Literature · Fashion · Teaching — Montréal
Reading the clothes of fiction.
I’m Rafael Hett, a researcher in literature and fashion and a French teacher based in Montréal. I study how novels dress their characters: what a coat says about class, and what it does to the body that wears it.
Fig. 1 · Current project
Dress in Balzac, between social sign and lived body
In Le Colonel Chabert (1832), a soldier returns from the dead in a worn greatcoat, and Paris judges him by it.
Research
Clothing sorts people into classes. It is also something they feel on their skin.
In La Comédie humaine, Balzac reads society through its fabrics, cuts and stains. My project follows dress from both sides, as a sign others read and as an experience of the body, in dialogue with fashion theory from Georg Simmel to Gilles Lipovetsky.
It builds on a decade of work on fashion, from my first conference talk on Le Colonel Chabert in 2015 to a master’s thesis on fashion and aesthetics, and now turns to the fashion system as a whole and its place in literature.
Research & writing
Fashion and fiction
Articles, essays and talks on fashion and literature, from Balzac onward.
Lectures
Fashion and literature, taught
Lectures and short courses on the fashion system and its place in literature, for universities, schools and cultural centres.
Reading circle
Le cercle des imaginaires
A free monthly online circle reading French-language literature together. This season: the French classics.
From the notebook
Your first notebook posts will appear here.