so incredibly
tenacious and turn up again and again.
What is particularly revealed by exploring the sartorial layers of
Cinderella is that the material and storied histories of women have been
distorted through the lens of patriarchy—and even the presumption
of patriarchy. The projects of fashion and fairy tale are coupled as both
feminine and frivolous. There are growing, dynamic fields of scholarship
in both areas but, even in contemporary society, what is worn, the tale
told, are regarded as inconsequential. Yet, these reveal the political and
social movements and negotiations that underpin history, and the actions
of women that are often obscured by the dismissal of a shoe, a flounce,
or the desire to go to a ball. Cinderellas have long negotiated and chal-
lenged the limitations of female agency in their many, varied shoes.
Notes
1. Elizabeth Semmelhack, “Above the Rest: Chopines as Trans-
Mediterranean Fashion,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 14, no. 2
(2013): 134, Taylor & Francis Online.
2. Anthony Hamilton, Fairy Tales and Romances, trans. M. Lewis,
H. T. Ryde, and C. Kenney (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), 95.
3. Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To the
Revolution (New York: Picador, 2006), 150, 161–162.
4. Hamilton, Fairy Tales, 98–99.
5. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned In Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, rev. ed.
6. Maria Tatar, ed., The Classic Fairy Tales (New York: W. W. Norton,
1999), 10–11.
8. Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale

2012, DVD.
10. Charlotte-Elisabeth and Duchesse d’Orléans, Letters from Liselotte, trans.
and ed. Maria Kroll (New York: McCall Publishing Company, 1971), 117.
11. Steele, Corset, 27.
12. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of
the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition, trans. and ed. Jack Zipes
13. Steele, Corset, 13.
14. Steele, Corset, 30–33.
15. There is a suggestion of 1830s, Victorian, and 1940s silhouettes in their
wardrobes.
16. Tracy McVeigh, “Kenneth Branagh’s corseted Cinderella fails the Frozen test,
say critics,” Guardian, March 21, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/
film/2015/mar/21/cinderella-disney-branagh-fails-frozen-role-model-test.
17. Mona May mentions using this illusion in designing the wedding dress
for Giselle in Enchanted. Nadine Kam, “Pouf ! Costume magic,”
Star Bulletin, November 15, 2007. http://archives.starbulletin.
com/2007/11/15/features/story01.html. The male counterpart to
Giselle, Prince Edward, is also padded, provided enormous puffed sleeves
and tights to accentuate the representation of ideal masculinity, one of
broad chest and shoulders tapering down to the boots. When such male
heroes appear with their female counterparts, the breadth of her skirts
tends to balance the width of his chest.
18. Emily Zemler, “‘Cinderella’ Costume Designer on Corsets: Actors
Like Them,” Elle, March 14, 2015. http://www.elle.com/culture/
movies-tv/news/a27274/cinderella-sandy-powell-costumes-interview/.
19. Clark Collis, “Beauty and the Beast: Creating Belle’s Fairy Tale Yellow
Dress,” Entertainment Weekly, November 3, 2016. http://ew.com/
article/2016/11/03/beauty-and-beast-emma-watson-yellow-dress/.
20. Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore To the
Revolution (New York: Picador, 2006), 82.
21. Black Panther (2018) is much more successful in terms of creating a fem-
inist princess for its time. Where Belle invents a method of doing laundry
with the aim of giving herself more reading time, Shuri leads Wakanda’s
technology program, designing technology to protect and improve the
lives of others. Where Belle disdains corsets, Shuri wears a ceremonial
corset inspired by historical dress, acknowledging its lack of comfort
without rejecting its historical significance. Where Belle disregards pre-
vailing standards of dress ostensibly for practicality, Shuri engages with
fashion to innovate new functional and aesthetically pleasing clothing.

Of course, Beauty and the Beast is set in eighteenth-century France and,
thus, Belle operates under a different set of opportunities being available
to women. Nonetheless, the two films highlight the very different ways
fashion and technological innovation can be reconciled in the representa-
tion of women.
22. P. Mactaggart and R. A. Mactaggart, “Some Aspects of the Use of Non-
Fashionable Stays,” Costume 7, sup. 1 (1973): 20, Taylor & Francis
Online.
23. Wilson, Adorned, 107.
24. Wilson, Adorned, 104.
25. Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008),
88. Of course, she does have to wear a metal bikini at one point.
26. Fisher, Wishful, 88.
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Index
A Blue Bird, 13, 122, 129, 253

