Dress Lecture

November 12, 2025December 1, 2025 Oscar Wilde Blog2 Comments

Free Online Lecture

Oscar Wilde on Dress
by John Cooper

DATE: Saturday, December 6 at 2pm EST
(Eastern Standard Time in the US is five hours behind GMT)

Click here to Register: Zoom Webinar.

Welcome to the sixth season of online lectures presented by the Victorian Society in America inspired by their internationally-acclaimed Summer Schools.

This season’s speakers will address a wide variety of subjects including Los Angeles in the Victorian era, the evolution of resort architecture, Oscar Wilde’s philosophy on dress and fashion, a behind-the-scenes look at the preservation of Gilded Age Newport, the Saturday Evening Girls’ club and the Paul Revere Pottery, and the work of British preservationist and architectural historian Gavin Stamp.

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On Dress

October 4, 2025 Oscar Wilde Blog2 Comments

Oscar Wilde On Dress
Now in a New Updated and Expanded Artisan Edition.

www.oscarwildeondress.com

Back in 2012 I rediscovered Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Philosophy of Dress” and published it the following year in a limited hardback bibliophile edition. That publication represented the essay’s first appearance in book form, and the first posthumous release of a lost work by Wilde.

I am now pleased to introduce the book in an updated and expanded softcover artisan edition.

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Article

A Manly Confession

September 2, 2025 Oscar Wilde BlogLeave a comment

“No man in modern times has dared to dress as he pleased, except Oscar Wilde…”

The commentary below appeared in a fashion issue of Life magazine in 1916. It is styled as the “manly confession” of a sentiment still so unmanly that its exemplar was Oscar Wilde, sixteen years after his death.

Unsurprisingly, it appeared above an amusingly transparent pseudonym in keeping with the light-hearted tone of the magazine.

And yet, given its reference to the “craven hisses” that greeted Wilde’s demise and the condemnation of cowardice, I suspect a little earnest belief lay hidden in plain sight.

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Article

Cello Encore

January 16, 2018March 31, 2024 Oscar Wilde Blog12 Comments

More Of The Cello Mystery Solved

—Corroborating Research—

In a recent article I established the literary source for the cello coat worn by Oscar Wilde at the Grosvenor Gallery. However, I left it open to interpretation whether Wilde actually did have such a coat tailored or, perhaps, he just happened to have one like it. After all, ask you may recall, there was only one report of the “cello” shape.

However, we can now be definitive.

Further research allows us to make the coat story complete—although, as we shall see, the archaic variant word compleat might make for a better fit.

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