''The Philosophy of Dress'' is an essay by
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is ...
that appeared in ''
The New-York Tribune'' in 1885. The essay remained unknown to scholarship until 2012 when it was rediscovered and published for the first time in book form by Wilde historian John Cooper i
''Oscar Wilde On Dress''(CSM Press, 2013), making it the only previously unknown work that Wilde intended for publication to have been released since he died in 1900.
The essay is Wilde's treatise on
Victorian Dress Reform and its relationship to art in which he expands on his public lecture entitled ''Dress'', which was one of several lectures given in Great Britain and Ireland between 1883 and 1888. A significance of ''The Philosophy of Dress'' is that Wilde's only previously published prose works had been a handful of short reviews and letters that appeared in journals or newspapers. With this essay Wilde announced himself as a commercial writer: it was the first work by him prepared as a composition for specific and separate publication, and it is the only piece of his journalism (out of over 150 examples) that was copyrighted.
In the essay is the first occurrence in print of Wilde's quotation: ''"A fashion is merely a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months!"''
Oscar Wilde In America/Quotations.
/ref>
Notes
External links
* The Philosophy Of Dress by Oscar Wilde available on Archive.org
* The Victorian Web
The Roots of Oscar Wilde’s Dress Philosophy
(excerpt from ''Oscar Wilde On Dress'').
Women of Homer
Works by Oscar Wilde
{{essay-stub