abjection, 37, 98, 101, 105, 106, 110, Doe in the Woods, 18, 76, 132, 230
116, 118, 120, 253, 254, 257, Finette Cendron, 14, 21, 51, 65, 72,
258, 260 73, 122, 156, 168, 180
Alcott, Louisa May, 159, 175 Golden Branch, 238, 253
Andersen, Hans Christian Good Little Mouse, 97, 116, 145,
Darning Needle, 146 230, 252
Emperor’s New Clothes, 21, 206, 252 Green Serpent, 26, 140, 143, 211,
Flying Trunk, 192, 218 255
Galoshes of Fortune, 215 Histoire d’Hypolite, 8, 132
Girl who Trod upon Bread, 191 Island of Happiness, 9
Red Shoes, 21, 189–191, 217 Prince Lutin, 239
Snow Queen, 191 Prince Marcassin, 119, 128
Anderson, Graham, 58, 82 Princess Little Carp, 103
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 114, 204 Princess Mayblossom, 135, 145, 196,
Arden, Holt, 268 254
Armstrong, Isobel, 199, 220 Ram, 65, 104, 115
artifice, 63, 261 White Cat, 85, 96, 131, 133, 227
Aulnoy, Marie-Catherine le Jumel de Wild Boar, 120, 127
Barneville, Baronne de Yellow Dwarf, 199, 239, 266
Babiole, 127, 243, 270 Auneuil, Louise de Bossigny, 216
Beauty with Golden Hair, 144
Bee and the Orange Tree, 31, 85,
103 B
Belle-Belle, 227, 229 Bacchilega, Cristina, 209, 218, 223
Benevolent Frog, 229, 238, 253 Bain, Jessica, 165, 176
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 307

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91101-4
308 Index
Balzac, Honoré de, 221 boots, 1, 2, 17, 19, 37, 56, 63, 95, 109,
Barnard, Malcolm, 35, 46 122, 179, 180, 183, 192, 193, 196,
barrière de diamants, 67 201, 205–210, 213, 217, 220, 222,
Bashor, Will, 187, 216 236, 241, 251, 257, 273, 274, 283
Basile, Giambattista Bottigheimer, Ruth B., 7, 39, 81, 84,
Cagliuso, 56, 205 123, 215
Cinderella Cat, 20, 49, 56, 57, 61, Boucher, François, 61
94, 95 Boyle, David, 12, 40
Goat-Face, 140 Bratich, Jack Z., 165, 176
Golden Trunk, 211 Breward, Christopher, 6, 39
Old Woman Who Was Skinned, 56, Brode, Douglas, 45, 100, 124
197 Broderip, Frances Freeling, 82, 149,
Rosella, 110, 111 173, 204, 222
Seven Little Pork Rinds, 141 Brooks, Mary M., 170
She-Bear, 108, 109, 117 Brown, Nicola, 263
Sun, Moon, and Talia, 274 Brun, Louis-Auguste, 279
Tale of the Ogre, 126 Brush, Heidi M., 165, 176
Three Fairies, 55, 56 Buck, Anne, 240, 266
Viola, 153, 215 Buckley, Cheryl, 165, 176
Baudissin, Sophie von, 29 Burger, Alissa, 258, 270
Baum, L. Frank, 192, 218, 249, Burns, E. Jane, 23, 43, 169
268
Beaudry, Mary C., 168
Beaumont, Jeanne Marie Le Prince de, C
27, 52 Cahun, Claude, 188, 204
Behnke, Andreas, 78, 89, 93, 122 Calvino, Italo, 82, 215
Belle Assemblée, 219 Campbell, Elizabeth A., 138, 171
Benstock, Shari, 214 Canepa, Nancy L., 42, 44, 80, 81,
Bergerat, Émile, 86 122, 127, 172, 174, 215, 222
Bernard, Catherine, 10 Cantu, Maya, 31, 45
Bertin, Rose, 274 Carney, Jo Eldridge, 1
Bignon, Jean-Paul, 25, 155 Carol, Lee, 217
black, 37, 119, 167, 177, 196, 211, Carroll, Lewis, 240
223, 231, 238, 241, 243–247, Carter, Angela
250–263, 267–271 Company of Wolves, 107
Black Panther, 256, 283 Puss-in-Boots, 209
Blackwell, Jeannine, 29, 44, 219 Tiger’s Bride, 107
blue, 13, 30, 69, 70, 77, 78, 85, 100, cat, 1, 17, 19, 20, 37, 49, 56, 57, 59,
106, 111, 122, 124, 126, 130, 61, 82, 83, 85, 94–96, 131–133,
144, 164, 182, 209, 229, 244, 144, 149, 160, 169, 180, 183,
245, 251, 253, 259, 266, 279 205–210, 216, 227, 235, 249,
Blundell, Sue, 183, 214 250, 253, 273
Index 309
Cavendish, Margaret, 9, 41, 81 D

