Catherine Spooner

“Wrapped in Plastic”: David Lynch’s Material Girls

Twin Peaks’s clothes are an inextricable part of its visual strangeness, and its appeal. As a British teenager watching the series on its original broadcast, I was perplexed by the exoticism of early 1990s America: all that big hair, all those lumberjack shirts (shortly to become a global trend, of course, through the ascendancy of grunge). Everyone was simultaneously underdressed and overdressed, wearing cozy knitted sweaters with immaculate make-up and bright lipstick. The rebel chic of Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) and James Hurley (James Marshall) was recognizable, if unsettlingly clean, but the other characters all looked strangely alien, evocative of a sartorial elsewhere.

Costuming the Outsider in Tim Burton’s Cinema, or, Why a Corset Is like a Codfish

Toward the beginning of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), Alice’s mother (Lindsay Duncan) chastises her daughter for not wearing a corset or stockings. Alice (Mia Wasikowska) replies, “What if it was agreed that proper was wearing a codfish on your head—would you wear it? For me a corset is like a codfish.”

Modes of Wearing the Towel: Masculinity, Insanity, and Clothing in Trollope’s ‘The Turkish Bath’

In a caricature for Punch published in 1866, George du Maurier shows a group of men relaxing in a Turkish bath (Fig. 4.1). The central figure, ‘Smith’, a muscular bearded fellow with a large checked towel draped around his waist and another flung nonchalantly over his shoulder, accosts his similarly attired companion with the words: ‘I say, Brown, come and Dine with us to-day, to meet Robinson and his Sisters. No fuss or Ceremony, you know! Come just as you are!!!’1