From Chanel to Halston: The Mythology of Fashion Costumes on Modernist Stages

When recognizable designer couture costumes the modernist stage, it adds layers of aesthetic, choreographic, and social meaning via extrascenic reference, a capacity to alter and reshape bodily movements, and the relationship to the pleasures and politics of women’s material culture. Onstage couture can confer a kind of contemporary mythological resonance upon performance — what I call the “mythic fashion unconscious.”