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Parisian store 'Printemps' asked designers to design unique and bespoke pieces for Alice.
Kirkwood told Vogue that his 'interpretation for Alice is all about fantasy & fun through escapism.'

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This piece is symbolic of the beginning of the story when Alice struggles to access the door that will eventually transport her to Wonderland.

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https://www.vogue.co.uk/gallery/tom-binns-collection-for-alice-in-wonderland?image=5d545c6ba24eee000838e3be

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Charles Dodgson (whose pseudonym was Lewis Caroll) was a mathematician at Christ Church, Oxford. he told the story to daughters of dean Henry Liddell as they rowed down the Thames. Afterwards, 10 yr old Alice Liddell (whom Alice was based on) encouraged Dodgson to write the story down.

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2003 VOGUE SHOOT BY GRACE CODDINGTON AND ANNIE LEIBOVITZ- acted as a commentary of the irrationality of fashion.

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2003 VOGUE SHOOT BY GRACE CODDINGTON AND ANNIE LEIBOVITZ- acted as a commentary of the irrationality of fashion.

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https://www.vogue.com/slideshow/once-upon-a-time-in-vogue-photos

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1966 ADVERT FOR T.ELLIOT & SONS 'ALICE' BOOTS

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1966 ADVERT FOR T.ELLIOT & SONS 'ALICE' BOOTS

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1966 advert which showed Victorian-styled ankle boots called 'Alice' worn by a miniskirted blonde in a hairband surrounded by sinister fauns. Based on the work of Aubrey Beardsley - just the name and the hairstyle were enough to create an association with the character

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JONATHON MILLER 1966 TELEVISION FILM - displays 1960s counter culture appropriation of 'Victoriana'

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JONATHON MILLER 1966 TELEVISION FILM - displays 1960s counter culture appropriation of 'Victoriana'

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SUUREAL SCENE FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT HAVE MADE IT INTO POPULAR CULTURE, E.G. FAIRGROUND TEACUP RIDE

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SUUREAL SCENE FROM THE ORIGINAL TEXT HAVE MADE IT INTO POPULAR CULTURE, E.G. FAIRGROUND TEACUP RIDE

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The lyrics associated with 1960s onwards idea of underlying drug themes in novel.

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'IS ALICE IN WONDERLAND REALLY ABOUT DRUGS?' (2012)bbc article

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'IS ALICE IN WONDERLAND REALLY ABOUT DRUGS?' (2012)bbc article

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19254839

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Who is Alice in Wonderland and how does she appear? Created 150 years ago, she is both fixed in the past and new for every fresh reader. But there is an ambiguity about her - is she an innocent child or a troubled adolescent? Is she a Victorian young lady or a modern girl? The bright young thing of the Disney cartoon or the troubled soul of Jan Svankmajer's surreal animation? Every generation has portrayed Alice in its own way; a large part of her appeal is in the ambiguity that allows every portrayal to be so distinctive, yet still Alice.

As we read the text, the many presentations of Alice can coexist or slide into one another. But viewed together in a new exhibition at London's Museum of Childhood, the different interpretations show an extraordinary variety, from the crinolined original of Tenniel's illustrations to the kanga-clad Swahili Alice. Looked at factually, her nature is easy to define: the child on whom she is based, Alice Pleasance Liddell, was 10 when Lewis Carroll started writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1862. In the language of the time, a middle-class girl of this age was a "young child", pre-adolescent and pre-sexual.

The monochrome illustrations commissioned from John Tenniel in 1866 depict Alice in the short-skirted and short-sleeved dress of a young schoolgirl. Fashionably cut, she has a wide skirt and puffed sleeves, unlike the flowing skirt and loose sleeves of Carroll's own sketches. It is surprising that the fastidious author accepted Tenniel's version, as he instructed the illustrator of his later novel Sylvie and Bruno (1889) "to make her dress clinging as I hate the crinoline fashion". Carroll may have been appeased by the inclusion of a pinafore that identified her as a young child in the schoolroom.

Alice's flowing hair was another signifier of 1860s childhood; however the subtle change from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where it hangs loose, to the ribbon band in the sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871) represents a step towards more adult styling. A similar evolution can be seen in Alice's footwear, with the striped stockings of Looking-Glass indicating an older child than the ankle socks of Wonderland.

