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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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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
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
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brizna, vna miserable ocasion
para le despegar de sí. Dize que
por tener grande edad le perdio el
respeto que le deuia como a
señor. O que le trata mal sus
hijos; o que quiere mandar más
que él; y si eres moço leuantate
que te le quieres echar con la hija,
o con la muger; o que te hallaron
hablando con vna donzella de
casa en vn rincon. De manera
que nunca les falta con que
infame y miserablemente los
echar, y avn sin el salario que
siruio, y donde penso el
desuenturado del sieruo que auia
proueydo a la pobreza y
neçesidad en que pudiera venir
se ofreçio de su voluntad a la
causa y ocasion de muy mayor,
pues echado de aquellas agenas
casas viene forçado al hospital.
Alli viejos los tales y enfermos y
miserables los dan de comer y
beber y sepoltura por limosna y
amor de Dios. Resta agora,
Miçilo, que quieras considerar
como cuerdo y auisado animo
todo lo que te he representado
aqui, porque todo lo esperimenté
y passó por mí. No çeues ni
engañes tu entendimiento con la
vanidad de las cosas desta vida,
que talmente suelen engañar, y
mira bien que Dios y naturaleza a
todos crian y produçen con
habilidad y estado de poder gozar
de lo bueno que ella crió, si por
nuestro apetito, oçio y miseria no
lo venimos a perder, y de aqui
adelante contentate con el estado
que tienes, que no es çierto digno
de menospreçiar.
Miçilo.—¡O gallo
bienauenturado! que
bienauenturado me has hecho oy,
pues me has auisado de tan gran
bien; yo te prometo nunca serte
ingrato a benefiçio de tanto valor.
Solo te ruego no me quieras
desamparar que no podre viuir sin
ti; y porque es venido el dia
huelga, que quiero abrir la tienda
por vender algun par de çapatos
de que nos podamos mantener
oy.
Fin del deçimo nono canto del

gallo.
NOTAS:
[1102] G., canto del gallo.
[1103] G., poseen.
[1104] G., morir.
[1105] G., acordarsseme.
[1106] G., el daño que despues de tragado el çeuo en el anzuelo
está, y teniendo la meluca en la boca para la tragar no te la hago
echar fuera antes que prendiendo la punta en tu paladar bomites
la sangre y vida con dolor.
[1107] G., el veneno.
[1108] G., no ha de aprouechar mi.
[1109] G., fuerça.
[1110] G., ¿como podre yo aprobar vuestra opinion?
[1111] G., se suple.
[1112] G., pleytos.
[1113] G., los.
[1114] G., poder soliçitar.
[1115] G., los sienten.
[1116] G., y casa.
[1117] G., trabajo, y por el consiguiente más miseria y
enfermedad que lleuan.
[1118] G., deuen desear aquella vida, por solo el deleyte y
contentamiento que da vibir en aquellas anchas y espaçiosas
casas, habitaçion de dioses y de sola persona Real y inçitados de
aquellas grandes esperanças que prometen aquellos poderosos
señores con su real y generosa conuersaçion.
[1119] G., por gozar solamente de aquellos marauillosos tesoros,
aparadores de oro.
[1120] G., al cunplimiento de vuestra neçesidad.
[1121] G., hallara.
[1122] G., propias.
[1123] G., pobres.
[1124] G., día.
[1125] G., grande.
[1126] G., en tal vida.
[1127] G., a la.
[1128] G., acaben.
[1129] G., porque se acuerde de tu.
[1130] G., dignidad.
[1131] G., que vas a.
[1132] G., patrimonio.
[1133] G., seruiçio.
[1134] G., a tu amo.
[1135] G., que te aconteçe que preguntandote el señor que
hombre fue el rey Tholomeo, respondas tu que fue hermano y
marido de Clopatra; o otra cosa que va muy lexos de la intinçion
de tu señor.
[1136] G., dizen que es temor.
[1137] G., de tu habilidad, persona y linaje.
