From Edward Gorey to the dishonorable mention of the Berenstain Bears, picture book fashions tell us a lot about our favorite characters — and even more about the culture that made them.
5. Everyone Always in Edward Gorey
A “short-lived wedding party, confined to one brief decade”* was Cecil Beaton’s description of the Edwardian period, from which Edward Gorey drew most of his inspiration. Of this top 5 list of picture book icons, Gorey is the most on the nose: an artist, with an encyclopedic knowledge of fashion and a historian’s love of minutia, who, unlike almost every other children’s literature author before and after, claimed no special affinity for or knowledge of children. He said when Agatha Christie died, he thought he couldn’t go on, but he did go on to give us, arguably, some of the best of the genre, and, inarguably, the most parasols per capita. Should you have clicked on this article hoping for guidance in how to dress as a Gorey character, then let me direct you to this rookie article.
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Mother Fox and Little Fox in Little Fox Goes to the End of the World.
Author: Ann Tompert
Illustrator: John Wallner
Like many girls in children’s literature, Little Fox wants to be an adventurer. Unlike many of them, however, she’s wearing pants: sensible, wide-legged jeans, a loose-fitting sailor top, with a coordinating bandana and T-straps. It’s 1976 inside and outside this charming book.
Of course, her momma is a talented seamstress, who spends her half of the story making a keen, androgynous blue jacket for her daughter. (A seamstress mother is no guarantee of practical clothing, though, Brave Irene’s dressmaking mother sends her daughter out into a snowstorm wearing tights and a dress.**) More than the pants, though, this picture book earns its spot through creating a family aesthetic: the mom’s smart shirtdress and saddle oxfords and her own coordinating bandana are not matched or scaled up from her daughter’s ensemble but complementary. A style kinship, if you will.
Honorable mention:
The style kinship of Tomi Ungerer’s Mellops family and their especially well-dressed father. Minus (a lot of) points for Mrs. Mellops never joining in the adventures except to cook or one time, bathe her piglets. Both these pictures are from The Mellops’ Go Diving for Treasures, the second picture is the only illustration in which Mamma Mellops —or half of her — appears.
3. Strega Nona’s Cape
Author & Illustrator: Tomie dePaola
Capes have long been plagued by the same practical conundrum as puffy vests, namely, what weather requires you to warm the middle of your body but not your (usually more vulnerable) appendages. When do you not want your arms covered? Answer: when you need them! Strega Nona achieves the coveted third spot—not due to her pleasing terra cotta styling and jaunty striped shoes nor even because she’s an elderly woman headlining as a heroine—but because her traveling cape provides a solution to a real-life question about the utility of this wardrobe staple. Because how else could Calabria’s finest witch have achieved the nimble magic movements necessary to stop the spaghetti storm if she were stuffed in a constrictive arm-inclusive coat?
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All the Pigs in The Book of Pigericks
Author & Illustrator: Arnold Lobel
More well-dressed pigs from Times Past here. A comparatively rarer feature elevates this book above Gorey for the purposes of the list, though. Fashion, in many of the rhymes, appears not as a backdrop but as a problem-solving device. Sometimes the device fails, like the sixteen coats that “never warmed…only deformed.” Or solves a problem that truly isn’t one: the rich pigs’ solution to how to display all his jewelry at once. But, for a few pigs, fashion changes everything.
Honorable mention:
For clothing that has a purpose and also accomplishes your dreams, Angelina Ballerina receiving her ballet shoes and clothes in the original book by Katharine Holabird with illustrations by Helen Craig. Nothing remarkable about the outfit, but what is different is that Angelina wears her clothes when dancing rather than impractically all around town (giving a children’s character a hobby almost guarantees they will be wearing the uniform appropriate to that hobby at all moments even when it would hinder their ability to participate in non-hobby activities).
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Lisa’s Mom in the Corduroy Books
Author & Illustrator: Don Freeman
Corduroy and its sequel A Pocket for Corduroy are picture books about a bear whose clothes aren’t working for him. He’s missing a button on his overalls in the original, which is preventing someone from choosing him, and he has no pockets in the sequel (a problem familiar to those of us who wear women’s clothing). The solution to the problems in the book is not to buy new clothes or a better bear, but for Lisa, the girl who originally purchases him, to change his clothes herself. That’s great, obviously, as is the impeccable 1968 styling of Lisa and her mother and the fact that this was for a very long time (and unfortunately still) one of the few picture books featuring a black family. These features alone might give them a spot on the top five, but why is it #1?
Lisa’s mom is why. In best-selling picture book world there are two major types of mom fashion: (1) impractical but stylish, let’s call it, aspirational and (2) practical but extremely gendered or sometimes, downright horrifying.*** If you’re having trouble deciding which category a mom goes in, ask yourself: is there an apron in this picture (and especially, is the mom wearing the apron for an apron-appropriate activity or is its sole purpose to signify her perpetual domestic servitutde?) If we just had the first book to go on and the lesser known third book Corduroy Lost and Found, Lisa’s mom might be tending towards (1) with her coats, chic hats, and earrings:
But—the sequel gives us a kind of fashion dialectic of the two archetypes in the practical stylish (and seldom addressed) answer to what a woman with several statement hats wears to the laundromat.
While revealing, on the next page, in a delightful assortment of pajama pants and laundry-day tees, that the author knows exactly what the rest of us wear to wash our clothes, giving a fitting juxtaposition with Lisa’s mom, long may she reign: 
Notes:
* A maybe even better description, from Beaton again, quoted in Alexander Theroux’s The Strange Case of Edward Gorey: “the Great Gatsby era when ladies willed their bodies to look as much like cooked asparagus as possible, taking the form of whatever sofa or chair they sat in.”
**I love Brave Irene specifically and William Steig in general. In a depressing b
ut rare depiction of class, the plot of the story is that Irene’s mother has fallen too ill to deliver the commissioned dress to the duchess in time for the ball, and Irene volunteers to go through a snow-storm to do so, an act portrayed as heroic (rather than desperate).
*** Dishonorable mention Mamma Berenstain’s shower cap and matching polka dot mumu is the prototype for 2…she wears this get-up inside and outside the house and sometimes accessorizes with long vests (see below, if you can handle it). If you don’t have kids but think you might someday, you probably think you can avoid the Berenstain Bears or the Disney princesses or whatever you wrote a paper about that one time, and I wish you sincere luck with that project, but for the rest of you, should you find yourself reading one of these, remember that your children can’t read at this age and science confirms that we would all have evolved the ability to read by two now if not for the the species-wide protection mechanism that allows parents to change what happens in Berenstain Bears without alerting their children (see this parent’s solution.)
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