Caylus, Anne-Claude de, 266 Dagley, Elizabeth Frances, 146
Challamel, Augustin, 84 Davidson, Hilary, 2, 189, 214, 217,
chaperon, 18, 172, 236–242, 265 221
Charlotte-Elisabeth, Duchesse Davis, Elizabeth, 10, 40
d’Orléans, 283 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 138, 171
Charlotte, Princess of Wales, 195 DeJean, Joan, 48, 79, 80, 216
Chastenet, Geneviève, 219 Delpierre, Madeleine, 25, 44
chemise, 274, 275 DeMello, Margo, 209, 223
chianiello, 20, 21, 54, 168, 184, 185, Désaugiers M., 82
188, 200, 274 Deslys, Charles, 213
Childe-Pemberton, Harriet L., 267 diamonds, 17, 68, 74, 76–78, 85, 112,
Lilian Lane, 248 116, 193, 199, 212, 239, 258
Red Riding-Hood Over Again, 240 Dickens, Charles, 146
Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly, 61, 83 Diderot, Denis, 269
Cinderella chapbooks and early edi- Dior, Christian, 176, 259, 281
tions, 203, 247 Disney
Citton, Yves, 16, 42 Beauty and the Beast, 33, 34, 52,
Clarke, Susanna, 133, 170 106, 229, 279
class, 20, 28, 29, 34, 37, 49, 52, Brave, 167
61, 62, 64, 74, 84, 103, 120, Cinderella, 5, 19, 101, 102, 151, 159,
124, 126, 130, 146, 148, 162, 181, 186, 229, 259, 278
152–154, 158–160, 167, Emperor’s New Groove, 261
190, 195, 226, 227, 232, Enchanted, 3, 4, 100, 101, 165,
234, 237, 242, 243, 254, 166, 176, 257
276, 280 Frozen, 186, 270
cloak, 11, 115, 116, 198, 240–243, Little Mermaid, 260
246, 247, 257 Maleficent, 46, 143, 258, 259
Cohen, Sarah R., 64, 84 Moana, 33, 36, 256
Collis, Clark, 283 Mulan, 36, 256
corset, 34, 199, 257, 276–279, 281, Pocahontas, 256
283 Princess and the Frog, 36, 167
cosmetics, 28, 60, 83, 108, 261, 271 Sleeping Beauty, 143, 164, 259, 270
Craik, Jennifer, 88 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
Crane, Thomas Frederick, 116 32, 99, 102, 262
cross-class-dressing, 98, 110 Tangled, 186
cross-dressing, 41, 61, 97, 107, 110, distaff, 135–137, 140, 142, 143, 145
127, 242, 258 Dohm, Hedwig, 196
Crowston, Clare Haru, 9, 169 domestic labour, 96, 97, 99, 124
Cruikshank, George, 38, 221, 244, donkey skin, 19, 50, 52, 91–93, 95,
268 96, 101, 102, 108, 110–116,
121, 130, 170, 197, 269
310 Index
Doré, Gustave, 210 farthingale, 238, 266