[1138] G., y esta pesquisa que de ti.
[1139] G., a tu.
[1140] G., que digan que se sirue.
[1141] G., sabios y cuerdos.
[1142] G., oculto y sonoliento.
[1143] G., tu saber, cordura y discreçion.
[1144] G., trihunfador.
[1145] G., mereçes, no de roble o arrayan como los otros en la
Olimpia.
[1146] G., cosas.
[1147] G., alguna.
[1148] G., de.
[1149] G., ante.
[1150] G., vna gran.
[1151] G., quanto a grandes salarios.
[1152] G., con.
[1153] G., inuidiosos.
[1154] G., pues.
[1155] G., puede.
[1156] G., osas.
[1157] G., les tienen.
[1158] G., çinquenta.
[1159] G., la.
[1160] G., que te manda tu señora.
[1161] G., que yo tanto amo.
[1162] G., confiar.
ARGUMENTO
DEL VIGESSIMO Y
VLTIMO CANTO
En este vigessimo canto el auctor

representa a Demophon, el
qual viniendo vn dia a casa de
Miçilo su vezino a le visitar le
halló triste y afligido por la
muerte de su gallo, y
procurando dexarle consolado
se vuelue a su casa.
Demophon. Miçilo.
Demophon.—¡O Miçilo! vezino y
amigo mio, ¿qué es la causa que
ansi te tiene atormentado por
cuydado y miserable
aconteçimiento? veote triste,
flaco, amarillo con representaçion
de philosopho, el rostro lançado
en la tierra, pasearte por este
lugar obscuro dexado tu contino
offiçio de çapateria en que tan a
la contina te solias ocupar con
eterno trabajo, ¿consumes agora
el tiempo en sospiros? Nuestra
igual edad, vezindad y amistad te
obliga a fiar de mí tus tan
miserables cuydados; porque ya
que no esperes de mí que
cunpliese tus faltas ayudarte he
con consejo; y si todo esto no
estimares, bastarte ha saber que
mitiga mucho el dolor comunicar
la pena, prinçipalmente
contandose a quien en alguna
manera por propria la sienta.
¿Qué es de tu belleza y alegria,
desemboltura y comunicaçion con
que a todos tus amigos y vezinos
te solias dar de noche y de dia en
çenas y combites y fuera dellos?
ya son pasados muchos dias que
te veo recogido en soledad en tu
casa que ni me quieres ver ni
hablar, ni visitar como solias.
Miçilo.—¡O mi Demophon! mi
muy caro hermano y amigo. Solo
esto quiero que como tal amigo
de mí sepas, que no sin gran
razon en mí ay tan gran muestra
de mal. Prinçipalmente quando
tienes de mí bien entendido que
no qualquiera cosa haze en mí
tan notable mudança, pues has
visto en mí auer disimulado en
varios tienpos notables toques de
fortuna y infortunios tan graues
que a muy esforçados varones
huuieran puesto en ruyna, y yo
con igual rostro los he sabido
passar. Avnque comunmente se
suele dezir que al pobre no ay
infortunio, que aunque esto sea
ansi verdad no dexamos de sentir
en nuestro estado humilde lo que
al anima le da a entender su
natural. Ansi que tengo por çierto,
Demophon, que no ay igual dolor
de perdida ni miseria que con
gran distançia se compare con el
mio.
Demophon.—Mientras más me le
has encareçido más me has
augmentado la piedad y miseria
que tengo de tu mal; de donde
naçe en mí mayor deseo de lo
saber. Por tanto no reserues en tu
pecho tesoro tan perjudiçial, que
no hay peor espeçie de auariçia
que de dolor. Por çierto en poco
cargo eres a naturaleza pues
pribandote del oro y riquezas, de
pasiones y miserias fue contigo
tan liberal que en abundançia te
las comunicó. Dime porqué ansi
te dueles, que no podré consentir
lo passes con silençio y
disimulaçion.
