Dressed: The History of Fashion · Dressed Media

Fashion Adventures in Wonderland: Dressed x Dressed Fancy, an interview with Lucy Clayton and Dr. Benjamin Wild (Dressed Classic)

February 5, 2026·1 hr·5 clips

Lucy Clayton recounts wearing a self-made Queen of Hearts costume that ended with scissors and a sick-filled minibus.

The archive setup does some work here. After a kids news pre-roll and the familiar Dressed welcome, Cassie and April ease into the episode before treating Wonderland as the day's odd little doorway. It starts close to home: a gloomy New York City hurricane, then a soft joke about what anyone should wear to visit the Borogoves. Once the guest gets going, the conversation tightens around Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the long shadow of Tenniel's drawings. Chris Riddell is the useful example. His newer illustrated Alice keeps close to Tenniel's white rabbit because he could not really picture the character any other way. That says plenty. The guest treats Tenniel's choices as almost fused to Carroll's words, not floating beside them. The fun is in the particulars. Nineteenth-century notes and letters make Tenniel sound exacting, nearly as fussy about detail as Carroll. The Duchess is tied to a sixteenth-century portrait, and natural history illustrations feed into the dodo. Accuracy matters, but it is not the whole story. Those precise visual choices give the weirdness weight. Then printing makes everything more human. Drawings went straight onto woodblocks and changed as they were worked. Early printings lost much of the fine detail after a botched job, which stings more because Carroll paid for it himself. Wonderland's fashion and character images lasted because art, text, craft, money, and mistakes all got tangled together.

As heard by us

Wonderland is framed through Tenniel's images and the craft behind them.

The episode uses Alice in Wonderland to show how illustration, costume, and literary imagination keep circling back into one another. Cassie and April work with an easy rhythm, then settle into Tenniel's images, especially the White Rabbit and the lasting authority those…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want Alice in Wonderland read through fashion, illustration, obsessive detail, and careful bookmaking.

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