Clothes have a curious presence in modern fiction, a presence which at once asserts and denies its significance, and whose relation to character, much like that between an individual's physiognomy and his or her secret subjectivity, hovers uncertainly between the synecdochic and the allegorical. The purpose of this book is to explore some aspects of that presence, based on the assumption that clothes matter to the construction as well as the reconstruction of a historical moment and its literary representations. The relations of clothes to culture can be thought of as constitutive to the extent that clothes as embodied cultural practice contribute to bringing forth and performing culture, and as reconstitutive to the extent that they, as cultural products and images, take on a historiographical or ‘mnemotechnological’ function. Such relations and functions are tied to the nature of clothes as objects, things and signs. They also arise from the many performative dimensions of sartorial language, grounded in its double semiotic function as both system and event. As a symbolic system clothes may serve to interpellate and discipline, to signify the place of individual bodies in social, economic, or sexual orders; as event, on the other hand, they offer an opportunity for individual performance, in Butlerian terms, as the idea of variation within a set of discursive possibilities. Beyond the material and the symbolic, clothes matter because they come with a deeply anchored phenomenology and an equally fundamental imaginary, and because they are invested by tradition with the ability to speak otherwise, in or as allegory.