drawers, 34, 263, 278, 279 fashion dolls, 9, 11, 53, 75
dressmaking, 75, 116, 130, 148, 161, female agency, 5, 37, 153, 278, 282
163, 165–167, 176 femininity, 14, 97, 117, 141, 153,
Duchesne, Alphonse, 201, 221 159, 166, 167, 259
Duggan, Anne E., 16, 42, 84, 123, feminism, 34, 43, 165–167, 176,
124, 263 281
Dulcken, Henry W., 203, 221 Ferragamo, Salvatore, 181, 202
Ferriss, Suzanne, 214
Ffoulkes, Fiona, 219
E fibre, 37, 70, 130, 135, 139, 140,
Earnshaw, Pat, 68, 86, 169 142–144, 171, 275
Elahi, Babak, 57, 82 Fife, George Buchanan, 202, 221
Ellison, Jo, 70, 87 Fisher, Carrie, 281, 284
El-Mohtar, Amal, 187 Ford, Elizabeth A., 6, 38, 122
Embroidery, 129, 130, 132, 134, 152, Fournier, Édouard, 125
153, 155, 157, 174, 196, 221, Franz, Agnes, 29, 141
252 Fraser, Antonia, 76, 88, 176
English, 30, 64, 68, 79, 86, 119, 122, frontispieces, 96
126, 127, 134, 143, 144, 146, Fryer, Jane Eayre, 151, 173
156, 170, 185, 197, 216–220, fur, 91, 95, 109, 115, 116, 130, 134,
230, 233, 234, 237, 239, 240, 135, 169, 170, 183, 200, 203,
243, 248, 252, 264, 266, 267, 204, 207, 232
274
Entwistle, Joanne, 7, 39
Ernst, Olga D.A., 150, 173 G
Ever After, 5, 50, 80, 82, 140, 160, Galland, Antoine, 24, 25
165, 166, 181, 183, 185, 192, Gammer Grethel, 234, 235, 265
198, 202, 206, 275 Geczy, Adam, 25, 44
Ewing, Juliana Horatia Gatty, 156, Gentil, M., 82
174 German, 29, 30, 44, 135, 150, 195,
196, 218, 219, 234, 235, 240,
265
F Gibbons, Stella, 180, 213
fairy godmother, 5, 18, 19, 22, 37, Gillray, James, 223
48, 50, 51, 65, 66, 69, 70, Gilmore, Gloria Thomas, 130, 169
72–74, 77, 82, 87, 88, 91–93, Gioia, Ted, 99, 124
95, 97, 111–114, 124, 125, 130, Giraud, Charles, 202, 221
159–161, 164, 182, 186, 187, Giroux, Henry, 32, 45
191, 199, 200, 229, 231, 232, glass, 2, 19, 82, 136, 143, 181, 182,
242, 244, 246–251, 259, 262, 187, 198–205, 214, 220, 221,
271, 276 236, 247, 264, 282
Index 311
Glass Slipper, 1, 4, 5, 17–19, 66, 82, Hannon, Patricia, 8, 15, 39, 84, 124,
168, 183, 193, 194, 197–200, 169, 218
202–204, 213, 217, 220, 221, Harlequin and Mother Goose; or The
232, 247, 265, 276, 283 Golden egg, 233, 244–246
gold, 29, 55, 57, 59, 69, 70, 74, 76, Harries, Elizabeth Wanning, 1, 38, 81,
104, 111, 112, 119, 120, 126, 123, 217
129, 130, 133, 135, 137–139, Harvey, John, 244, 267, 269
142, 147, 158, 169, 171, 181, hats, 60, 83, 148, 161, 230, 241,
193, 195–197, 213, 223, 227, 243–245, 250, 251, 266
248, 252, 269, 278 Hauff, Wilhelm, 156, 174
Goldstein, Claire, 66, 85 Heiniger, Abigail, 175
Goody Two Shoes, 218 Heller, Sarah-Grace, 6, 38, 50, 80,
Gordon, Sarah A., 159, 175 264
Goss, Theodora, 187 Helwig, Amalie von, 29
Green, Roger Lancelyn, 216 Hilferty, Susan, 259, 271
Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Hill, Colleen, 2, 70, 80, 221
All Fur, 95, 109, 116, 130, 134, 169 History of Witches and Wizards,
Briar Rose, 142 244
Cinderella, 22, 28, 29, 59, 160, Hoffman, Kathryn A., 2, 183, 200,
192, 194, 197, 202 201, 204, 214, 220–222
Clever Gretel, 124, 192 Hohti, Paula, 17, 42, 51, 81
Clever Little Tailor, 157 Holmes, Kathryn, 161, 175
Elves, 157, 217 Holt, Ardern, 246, 268
Frog King, 106, 256 Hunt, Lynn, 53, 81, 264
Gnome, 201
Iron Stove, 169
Juniper Tree, 191 I
Little Red Cap, 222, 239 iron shoes, 187, 210, 211
Little Snow White, 100, 277 Italian, 7, 17, 53, 61, 82, 93, 117,
Nasty Flax Spinning, 137 181, 185, 188, 194, 215, 249,
Princess Mouseskin, 109, 115 275
Puss in Boots, 206, 222 Ivleva, Victoria, 28, 44
Rumpelstiltskin, 138, 139, 142, 151
Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle, 145
Worn-out Dancing Shoes, 28, 194 J
Grosz, Elizabeth, 43 Jacobs, Joseph, 127
James, Harry A., 145
Jarvis, Shawn C., 44, 219
H Jests, Pasquils, 265
hair and hairdressing, 68, 86, 88 jewellery, 67, 77, 97, 130, 269
Hamilton, Anthony, 136, 171, 174, Jones, Ann Rosalind, 18, 42,
223, 282 170
312 Index
Jones, Christine A., 10, 40, 48, 68, Discreet Princess, 11, 12, 26, 136,
79, 122, 123, 220, 222, 265, 282 269
Jones, Diana Wynne, 124 Enchantments of Eloquence, 13, 73, 98
Jones, Jennifer M., 63, 73, 153 Marmoisan, 11, 13, 97
Josephine, Empress, 195 Ricdin-Ricdon, 135, 139, 140
Robe of Sincerity, 252
Lipovetsky, Gilles, 62, 84, 122
K little black dress, 2, 260, 263
Karras, Ruth Mazo, 143, 172 Lorrain, Jean, 133
Kay, Sarah, 24, 43 Louis XIV, 9, 14, 19, 21, 35, 41, 48,
Keightley, Thomas, 25, 44 62, 63, 65, 66, 69–71, 78–80,
Killerby, Catherine Kovesi, 22, 43, 86–88, 102, 104, 105, 111, 112,
81 117, 125, 131, 174, 185, 186,
Kirkham, Victoria, 61 189, 192, 195, 200–202, 207,
Knapp, Raymond, 257, 270 229, 230, 243, 252, 264
Kristeva, Julia, 253, 269 Lowes, Emily L., 86, 172
Lurie, Alison, 175
L
lace, 68, 69, 86, 119, 130, 131, 133, M
152, 169, 172, 176, 202, 221, MacKay, Carol Hanbery, 159, 175
246, 248, 252, 277, 278 Maguire, Gregory, 193, 218, 258, 271
Lacroix, Paul, 201, 221 make do and mend, 162
Lady’s Magazine, 197, 216, 220 Malarte-Feldman, Claire-Lise, 127
La Force, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont Mansel, Philip, 50, 80, 264
de, 10 Margerum, Eileen, 164, 176
Lang, Andrew, 30, 68, 85, 218 Marie-Louise, Empress, 195
Largillière, Nicolas de, 67 Martin, Morag, 63, 83, 261, 271
Lathey, Gillian, 214, 234, 265 McManus, Shawn, 217
Lau, Kimberly J., 255, 270 McNeil, Peter, 2, 38, 43, 214, 215,
Laver, James, 54, 81 217, 219
Lear, Linda, 174 Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine, 17, 42
Lee, Carol, 217 Mercure Galant, 68, 199, 220
Legault, Marianne, 98, 123 Michel, Francisque, 125
Lehmann, Ulrich, 254, 269 Miller, Nancy K., 61, 83
Leia, Princess, 281 Mirror of the Graces, 197, 220
Lemire, Beverly, 26, 44 Mitchell, Deborah C., 6, 38, 122
L’Engle, Madeleine, 235, 250 Moeran, Brian, 49, 80
Lestage, Nicolas, 201 Mollet, Tracey, 33, 45
Lewis, Philip, 50, 80, 110, 126 Montespan, Madame de, 68, 70, 71,
L’Héritier de Villandon, Marie-Jeanne 186
Montoya, Alicia C., 40
Index 313
Morgan, Mary de, 150, 173 P

