Fashion in fiction and literature

(This is my first post in 2018 and I take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year.)
I came across this article by Helen Gordon while researching fashion in fiction, after reading the homonymous book, which inspired me to look for more. I love Gordon's take on the whole thing. I totally agree on how important the way authors dress their characters is, how they take on the role of stylists to place their characters in the right context. Gordon mentions Tolstoy and Anna Karenina's black gown, which she demurely wore at the fateful ball where she danced with Vronsky inciting  the jealousy and despair of Kitty. The latter wore lavish lace effortlessly and  Gordon notes that Tolstoy gives the very definition of stylishness when describing Kitty's attire: "as if these bows and laces and all the details of her toilet had not cost her or her people a moment's attention, as if she had been born in this net and lace". Which she actually was.
Think for a moment of your favourite books and the heroines and heroes that appear in them. What are they wearing? How has this influenced the way you dress?
Gordon cites Holly Golightly and her LBD- visualised in the film rendition by Audrey Hepburn wearing Givenchy and that elegant hat which she puts on, immediately asking, quite redundantly, "how do I look?"
As Gordon says "fashion, even when peripheral to plot and meaning, does tend to date a novel by fixing it within a certain historical moment. Style, which some have argued is the opposite of fashion, has the timeless quality evident in Fitzgerald and Waugh's musings on dress."
Literature is not immediately visual, or so we contend, yet that is a fallacy because when reading a novel we cannot help but visualise an entire world peopled by characters, all wearing clothes. And the clothes are described by authors in great detail. They may be marginal to the narrative but only just. Miss Havisham's wedding dress, in Dicken's Great Expectations  is a case in point.  Her whole existence is defined by her rotting wedding dress. This is how  Dickens describes her "she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white ... But, I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its luster, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone".

(When I participated in the second BBC Hair competition in 2015  as a model, my hairdo was inspired by Miss Havisham, who, as a character had left a great impression on my stylist, Phil) 

Another iconic dress is the one Scarlett O'Hara wears in Gone With The Wind, made out of a green velvet curtain, to match her eyes, when visiting Rhett Butler in jail and attempting to seduce him. 

But there is no doubt that Franz Kafka's words in his short story The Clothes will leave us pondering on the significance he gives to dress as a metaphor, whilst ostensibly discussing its value as apparel:

"Often when I see clothes with manifold pleats, frills, and appendages which fit so smoothly onto lovely bodies I think they won't keep that smoothness long, but will get creases that can't be ironed out, dust lying so thick in the embroidery that it can't be brushed away, and that no one would want to be so unhappy and so foolish as to wear the same valuable gown every day from early morning till night.'

There is indeed more to fashion than meets the eye...