Dior’s New Look and clothes consciousness in Alice Munro’s ‘Sunday Afternoon’ (1968) and ‘Hired Girl’ (2006)

‘Sunday Afternoon’ (1968) and ‘Hired Girl’ (2006) are two autobiographically inspired and closely related stories set in the 1950s, a decade of momentous change both in the history of fashion and Alice Munro’s personal life. My reading of these two stories focuses on Munro’s descriptions of clothing and the clothes consciousness of her characters and narrators. Building on previous scholarship at the intersection of literary and material culture studies, I will show how sustained attention to the materiality of characters’ attire reveals patterns in Munro’s work. I argue that through her unobtrusive but sustained attention to attire and clothes consciousness, Munro interrogates the Cinderella plot – one that promises triumph by romance aided by the right dress – while also exposing the precariousness of the self when it is rooted in invisibility.