Morley, Henry, 145, 173 Paris, 8–12, 15, 27, 40, 50, 63, 82,
Morris, Desmond, 183, 214 84–87, 125, 126, 128, 130,
Mother Bunch, 234, 239, 265 196, 197, 200, 202, 213, 216,
Mother Goose, 16, 18, 19, 37, 40, 65, 219–221, 264, 269
66, 79, 80, 122, 126, 216, 222, Parker, Rozsika, 152, 174
232–235, 242–250, 258, 265, pastoral, 102–106, 108, 109, 116, 120,
267, 271, 282 121, 125, 132, 136, 151, 162
Mother Goose and the Golden Egg, 245, Pastoral, 102
268 patronage, 26, 47, 55, 92, 132, 145,
Mother Hubbard, 249, 268 225, 231, 254, 263
Mother Red Cap, 239 Peau d’âne, 91, 101, 114
mouches, 67, 238, 253 Peers, Juliette, 5, 38, 81
mule, 168, 185–189, 191, 199, 216, 269 Peiss, Kathy, 60, 83
Murat, Henriette-Julie de Castelnau, Perezutti, Gabriela, 176
Comtesse de Perrault, Charles
Bearskin, 109 Cinderella, 5, 19, 48, 50, 53, 55,
Little Eel, 81 59, 64–66, 69–71, 73, 74, 77,
Pig King, 120 78, 82, 86, 87, 91, 94–96, 114,
Savage, 76 115, 130, 163, 184, 186, 188,
To the Modern Fairies, 65 198–201, 203, 215, 277
Young and Beautiful, 266 Donkey Skin, 19, 50, 91, 92, 96,
Murphy, Jill, 250 101, 102, 108, 111, 113–115,
muslin, 78, 87, 170, 246, 274, 275, 170, 197
279, 280 Little Red Riding Hood, 222, 237, 276
Muzzarelli, Maria Giuseppe, 217 Little Thumbling, 180, 276
Puss in Boots, 56, 95, 180, 205, 206
Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, 18
N Pershing, Linda, 166, 176
needle, 37, 130–134, 145–149, pin, 67, 144–151, 162, 204, 236
151–153, 155–161, 164, 166, Planché, James Robinson, 41, 45, 123,
168, 176 172, 222, 266
Nesbit, Edith, 169, 199, 220, 270 Bee and the Orange Tree, 31
Norton, Lucy, 87 Island of Jewels, 143
Novik, Naomi, 88, 92, 122 point d’Angleterre, 68, 86
Pollock, Grace, 32, 45
portraits, 68, 125, 132, 240
O Potter, Beatrix, 158, 174
old wise women, 243 Pratchett, Terry
Once Upon a Time, 49, 128, 142, 172, Sam Vimes, 180
182, 213, 248 Tiffany Aching, 251
Orientalism, 44, 157 witches, 204, 222, 235, 250, 268
314 Index
Pretty Woman, 62 Savoie, Marie-Adélaïde de, 76

