Some well-dressed people in hereLET IDEAS COMPETE

Sebastian Flyte, Brideshead Revisited

The Oxford diva’s outfits are always impeccably on point. From ‘pillar-box red pajamas’ to flawless white-tie, Flyte’s look is at its height when armed with his teddy bear.

Luna Lovegood, the Harry Potter series

Luna is the most aesthetically individual character of Rowling’s series. Her eccentricity, quirkiness, and resistance to register to social norms is refreshingly culminated in a style fabulously realised in the films. Luna Looksgood.

Dorian Gray, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Embodying “once you go black, you never look drab”, the brooding Dorian oozes haunting seduction. Whether you find him to be “perfectly hideous” or someone “whose picture really fascinates” you, Gray tantalisingly tempts us to wonder what dwells within his un-ageing and sculpted exterior: “behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”

Cleopatra, Antony and Cleopatra

If lying under a “pavilion of cloth of gold tissue” doesn’t scream fabulously regal then nothing else will. Cleopatra will forever be an unrivalled queen from across the pages, and her appearance does not disappoint; she is “more beautiful than any artist’s idealised portrait of the goddess Venus.” (Forever an ideal go-to fancy dress option).

Little Red Riding Hood

A predominant fairytale icon, Little Red Riding Hood pulls off a number that no one else could. Angela Carter boldly reminds us of this, as in her gothic short story collection The Bloody Chamber, lil’ Red is used as a walking symbol of the female hymen. Albeit an illogically noticeable outfit choice for walking in an infamously dangerous forest, Red’s coat is at the peak of fairytale couture and is nothing short of a symbol of adventure, individuality, boldness, and literary immortality.

Arcite & Palamon, The Knight’s Tale

Chaucer’s knights are enough to make any medieval admirer swoon. Think James Bond, but the seven hundred year old equivalent. Dashing and chivalrous, few could throw down their gauntlet to challenge these knights’ aesthetic appeal, “robed splendidly” with “glittering shields” and “marvellous armour.” And yet, Arcite and Palamon are painful reminders of the male fashion of today – who is going to want to send princes of snapbacks and high-top trainers to fight for your hand?

Jordan Baker, The Great Gatsby

Commending Fitzgerald’s titular character is too easy – his extravagant and somewhat farcical shower of shirts over Daisy is just one warning of how we should not mistake quantity for quality. It is the deliciously dark and unassumingly cool Jordan Baker who steals the spotlight. Her unrivalled poise sets her above the insufferably bland Daisy, and our literary eye is always drawn to the more quirkily and yet nonetheless sexily described Jordan: “she wore her evening-dress, all her dresses, like sport clothes - there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.” One can only dream of gliding through 1920’s New York high society with Ms Baker and her effortless fashion of aloofness.

Ayesha, The Satanic Verses

Salman Rushdie’s masterpiece in magic realism plays host to Ayesha, a character in whom Rushdie achieves a supernatural wonder: “butterflies had settled upon her body in such thick swarms that she seemed to be wearing a dress of the most delicate material in the universe.” The image is striking and celestial, and (getting one up on the pop-culture icon Effie Trinket) the girl with the butterfly dress appeals to even the most resisting of imaginations.

Orlando, Orlando

Woolf’s Orlando exhibits how “vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” Raised as a man but identifying as a woman, Orlando’s sense of self is traced through the development of aesthetic. Woolf’s recognition of the relationship between gender, identity, and aesthetic is presented as somewhat simultaneously fundamental but also eternally complex: “Never have I seen my own skin (here she laid her hand on her knee) look to such advantage as now. Could I, however, leap overboard and swim in clothes like these? No! […] she wondered, here encountering the first knot in the smooth skein of her argument.” This examination of what it means to think about gender and how it manifests in appearance is a powerful reminder of how we establish our connection with the world, and how we feel it should perceive us.