Author: Rosalie Ham
Rosalie Ham’s novel The Dressmaker is a satirical novel set in the fictional rural Australian town of Dungatar in the 1950s. The story follows Myrtle or Tilly Dunnage, who returns to the town after years away. As a child, Tilly was sent away based on an accusation and shame, but when she returns, she is no longer a rejected local girl. She is now also a skilled dressmaker who has mastered couture in Paris, where she worked for haute couture designers such as Vionnet and Balenciaga. She mastered the art of couture and fine dressmaking, but she also clearly has a designer’s talent because, as one merchandizer recognizes when accidentally visiting Dungatar, some of her designs were not seen before, whereas some are from Dior or interpretations of Dior and other big haute couture houses.
I absolutely loved how Dior is portrayed in the book. Similarly to Flowers for Mrs Harris, where Dior is at the center of the story, here, it is fashion and haute couture as such, but Dior’s designs have a prominent role, particularly when Tilly reinterprets those designs. Women in the small town continue to be outraged with Tilly and see her as an outcast, but cannot resist her dresses.
The Dressmaker is not just a revenge story, albeit this is present; it is also a story of recognition, social exclusion, and the uneven transferability of fashion capital. Tilly has acquired the right cultural capital for the fashion field because she has the skill, aesthetic judgment, knowledge of cut, fabric, silhouette, and transformation. However, while her fashion authority is not in question because women love her dresses, and her designs and cuts change the way these women are seen, the town still refuses to convert fashion authority into social belonging, so they want Tilly’s taste but do not want to accept her as a legitimate member of their small community. The book is also a story of class, belonging, family, and small communities.
The Dressmaker suggests that fashion can grant authority, but only within particular systems of recognition. Tilly can transform other women, but she cannot easily transform the town’s story about her. This is why the novel is about much more than clothes. Clothes are the medium through which recognition, envy, aspiration, humiliation, and revenge circulate. A dress is never just a dress in Ham’s novel. It is a social claim. It says something about who the wearer wants to be, how she wants to be seen, and what kind of recognition she hopes to receive.
For readers interested in fashion, The Dressmaker is valuable because it challenges the idea that fashion is trivial. Fashion here is communication, status, memory, revenge, and longing. Tilly knows how to make garments speak, and the town understands the result, forcing them to use Tilly’s services. A dress becomes a claim to be seen differently. But Ham also shows the limits of that claim: one can be visually transformed and remain socially rejected. That is the cruelty at the heart of the novel. Fashion can make recognition possible and allow even social outcasts into fashion’s field because of their talent and cultural capital (which happened to Tilly), but it cannot guarantee belonging outside of the fashion field.
Only after I read this amazing book did I realize this is a trilogy, and The Dressmaker has a prequel called Molly, which is clearly about Tilly’s mother, who is a side character in The Dressmaker. There is also a third book, The Dressmaker’s Secret. It goes without saying that I will be buying the remaining books due to fantastic writing (not just the fact that The Dressmaker is about love and the power of haute couture).
Thank you for reading!