Within a generation, the outfit worn by Alice was old-fashioned; a review of an 1886 stage adaptation contrasted the "childlike" stage Alice with the precocious bustle-wearing minxes in the audience. By 1907, the new versions of Alice that poured off the presses after the book's copyright lapsed were split between those (like Arthur Rackham's) which presented her as a contemporary child, and those (like Peter Newell's) which retained the Victorian pinafore.

From the 1920s, the gap between images of Alice and the Victorian references of the text create a form of cognitive dissonance. If Alice is the modern Miss depicted by Willy Pogany in 1922 with bobbed hair and a drop-waisted sweater, why is she reciting 19th-century verses and playing croquet?

Even more troubling than this chronological slippage is the ambiguity of Alice's age, which makes her a particularly appealing role model for young women trying to escape the social pressures of adulthood. An unsettling vision of Alice as a child-woman was developed in the 1930s and 1940s by Surrealist artists such as Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst, with a sexualised heroine lost in a dream landscape.

As Tenniel's Alice became increasingly distant from current children's clothing, the full-skirted dress, white pinafore and hair ribbon became more symbolic of the character. Curiously, the most pervasive element of Alice's wardrobe, and the one with which she has been so associated, was not present in the original images: her sky-blue dress is neither mentioned in the text, nor was it present in the 1890 coloured illustrations by Tenniel, which dressed the heroine in golden yellow.

The blue dress arrived in the early 20th century, partly through association with a very different Alice, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, whose choice of a blue gown for her father's inauguration as US president in 1904 sparked a fashion for "Alice blue".

The 1951 Disney cartoon simplified these markers of style to align them with the petticoats and bobby socks of contemporary teenagers. The closeness of 1850s and 1950s silhouettes made it possible to promote "Alice" dresses to young girls. The Victorian features of the outfits give a comforting sense of "pastness" that is not tied to a specific period or national narrative.

In the 1960s counterculture, with its appropriation of Victoriana, Alice was again ripe for reinterpretation. In 1966 there was a television film directed by Jonathan Miller, who saw the theme of the text as "nostalgia and remorse . . . The Victorians looked on infancy as a period of perilous wonder when the world was experienced with such keen intensity that growing up seemed like a fall and a betrayal". His adolescent heroine in her Edwardian dress represented Alice as a critical observer of the cruelties of the adult world.

Other attempts to radicalise her included a nude "happening" by the artist Yayoi Kusama; a stage play by Andre Gregory; and figurative works by Graham Ovenden and Peter Blake. These versions stressed the irrationality of the story and linked it covertly - or overtly - to drug culture. A 1966 advert showed Victorian-styled ankle boots called "Alice" worn by a miniskirted blonde in a hairband surrounded by sinister fauns. Based on the work of Aubrey Beardsley, here just the name and the hairstyle were enough to create an association with the character.

The 2003 Vogue shoot of "Alice" directed by Grace Coddington and photographed by Annie Leibovitz acted as an acid commentary on the irrationality of fashion. Designers both dressed Alice and embodied the story's characters. The ensembles played wittily with our expectations of the character and the designers: Viktor and Rolf's Alice wore a version of their multi-collared dress, while Karl Lagerfeld imagined her clutching a piglet to a lavishly embroidered Chanel jacket. Model Natalia Vodianova combined an adult body with a childlike truculence that played against the stylishness of the garments.

As the literary theorist Carolyn Sigler argues, the enduring power of the Alice books lies "in the fact that, like dreams, they can mean whatever the readers need them to mean". Damon Albarn's forthcoming stage production Wonder.land will show us an Alice for the 21st century; it will be interesting to see whether he retains the dress, pinafore and headband to link her to tradition, or presents her as a psychic voyager in a spacesuit or body-paint.
Clare Rose is a costume historian. On May 9, she will take part in a conference exploring Alice in fashion as part of the Museum of Childhood's 'The Alice Look' exhibition, May 2-November 1, vam.ac.uk/moc Illustrations: Mary Evans Picture Library; Aquarius Collection Photograph: Leah Gallo

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How Alice's look has reflected 150 years of fashion

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Who is Alice in Wonderland and how does she appear? Created 150 years ago, she is both fixed in the past and new for every fresh reader. But there is an ambiguity about her - is she an innocent child or a troubled adolescent? Is she a Victorian young lady or a modern girl?