Miçilo.—Quiero que ante todas
las cosas sepas, ¡o Demophon!
que no es la que me fatiga falta
de dineros para que con tus
tesoros me ayas de remediar, ni
de salud para que con medicos
me la ayas de restituir. Ni tanpoco
me aflixo por mengua que me
hagan las tus vasijas, ni aparatos
y arreos de tapetes y alhajas con
que en abundançia te sueles
seruir. Pero faltame de mi casa vn
amigo, vn conpañero de mis
miserias y trabajos y tan igual que
era otro yo; con el qual poseya yo
todos los tesoros y riquezas que
en el mundo ay; faltame, en
conclusion, vna cosa, Demophon,
que con ningun poder ni fuerças
tuyas la puedes suplir: por lo qual
me escuso de te la dezir, y a ti de
la saber.
Demophon.—No en vano suelen
dezir, que al pobre es proprio el
filisofar, como agora tú; yo no
creo que has aprendido esa
retorica en las scuelas de
Athenas, con que agora de nueuo
me encareçes tu dolor: ni sé qué
maestro has tenido della de poco
acá.
Miçilo.—Ese maestro se me
murio, cuya muerte es causa de
mi dolor.
Demophon.—¿Quien fue?[1163].
Miçilo.—Sabras, amigo, que yo
tenia vn gallo que por mi casa
andaua estos dias en conpañia
destas mis pocas gallinas que las
albergaua y recogia y defendia
como verdadero marido y varon.
Suçedio que este dia de
carnestolendas que passó, vnas
mugeres desta nuestra vezindad,
con temeraria libertad, habiendo
solamente cuenta, y
pareçiendoles que era el dia
priuillegiado me entraron mi casa
estando yo ausente, que
cautelosamente aguardaron que
fuesse ansi, y tomaron mi gallo y
lleuaronle al campo, y con gran
grita y alarido le corrieron
arroxandosele las vnas a las
otras: y como quien dize[1164],
daca el gallo, toma el gallo, les
quedauan las plumas en la mano.
En fin fue pelado y desnudo de su
adornado y hermoso vestido; y no
contentas con esto, rendiendosele
el desuenturado sin poderles
huyr, confiandose de su
inoçençia: pensando que no
pasara adelante su tirania y[1165]
crueldad, subjetandoseles con
humildad, pensando que por esta
via las pudiera conuençer y se les
pudiera escapar, sacaron de sus
estuches cuchillos, y sin tener
respecto alguno a su inoçençia le
cortaron su dorada y hermosa
çeruiz, y de comun acuerdo
hiçieron çena opulenta dél.
Demophon.—Pues ¿por faltarte
vn gallo te afliges tanto que estás
por desesperar? Calla que yo lo
quiero remediar con embiarte otro
gallo criado en mi casa, que creo
que hará tanta ventaja al tuyo
quanta haze mi despensa a la
tuya para le mantener.
Miçilo.—¡O Demophon! quanto
viues engañado en pensar que mi
gallo perdido con qualquiera otro
gallo se podria satisfazer.
Demophon.—¿Pues qué tenia
más?
Miçilo.—Oyeme, que te quiero
hazer saber que no sin causa me
has hallado philosopho rectorico
oy.
Demophon.—Dimelo.
Miçilo.—Sabras que aquel gallo
era Pythagoras el philosopho,
eloquentissimo varon, si le has
oydo dezir.
Demophon.—Pythagoras,
muchas vezes le oy dezir. Pero
dime ¿cómo quieres que entienda
que el gallo era Pythagoras: que
me pones en confusion?
Miçilo.—Porque si oyste dezir de
aquel sapientissimo philosopho,
tambien oyrias dezir de su
opinion.
Demophon.—¿Quál fue?
