Alice! a childish story take,And with a gentle handLay it where Childhood's dreams are twinedIn Memory's mystic band,Like pilgrim's withered wreath of flowersPlucked in a far-off land.
Dress // Spotted Moth // Headband // Titania Dreaming // Shoes // Aldo // Necklace // Modcloth // Ring // Etsy //
Every little girl has once in her life fallen down the rabbit hole into the subversive and stragen world of Alice in Wonderland. Whether it is a dusty paperback book on the night stand or an animated sing song world of Disney characters, Alice's highly stylized universe of anthropomorphic animals and Dali-esque scenery are an unmistakable source of my inspiration in fashion and style. All of the characters in Alice's wonderland are given so many extremely detailed outfits which reflect the story and their personality as well as their metaphorical meaning in Alice's mind. Although generally looked at as a children's book, Alice in Wonderland is an incredible deep and meaningful piece of fiction that deal with themes of identity and curiosity. And as we all know, fashion is all about identity and those who do it right, use fashion to show off their personality and identity (as we've seen throughout the various posts on Literature this week.)
Alice is another child whose fashion has become canon for designers to use while designing their collections. This wish to fall back to a younger time when life wasn't necessarily simpler, but we had the time to explore, examine and expel our curiosity wherever we go.
In style, I explore Alice's wardrobe both through the traditional look of her blue and white sun dress she is oft described as wearing as well as with different trinkets inspired by the book. This apothecary necklace, and long favorite of mind from Modcloth, as the perfect addition to the outfit. All it needed is the "Drink Me" label and it could have flown right out of the pages.
This gorgeous dress form Spotted Moth is fantastically detailed with delicate crosshatched open lace pattern on the top, creating a geometric, Spirograph effect. Since mathematics were a passion of Carol's, it is another theme wrapped up in the book and I thought this almost mathematically patterned detail in this dress was a perfect compliment to the theme and the book.
