Accessorizing Clarissa: How Virginia Woolf changes the clothes and the character of her lady of fashion

The period following the first world war in England saw dramatic changes in women's clothing: the manufacturing of quality ready-made clothing brought fashion to the masses, and modern fashions helped liberate women with simpler, lighter, and more youthful designs. These changes, I argue, have great consequence for Virginia Woolf's lady of fashion, Clarissa Dalloway. In her story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street” (1922), Woolf produces an ultimately satirical portrait of Clarissa, who remains insulated, by class privilege and fashion sensibility, from the working world about her; but when Woolf rewrites her story as a novel (1925), Clarissa comes to feel deeply for her lower-class counterparts. The change reflects Woolf's modernist technique, which strips away Clarissa's material insulation. But Woolf's dematerialized modernism in turn echoes contemporary women's fashions, which likewise were revolting against heavy materials, exploring youthful looseness, and even allowing ladies and workers to become fashion doubles.