Miçilo.—Este afirmó que las
animas passauan de vn cuerpo a
otro. De manera que dixo que
muriendo vno de nosotros luego
desanparando nuestra alma este
nuestro cuerpo en que vibio se
passa a otro cuerpo de nueuo a
viuir: y no sienpre a cuerpo de
honbre. Pero aconteçe que el que
agora fue rey passar[1166] a
cuerpo de vn puerco, vaca ó leon,
como sus hados y suçeso[1167] lo
permiten, sin el alma lo poder
evitar; y ansi el alma de
Pythagoras despues aca que
naçio auia viuido en diuersos
cuerpos, y agora viuia en el
cuerpo de aquel gallo que tenia
yo aqui.
Demophon.—Esa manera de
dezir ya la oy que la afirmaua él.
Pero era un mentiroso,
prestigioso y embaydor, y tanbien
como el era efficaz en el persuadir
y aquella gente de su tienpo era
sinple y ruda, façilmente les hazia
creer qualquiera cosa que él
quisiesse soñar.
Miçilo.—Çierto es yo que ansi
como lo dezia era verdad.
Demophon.—¿Como ansi?
Miçilo.—Porque en aquel gallo
me habló y me mostró en muchos
dias ser él.
Demophon.—¿Que te habló?
Cosa me cuentas digna de
admiraçion. En tanta manera me
marauillo de[1168] lo que dices por
cosa nueua que sino huuiera
conoçido tu bondad y sinçera
condiçion pensara yo agora que
estauas fuera de seso y que
como loco deuaneas. O que
teniendome en poco pensauas
con semejantes sueños vurlar de
mí. Pero por Dios te conjuro ¡o
Miçilo! y por nuestra amistad, la
qual por ser antigua entre
nos[1169] tiene muestra de
deydad, me digas muy en
particular todo lo que en la verdad
es.
Miçilo.—¡O Demophon! que sin
lagrimas no te lo puedo dezir,
porque sé yo solo lo mucho que
perdi. Auianme tanto faboreçido
los hados que no creo que en el
mundo haya sido honbre tan feliz
como yo. Pero pareçeme que
este fabor fue para escarneçer de
mí, pues me comunicaron tan
gran bien con tanta breuedad,
que no parece sino que como
anguila se me deleznó.
Solamente me pareçe que
entendí mientra le tuue en le
apretar en el puño para le poseer,
y quando pense que le tenía con
alguna seguridad se me fue.
Tanbien sospecho que los hados
me quisieron tentar si cabia en mí
tanto bien, y por mi mala suerte
no fue dél mereçedor; y porque
veas si tengo razon de lo
encareçer, sabras que en él tenía
yo toda la consolaçion y
bienauenturança que en el mundo
se podia tener. Con él pasaua yo
mis trabajos de noche y de dia: no
auia cosa que yo quisiesse saber
o auer que no se me diesse a
medida de mi voluntad. El me
mostró la vida de todos quantos
en el mundo ay: lo bueno y malo
que tiene la vida del rey y del
çiudadano, del cauallero, del
mercader y del labrador. El me
mostró quanto en el çielo y el
infierno ay, porque me mostró a
Dios y todo lo que gozan los
bienauenturados allá. En
conclusion ¡o Demophon! yo perdi
vn tesoro que ningun poderoso
señor en el mundo más no pudo
poseer.
Demophon.—Por çierto tengo, ¡o
Miçilo! sentir con mucha razon el
gran mal que te han hecho esas
mugeres en pribarte de tanto
bien, quando queriendo satisfazer
a sus vanos apetitos, çelebrando
sus lasçiuas y adulteras fiestas no
perdonan cosa dedicada ni
reseruada por ningun varon, con
tanto que executen su voluntad.
