A Modernist Approach of Fashion and Identity in Mrs. Dalloway Shopping in the early twentieth century had become part of daily life but that establishment was caused by a development that occurred one century earlier already. From the ‘boom in textile trade’ (Benjamin 3) around the 1820s onwards, the demand for clothes was rising. One of the most well-known novels on shopping in London was written in 1891 already by William Morris and is called News From Nowhere which addresses shopping in ‘late nineteenth-century capitalist society’ (Beaumont 192). During the first two decades of the twentieth century, ‘women’s clothing was revolutionized’ (Andrésdóttir 4) which resulted in shorter flowing dresses that literally gave women more breathing space. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is rather crucial in its own time, partly because of the novel’s arc of clothing. Quite paradoxically, Virginia Woolf herself was known to have an awkward relationship with clothing and appearance in personal life and her relationship with fashion has been addressed by various critics already. Vike Plock depicts Virginia Woolf’s relationship to clothes ‘torturous’. As Jane Garrity pointed out, clothing ‘functions for Woolf as a sign […] of modernity’ (195). Although Woolf was seen as ‘an intellectual and literary trendsetter’ (Plock), she was quite the opposite in the world of fashion. Paradoxically, she functioned ‘as both the producer and the subject of specific news items, in the pages of