Pritchard, Will, 84 Scala, Carmela Bernadetta, 59, 83
prostitute, 21, 22, 62, 143, 185 Schacker, Jennifer, 234, 265
pump, 4, 182, 193, 221 Schmiesing, Ann, 255, 270
Purdy, Daniel L., 196, 219 Schönwerth, Franz Xaver von, 123,
192
Schultz, Gretchen, 86, 170, 217
R Schwartz, Stephen, 258
race, 45, 124, 167, 177, 231, 254– seamstresses, 37, 40, 73, 130, 149,
256, 258, 265, 270 157, 167, 169
Rackham, Arthur, 210, 247 Séguy, Philippe, 219
Rappaport, Erika Diane, 30, 44 Seifert, Lewis C., 39, 41, 81, 88, 123,
Raveux, Olivier, 44 127, 170
Raynard, Sophie, 11, 39, 83 Sells, Laura, 261, 271
red, 1, 2, 12, 13, 17–19, 21, 42, 67, Semmelhack, Elizabeth, 214, 215, 282
68, 82, 100, 124, 129, 144, 156, Sévigné, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal,
168, 186–194, 198, 210, 211, Marquise de, 8, 85, 86, 269
216, 218, 222, 233, 235–242, sewing, 29, 57, 82, 100, 129–133,
244–250, 258, 259, 266, 273, 135, 141, 146, 148, 151–156,
276 159, 160, 162–168, 170, 173,
red shoes, 1, 21, 37, 179, 188–192, 175, 176
194, 211, 217, 223 Sex and the City, 182, 213
Rexford, Nancy, 196, 219 shopping, 27, 29, 30, 44, 45, 227,
ribbon, 26, 68, 119, 230 248
Ricci, Stefania, 181, 213 Siemens, Melanie, 42
Ridinghood, Rebecca, 240, 266 silk, 17, 56, 59, 117, 119, 133, 139,
Riello, Giorgio, 2, 24, 38, 43, 214, 140, 145, 147, 174, 176, 188,
215, 217, 219 193, 194, 196, 202, 221, 277
Ritchie, Anne Isabella Thackeray, 45, silver, 19, 29, 51, 59, 69, 74, 76, 101,
221 111, 145–147, 170, 181, 182,
Roberson, Chris, 217 192–197, 202, 218, 239, 250,
Roche, Daniel, 63, 84 253, 257–259, 268, 275
Roemer, Danielle Marie, 223 slavery, 146, 255, 264, 265
Rölleke, Heinz, 242, 267 Sleeping Beauty and the Beast, 107,
Rossi, William A., 183, 214 126
Rowling, J.K., 250 slipper, 2, 11, 19, 20, 77, 93,
121, 146, 179, 181–183,
185, 186, 188, 191, 196–200,
S 202–204, 212, 216, 220, 221,
salons, 8, 9, 11, 14, 63–65, 114, 196, 247, 249
225 Slipper and the Rose, 50, 80, 115, 185,
satin, 36, 63, 77, 78, 116, 166, 174, 186, 199, 232
179, 182, 196, 202, 221, 265 Snow White and the Huntsman, 280
Index 315
Souloumiac, Michel, 126 Taylor, Edgar, 234, 265