No miraron que tú no eras honbre
con quien tal dia se suelen
festejar, y que por tu edad no
entras en cuenta de los que
çelebran semejantes fiestas. Que
los moços ricos subjetos al tirano
y lasçiuo[1170] amor, enpleados en
las contentar no les pueden negar
cosa que haga a su querer, y ansi
por[1171] los entretener les
demandan en tales dias cosas
curiosas, en el cumplimiento de
las quales conoçen ellas su
mayor y más fiel enamorado y
seruidor; y ansi agora dandoles a
entender que para su laçiuia no
los han menester en el tienpo que
entra[1172] de la quaresma,
mostrando gran voluntad de se
contener pelan aquellos gallos en
lugar de la juuentud; mostrando
menospreçiar su gallardia por ser
tienpo santo el que entra, y que
no se quieren dellos en este
tienpo seruir; y ansi, burlando
dellos, pelan aquellos gallos en su
lugar, dando a entender que los
tengan en poco, pues pelados de
toda su pluma y hazienda en el
tienpo pasado que les fue
disimulado el luxuriar, ya,
recogiendose a la santidad, los
dexan[1173]; ¡o animal tirano y
ingrato a todo bien!; que en todas
sus obras se preçian mostrar su
mala condiçion. ¿Y no vian que tú
no estauas en edad para vurlar de
ti?
Miçilo.—Y avn por conocer yo
bien esa verdad ni me casé, ni las
quise ver; y avn no me puedo
escapar de su tirania, que
escripto me dizen que está que
no ay honbre a quien no alcançe
siquiera la sombra de su veneno y
maldiçion. Solamente me lastima
pensar que ya que me auian de
herir no fue de llaga que se
pudiesse remediar. Quitaronme
mi consejero, mi consuelo y mi
bien. Avn pluguiesse a Dios que
en este tienpo tan santo se
recogiessen de veras y sin alguna
fiçion[1174] tratassen de veras la
virtud. Ayunar, no beber, ni comer
con tanta disoluçion, no se
afeytar, ni vestirse tan
profanamente, ni vurlar, ni mofar
como en otro qualquiera tienpo
comun[1175]. Pero vemos que sin
alguna rienda viben el dia de
quaresma como qualquiera otro.
Son sus fiestas las que aborreçe
Dios, porque no son sino para le
ofender.
Demophon.—Por çierto, Miçilo,
espantado estoy de ver la vurla
destas vanas mugeres; con
quantas inuençiones[1176] passan
su tienpo, y quantas astuçias
vsan para sacar dineros de sus
amantes. Prinçipalmente en estos
pueblos grandes de villas y
çiudades; porque estas cosas no
las saben los aldeanos[1177], ni ha
llegado del todo la maliçia
humana por allá. Por çierto cosas
ay de gran donayre que se
inuentan en estos pueblos
grandes[1178]; con las quales los
inuentores dellas entretienen sus
cosas, y hazen sus hechos[1179]
por su proprio fin de cada qual y
interes; por çierto que me tienen
de cada dia en más admiraçion.
Prinçipalmente en este pueblo
donde ay tanta concurrencia de
gentes, o por causa de corte Real
o por[1180] chançelleria; porque la
diuersidad de estrangeros haze
dar en cosas, y inuentar donayres
que confunden el ingenio auerlas
solamente de notar. Quantas
maneras de santidades fingidas,
romerias, bendiçiones y
peregrinaçiones. Tanto hospital,
colejios de santos y santas; casas
de niños y niñas é hospitales de
viejos. Tanta cofradia de
disçiplinantes de la cruz y de la
pasion, y proçesiones. Tanto
pedigueño de limosnas, que más
son los que piden que son los
pobres que lo[1181] quieren[1182]
reçebir.