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FT ARTICLE - 'HOW ALICE'S LOOK HAS REFLECTED 150 YEARS OF FASHION'

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FT ARTICLE - 'HOW ALICE'S LOOK HAS REFLECTED 150 YEARS OF FASHION'

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Clare Rose (2015)

https://www.ft.com/content/cb1c822a-ac92-11e4-9d32-00144feab7de

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NATIONAL THEATRE MUSICAL CREATED BY DAMON ALBARN

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Wonder.Land for The National Theatre Live

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MARY BLAIR DISNEY STORYBOARDS (influenced Anna Sui)

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MARY BLAIR DISNEY STORYBOARDS (influenced Anna Sui)

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MARY BLAIR DISNEY STORYBOARDS (influenced Anna Sui)

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MARY BLAIR DISNEY STORYBOARDS (influenced Anna Sui)

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MARY BLAIR DISNEY STORYBOARDS (influenced Anna Sui)

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MARY BLAIR DISNEY STORYBOARDS (influenced Anna Sui)

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ANNA SUI RUNWAY - INFLUENCED BY MARY BLAIR

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ANNA SUI RUNWAY - INFLUENCED BY MARY BLAIR

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https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/suzynyfw-psychedelia-hidden-or-bold-at-coach-and-anna-sui

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ANNA SUI INFLUENCED BY ALICE IN WONERLAND

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ANNA SUI INFLUENCED BY ALICE IN WONERLAND

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https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/john-tenniel-an-introduction

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Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Dorothea Tanning

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Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Dorothea Tanning

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Dorothea Tanning 1910-2012

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
1943
Oil on canvas
410 x 610 mm
Purchased with assistance from The Art Fund and the American Fund for the Tate Gallery 1997
T07346

Ownership history:
Purchased from the artist by Roland Penrose, Chiddingly, Sussex, in September 1946; inherited by Anthony Penrose, Chiddingly, Sussex, by whom sold to Tate in 1997.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was produced early in Dorothea Tanning's long career, during a period in which the artist used the stylistic conventions of surrealism to portray enigmatic and highly fantastical images rendered with precise realism. Born in Galesburg, Illinois in 1910, where Tanning has complained that 'nothing ever happened but the wallpaper', she was seduced by the psychologically charged escapism of fantasy fiction and gothic terror novels early in her childhood. She was already a convert to the drama inherent in surrealism by the time she saw the Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936, the effect of which she describes in her memoir Between Lives as the recognition of an 'infinitely faceted world I must have been waiting for ... the limitless expanse of possibility'. 1 Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is an excellent example of the way in which Tanning utilises the language of surrealism to explore her own personal pre-occupations and obsessions.

The picture depicts a shabby hotel corridor with cracked plaster, peeling wallpaper and numbered doors, the farthest of which is ajar allowing an unidentifiable, glowing light to pour out into the dimly lit, narrow space. The image of doors and doorways is a constant one throughout Tanning's work, serving as a metaphorical threshold through which one can enter unknown other worlds or the unconscious. The opening here suggests a gateway between one reality and another, alerting the viewer to the possibility of the unexpected, which here takes the form of a giant sunflower lying broken and twisted on the blood-red carpet. Its petals are torn and its yellow centre faces upwards like an unblinking eye. Two figures also inhabit the scene, both of which appear to be young girls. One leans against a doorway, eyes closed, head back, clothing torn, her chest and stomach exposed; she appears to be exhausted and on closer inspection her face is actually a mask. In her hand she clutches a limp petal from the flower. The other girl stands defiantly, back to the viewer, fists clenched, her hair streaming wildly upwards into the air. The tattered state of the flower and the figures' clothing suggest that there has been a struggle or encounter and that the flower has possibly been vanquished. In a letter to Tate in 1999 about the painting, Tanning stated:

It's about confrontation. Everyone believes he/she is his/her drama. While they don't always have giant sunflowers (most aggressive of flowers) to contend with, there are always stairways, hallways, even very private theatres where the suffocations and the finalities are being played out, the blood red carpet or cruel yellows, the attacker, the delighted victim.2

Melodrama, sado-masochism, desire and death all form part of Tanning's lifelong preoccupation with the gothic sensibility she first encountered as a child. Transformed by the intensity of childhood imagination, Tanning escaped into a world of fatal desires, psychological terrors and supernatural battles between good and evil. This picture is, she has stated, 'like a dream, anything can happen. You might be confronted by your worst fears or greatest joys but you are awake ... so you must be vigilant'. 3