spindle, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, theatre, 7, 11, 31, 33, 45, 63, 64,
142–145, 153 233, 244
spinning, 96, 129, 134–145, 151, Thomas, Dana, 63, 84
159, 171, 172, 232, 234, 235 Thurston, Robert, 243, 267
Spufford, Margaret, 234, 265 Tieck, Ludwig, 208, 222
Stallybrass, Peter, 18, 42, 79, 80, 125, Tiffin, Jessica, 106, 126
170 trade, 3, 23, 25, 26, 43, 51, 52, 66,
Stanton, Domna C., 41, 81, 88, 123, 105, 111, 139, 145, 153–155,
170 157, 158, 162
stays, 68, 69, 77, 274, 276, 277, 280, Troy, François de, 125
284 Tsurumi, Ryoji, 244, 267
Stedman, Allison, 8, 39 Tucker, Holly, 1, 15, 42
Steele, Valerie, 9, 40, 81, 84, 252, Turner, Sarah E., 167, 177
268, 283
Stevens, Christine, 245, 268
stockings, 28, 119, 156, 194–197, U
202, 218, 219, 241, 244, 245, underwear, 37, 273, 274, 276, 278,
267, 274 280, 281
Story of Mother Goose, 246
Straparola, Giovan Francesco
Costantino Fortunato, 56, 205 V
Doralice, 52, 113, 135 Valentine, Laura
Pig Prince, 117 Little Red Riding Hood, 242
Silvia Ballastro, 22, 54 Patty and her Pitcher, 183
Stuard, Susan Mosher, 20, 43, 82, 169 Septimus, 266
Stuckey, Johanna H., 58, 82 The Story of Prince Sincere, 139
Styles, John, 3, 6, 38, 89 Varholy, Christine M., 62, 84, 110,
sublime, 37, 253, 254, 257–261, 263 126
Sullerot, Evelyne, 40 Velay-Vallantin, Catherine, 39, 232,
Sumptuary regulation, 49 265
velvet, 63, 65, 67, 68, 77, 119, 124,
133, 168, 187–189, 216, 229,
T 238, 246, 248, 252, 265
tailors, 29, 63, 111, 130, 157, 158 Verdier, Yvonne, 144, 172
Talairach-Vielmas, Laurence, 27, 44, Versailles, 8, 19, 24, 50, 62, 63, 66,
173, 267 71, 78, 85, 87, 102, 104, 130
Tankard, Danae, 244, 267 Vianello, Andrea, 185, 215
Tasker, Yvonne, 166, 176 Viehmann, Dorothea, 169, 194
Tatar, Maria, 21, 43, 123, 169, 171, Vigée-Lebrun, Élisabeth, 274
173, 218, 265, 271, 282 Villeneuve, Gabrielle-Suzanne de, 52
316 Index
Vincent, Susan, 61, 84 Wizard of Oz, 124, 181, 193, 218,

Vogel, Juliane, 48, 80 249, 250, 258, 270
Wolf, Stacy, 258, 270
women’s work, 37, 148, 153
W Wurst, Karin, 219
Waley, Arthur, 219
Walsh, Margaret, 163, 175
Warner, Marina, 1, 33, 39, 48, 79, 94, Y
122, 169, 265 Yolen, Jane, 159, 175
Wasko, Janet, 32, 45
Webb, Wilfred Mark, 214
Weber, Caroline, 282, 283 Z
Whitley, David, 102, 124, 162, 175 Ziolkowski, Jan M., 266
Wicked Zipes, Jack, 7, 33, 39, 40, 42, 45, 83,
Book, 193, 258, 259, 271 85, 124, 126, 171, 173, 216,
musical, 194, 258, 259 218, 263, 266, 267, 272, 283
Wilson, Elizabeth, 49, 80, 125, 164,
176, 282
Wise women, 37, 234, 243
witches, 92, 96, 182, 204, 213, 222,
235, 243, 244, 246, 247, 250,
251, 258, 259, 263, 268

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Fashion in the Fairy Tale Tradition

Fashion in the Fairy

ISBN 978-3-319-91100-7 ISBN 978-3-319-91101-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941874

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: George Mayer/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

