"Dress to Transgress": Semiotics in Victorian Fashion

Fashion is a social language—the clothes one wears are imbued with signifiers of one’s identity, such as class, gender, and morality. Within an interpretive community, there exists a shared set of coherent meanings behind particular choices: the garment, the fabric, the colors (Barthes, 1990). We explore the meanings that clothing can hold in a corpus of 19th century English literature. How do Victorian authors draw on the semiotics of fashion to achieve rich characterization?