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was made while Tanning was visiting Sedona, in the Arizona desert. She and her companion, Max Ernst went there from the urban landscape and artistic milieu of New York. Later, in 1946, she would marry Ernst and move to Sedona where they remained for many years. The German title, which translates into English as A Little Night Music, is taken from the popular title for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Serenade No.13 for Strings in G Major of 1787. In her book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement Whitney Chadwick, who provided one of the earliest discussions of this picture, suggests that the image is highly autobiographical and inspired by the composition of Danger on the Stairs 1927 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) by the Belgian surrealist Pierre Roy (1880-1950), a painting which featured a large snake descending a staircase. Chadwick points out that Tanning 'removes the snake with its Freudian symbolic content and replaces it with a torn and writhing sunflower, an image strongly identified with Tanning's mid-western origins, close to nature and capable of both fecundity and menace'. 4 However, Tanning strongly contests the link between the two paintings. In a letter to Tate in 1998, she stated that to 'compare my vision with the perfectly proportioned and very photographic depiction of a snake (anaconda) on the stairs, neatly painted, somewhat in the manner of Magritte, is simple-minded. The scene, though infrequent, is possible in the natural outside world. Mine is not'. Nevertheless, Tanning openly states that the sunflower in this picture 'is a symbol of all things that youth has to face and deal with ... representing the never-ending battle we wage with unknown forces that were there before our civilization'. 5

Tanning was already obsessed with 'this most aggressive of flowers' when in 1943, a year after meeting Ernst, she painted Sunflower Landscape, one of only two existing portraits of Ernst by Tanning. 6 Curiously, the picture portrays an imagined Ernst of about ten years old, exploring a rather sensuous stand of huge anthropomorphic sunflowers most of which are over twice his height, the stems and faces of the flowers forming a tangled throng of naked, mostly female bodies. The young Ernst strolls through the moonlit scene arm in arm with one of the shorter flowers; smiling enigmatically he glances towards his companion's large, round, green breasts and into the darkness of a thicket of large-leafed flora. The tone is suggestive of secrecy and sexual exploration. According to Tanning, the flowers in this picture are both menacing and alluring at the same time. They are metaphors for the forces that can, at once, seduce and destroy.

In Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, instead of the conspiratorial and adventurous atmosphere of Sunflower Landscape, the sunflower lies vanquished, implying that a more violent sexual struggle or event has already taken place, leaving one of the figures in a swoon, her clothing torn and her face a doll-like mask. Tanning has suggested that that these two paintings, both painted in the same year:

to some extent reflect the vastly different ways boys and girls experience early childhood desire and the relationships they have with their changing bodies which are primarily dictated by moralistic and religious views. Boys are encouraged to be sexually experienced and girls are taught to be passive ... or frightened by sexual behaviour [as it could lead to the shame of unwanted pregnancy].7

In other words, if the sunflowers represent, at some level, initiation into the world of desire, the young Ernst's experience is one of mystery and seduction, whereas for the girls in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik there is much more incipient threat and violence, 'a [thing] that youth has to face and deal with'. 8

Tanning has described this and other paintings made during the period when the she and Ernst had first moved to Sedona as 'a series of chilly, secretive, confined and domestic paintings that typifies my response to the brash, crushing, diabolically red landscape outside the studio'. 9 She has further explained that these works contain:

an almost primitive, fundamental acceptance of a primarily sensorial world, one in which powerful supernatural forces inhabit the eerie landscapes of both the natural environment and in the recesses of the imagination, particularly the childhood imagination, where the extraordinary can exist unhampered by disbelief or logic. Eine Kleine Nachtmusik depicts a confrontation between the forces of grown-up logic and the bottomless psyche of a child.10

These words rightly contextualise the works within the world of fairytales and fables. When asked to elucidate on her choice of title, Tanning responded, 'did anybody ask Mozart what he meant by Eine Kleine Nachtmusik? Could it be his own playful sense of the absurd just pulled it out of the air - as I did, in the same mood, when I borrowed it for a picture?' 11 While a strong connection with music is a recurrent feature throughout her career, she later conceded that Mozart's popular tune 'seems very simple but hints at something darker ... it's like a lullaby, it can be both naive and sinister, like the dreams of children'. 12 In 2003, Tanning returned to these early images by completing a novel entitled Chasm. It is a gothic fairy story begun in Sedona in 1946, in which the central protagonist, a highly-strung young girl, is caught in between a recognisable theatre of airless, overly cultivated interiors and the freedom of a vast magical desert, symbolic of the landscape of the unconscious.