1 Introduction: The Rise of Fashionable Fairy Tales,

2 Fashion Felons I: Leading La Mode 47

3 Fashion Felons II: Breaking All the Fashion Rules 91

4 Skills with Threads: Heroes Who Make Fashion 129

5 Shoes, the Sole of Fairy Tale: Stepping Between Desire

6 What the Fairies Wore: Sartorial Means and Darkest

7 Conclusion: The Fairy Tale Undressed 273

Fig. 2.1 Finette Cendron rides to the palace. Illustration by Gordon

Introduction: The Rise of Fashionable Fairy

© The Author(s) 2018 1

respectively—in their historical contexts. Still, a great part of the history

John Styles observes that the most influential delineation of fashion in

Fashionably Told: Understanding the Relationship

changes on the cycle of innovation and obsolescence which characterizes

ideological interpolations, the references to diverse social orders and nar-

the novel also includes an actual fairy tale, “L’Île de la Félicité”

dress” in salon culture, and such exchanges influenced the descriptions of

a literary compendium of available, evolving genres. They reproduced

The fairy tales offer female authors opportunities to celebrate prin-

d’Aulnoy, imprisoned for a time, apparently went on to travel through

So Why Did Perrault’s Tales Take the Lead?:

great importance to the first impression; it was important to harness

The Consumer at the Root of Fairy Tale

simply a visual image. Those expressions of desire populate fairy tales

Fashion obliterated local costume, replacing it with fashions that spread

Consumption was driven by the desire to be part of the great pub-

protagonists [helps] us see that gender in courtly love scenarios is often

Courtly love presented a forum in which a culture of erotic love could

that other fairy-tale authors including Louise de Bossigny, Comtesse

The Fashionable Bourgeoisie (Contains Some Aristocrats)

to consumerism is nothing new, neither is the notion of women look-

Erika Diane Rappaport, writing of the perceptions of the female

sentences, and the references to ‘fairyland’ replicated the abundant

A Girl in a Dress: In Disney Fashion

people to work with, too, whether that be award-winning theatre

princesses or the daughters of wealthy merchants now in financial straits,

not unusual to see photographs of small girls dressed as Disney prin-

Conclusion: Fashion in Fairy Tale Matters

14. Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

63. Holly Tucker and Melanie Siemens, “Perrault’s Preface to Griselda and

79. Styles, “Fashion,” 34.

97. Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 179–210.

119. Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of

Commercial Cinema, ed. Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode (Lanham:

Fashion Felons I: Leading La Mode

The Cinderella entering the European literary tradition is shrewd and

© The Author(s) 2018 47

slut, delighting in murders of evil stepmothers and ogres that precipitate

her eventual reintegration into public life. As Stallybrass further observes,

The Fashion Protagonists: The Impact of Sumptuary

The magnificent dresses are, simply, essential to appearing at court, in

violent encounters between fashionable, non-noble women and officials,

were also overwhelmingly directed at women’s fashion. Although male

In Basile’s collection, men are intimately familiar with female fashion.

The erogenous zone is always shifting and it is the business of fashion to

Fig. 2.1 Finette Cendron rides to the palace. Illustration by Gordon

Introduction: The Rise of Fashionable Fairy

The Consumer at the Root of Fairy Tale

A Girl in a Dress: In Disney Fashion

Conclusion: Fashion in Fairy Tale Matters

14. Christopher Breward, Fashion (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

63. Holly Tucker and Melanie Siemens, “Perrault’s Preface to Griselda and

79. Styles, “Fashion,” 34.

97. Burns, Courtly Love Undressed, 179–210.

119. Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of

The Fashion Protagonists: The Impact of Sumptuary

Fig. 2.1 Finette Cendron rides to the palace. Illustration by Gordon Browne.

7. Juliane Vogel, “The Double Skin: Imperial Fashion in the Nineteenth

24. Stallybrass, “Worn Worlds,” 30.

39. Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the Market: Luxury and Fashion in

54. Basile, Tale of Tales, 86.

68. Susan Vincent, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England

87. Duggan, Salonnières, 203.

99. Jones, Refigured, 138.

117. Jones, Sexing, 78.

The Witty Fancy of Pastoral Domesticity

Sex and the Furry Princess

3. Queen Florine in d’Aulnoy’s “The Blue Bird,” for example, disguises

18. Charles Perrault, The Complete Fairy Tales, trans. Christopher Betts

45. The use of leopard skin is notable in portraits of fashionable women as

59. Warner, Beast to the Blonde, 315.

77. Warner, Beast to Blonde, 358.

Skills with Threads: Heroes Who Make

Why the Little Golden Spinning Wheel Fell into the

Spinning for Your Life

Walking down the Path of Pins or Needles

18. Such tests of the fineness of cloth are historically widespread. James

120. Jane Yolen, “America’s Cinderella,” in Cinderella: A Casebook, ed. Alan

141. Walsh, “Democratization,” 301.

Shoes, the Sole of Fairy Tale: Stepping