Miçilo.—Por çierto, Demophon,
tú tienes mucha razon y vna de
las cosas de que yo estoy más
confuso es de ver que en este
nuestro lugar, siendo tan noble y
el más prinçipal de nuestra
Castilla, donde[1183] ay más
letrados y honbres más agudos
en la conuersaçion y cosas del
mundo y cortesanía, y en estas
flaquezas y engaños que se
ofreçen[1184], son todos en vn
común más façilmente arroxados
y derrocados que en todos
quantos en otros pueblos ay; y
avn engañados para lo aprobar,
auctorizar y seguir[1185]. Que se
atreua vn honbre a entrar aqui en
este pueblo donde está la flor de
cordura y agudeça y discreçion, y
que debajo de vn habito religioso
engañe a todo estado eclesiastico
y seglar, diziendo que hará boluer
los rios atras, y hará cuaxar el
mar, y que forçará los demonios
que en los infiernos estan, y que
hará[1186] parir quantas[1187]
mugeres son, quanto quiera que
de su naturaleza sean esteriles y
que no puedan conçebir[1188], y
que en esto vengan a caer todos
los más prinçipales y generosos
prinçipes y señores, y se le
vengan a rendir quantas dueñas y
donzellas viben en este
lugar[1189]. Que se sufra vibir en
este pueblo vn honbre que debajo
de nonbre de Juan de Dios, no se
le çierre puerta de ningun Señor
ni letrado, ni se le niegue cosa
alguna que quiera demandar, y
después le quemen públicamente
por sometico engañador. Pues,
¿no se ha disimulado tanbien un
clerigo que auia sido primero
frayle veynte años, al qual por
tener muestra de gran santidad le
fue encargado aquel colegio de
niñas? tal sea su salud qual dellas
cuenta dio. ¿En que está esto,
amigo?
Demophon.—A tu gallo quisiera
yo, Miçilo que lo huuieras
preguntado antes que a mí
porque él te supiera mejor
satisfazer. Pero para mi bien creo
que en alguna manera deuo de
açertar; que creo que de los
grandes pecados que ay en este
lugar[1190] viene esta comun
confusion, o çeguedad. Que como
no hay en este pueblo más
prinçipal ni más comun que
pecados y ofensas de Dios;
pleytos, hurtos, vsuras, mohatras,
juegos, blasfemias, symonias,
trapazas y engaños, y despues
desto una puteria general, la qual
ni tiene punto, suelo, ni fin. Que ni
se reserua dia, ni fiesta,
quaresma, ni avn Semana Santa
ni pasqua en que se çese[1191] de
exerçitar como offiçio conueniente
a la republica, permitido y
aprobado por neçesario en la ley,
en pena deste mal nos çiega Dios
nuestros entendimientos, orejas y
ojos, para que auisandonos no
entendamos, y oyendo no
oyamos, y con ojos[1192] seamos
como çiegos que palpamos la
pared. En tanta manera somos
traydos en çeguedad que
estamos rendidos al engaño muy
antes que se ofrezca el
engañador. Hanos hecho Dios
escarnio, mofa y risa a los muy
chicos[1193] niños de muy tierna
edad. ¿En qué lugar por pequeño
que sea se consentira, o
disimulará lo mucho, ni lo muy
poco que se disimula y sufre
aqui? ¿Dónde hay tanto juez sin
justiçia como aqui? ¿Dónde tanto
letrado sin letras como aqui?
¿Dónde tanto executor sin que se
castigue[1194] la maldad? ¿Dónde
tanto escribano, ni más comun el
borron? Que no ay honbre de
gouierno en este pueblo que trate
más que su proprio interes, y
como más se auentajará. Por esto
permite Dios que vengan vnos
zarlos, o falsos prophetas que con
embaymientos, aparençias y
falsas demostraçiones nos hagan
entender qualquiera cosa que nos
quieran fingir. Y lo que peor es,
que quiere Dios que despues
sintamos más la risa que el
interes en que nos engañó.
Miçilo.—Pues avn no pienses,
Demophon, que la vanidad y
perdiçion destas liuianas mugeres
se le ha de passar a Dios sin
castigo; que yo te oso afirmar por
cosa muy çierta y que no faltará.
Que por ver Dios su disoluçion,

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Fashion in The Fairy Tale Tradition 1St Ed Edition Rebecca Anne C Do Rozario Full Chapter

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Fashion in the Fairy Tale Tradition 1st

ed. Edition Rebecca-Anne C. Do

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

Fin del deçimo nono canto del

En este vigessimo canto el auctor

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