From early on, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik was recognised as one of Tanning's strongest works. It was exhibited in 1944 at the artist's first show with the Julien Levy Gallery and later at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It was selected by the surrealists André Breton (1896-1966) and Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) for inclusion in Le Surrealisme en 1947; both Breton and Duchamp, who remained a life-long friend of Tanning's until his death in 1968, highly praised the work. On a visit to Sedona in 1946, the British surrealist artist and collector Roland Penrose bought the painting, alongside several others. Upon his death, it remained in the collection of his son Anthony Penrose until it was acquired by Tate in 1997.

Victoria Carruthers
March 2010, revised July 2012

Supported by The AHRC Research Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies.

Notes:

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'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik', Dorothea Tanning, 1943 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik', Dorothea Tanning, 1943 This scene of a dreary hotel corridor appears haunted by unnatural forces. The oversized sunflower on the landing is strangely animated. A life-size doll leans in a doorway while the long hair of a girl stands on end, blown by the wind.

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'HOW HAS ALICE IN WONDERLAND INFLUENCED THE FASHION INDUSTRY'

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'HOW HAS ALICE IN WONDERLAND INFLUENCED THE FASHION INDUSTRY'

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http://theatlasmagazine.com/alice-wonderland/#:~:text=Alice%20and%20her%20surroundings%20have,and%20project%20it%20into%20clothing.

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Zenaida Yanowsky as The Red Queen in Christopher Wheeldon's ballet Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Royal Ballet. 

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Zenaida Yanowsky as The Red Queen in Christopher Wheeldon's ballet Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Royal Ballet. 

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The Tart Adage from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (The Royal Ballet, 2017)

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Zenaida Yanowsky as The Red Queen in Christopher Wheeldon's ballet Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Royal Ballet. 

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Zenaida Yanowsky as The Red Queen in Christopher Wheeldon's ballet Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The Royal Ballet. 

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One of my very favorite photographers, Tim Walker, is back with another fanciful feast for the eyes! The new editorial, title Lady Gray, looks like it was inspired by the movie of the moment, Alice in Wonderland. Set in what seems like an old, abandoned mansion, models Stella Tennant and Imogen Morris Clarke pose gracefully around ladders and drapes. Lovely.

Lady Gray can be found in Vogue Italia's March 2010 issue. via [ Refinery 29]

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One of my very favorite photographers, Tim Walker, is back with another fanciful feast for the eyes! The new editorial, title Lady Gray, looks like it was inspired by the movie of the moment, Alice in Wonderland. Set in what seems like an old, abandoned mansion, models Stella Tennant and Imogen Morris Clarke pose gracefully around ladders and drapes.

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Blessed with boundless creativity, and drawn to Victorian sensibilities, gothic humour, English irony and eccentricity, Tim Walker is unquestionably one of the most cultured, original and influential contemporary photographers the world has seen. A photographer who, more than anybody else around, has an undisputable talent for storytelling.

His images channel the magic of photography to become -- through complex scenographic narration -- genuine works of art, which is why they can be found in various permanent collections in prestigious museums and galleries throughout the world.

With his unique photographic style, Walker is capable of using his camera to do something which very few others can achieve: placing movement and words into a single shot, and creating a story.

As in a dream with our eyes wide open, following a subtle central thread of a fragile, surreal romanticism, telling us something without making it truly visible, Tim Walker makes photographs which offer a dimension of reality to our unconscious mind.

Bringing emotional involvement, capable of evoking memories of childhood, of wonder and enchantment, his images are constructed as scenography, developed with a meticulous attention to detail and never, ever re-touched.

The worlds created by Walker, despite representing a fantastic reality of an essence which is both fragile and imperceptible, are at the same time never far from our daily lives, and are merely a surreal but believable version of our own reality.

His connection with reality is also evident in his interpretation of modern tendencies, and though his work contains frequent references to the past, his aesthetic culture is strongly tied to the most innovative movements and artistic trends of modern times.Pirelli welcomes Tim Walker as the visionary behind the 45th Calendar.

03/07/2017

Copyright © 2019 Pirelli & C. S.p.A

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Tim Walker, the Photographer of the 2018 Pirelli Calendar

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Blessed with boundless creativity, and drawn to Victorian sensibilities, gothic humour, English irony and eccentricity, Tim Walker is unquestionably one of the most cultured, original and influential contemporary photographers the world has seen. A photographer who, more than anybody else around, has an undisputable talent for storytelling.