A range of stimulating books on the theory of modern fashion and the connections between fashion and modernity have become available in recent years, many of them published as part of Berg's ‘Dress, Body, Culture’ series, confirming that the connections between mode and modernité far exceed the etymological. The interrelationships between literary modernism and modern theories and practices of fashion have been much less consistently explored, however. Clair Hughes and Mark Anderson have written valuable books on the connections between dress, fashion and fiction (Hughes's Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001) and Dressed in Fiction (2006), Anderson's Kafka's Clothes (1992)). Within Woolf studies a number of recent essays have been devoted to aspects of Woolf's famous ‘clothes-consciousness’, proposing readings of her work in the contexts of shopping, masquerade, and crossdressing, as well as exploring the complexities and contradictions of her engagement with a fashionable modernism, commodity culture and the cultural marketplace. These contributions are highly valuable, but remain uncollected and relatively scattered. A comprehensive reading of Woolf's work as cultural analyst and writer of fiction, set in the context of the modern interest in fashion as theory and practice, and in clothes as things, commodities and symbols, is still lacking. My own book is intended to begin to fill this gap.