From Disney’s blond teenager to Tim Burton’s surreal reimagining and an all-black Pirelli calendar, Lewis Carroll’s character has had many lives and looks. A new V&A exhibition charts them all
A blue dress trimmed with white, plus long hair swept back from the forehead by a ribbon, always means Alice. When Gwen Stefani wears a black satin headband and a blue-sky corset edged with snowy lace in the video for What You Waiting For, she is Alice. No surname required. When the supermodel Natalia Vodianova balances on a marble mantelpiece in Balenciaga ankle boots and a sky-blue mini dress, with a bunny’s tail fashioned from a whisper of Fortuny-pleated white silk plissé on the pages of Vogue, she is Alice. Alice’s look, now 150 years old, is as recognisable as a Batman or Superman costume. She is an icon, a fashion fairytale. Should you so wish – for about £20 – you can be Alice.
But does the 20th century really need another skinny, posh, blond pin-up? Because that – to phrase it as bluntly as our heroine might have – is how we now see Alice. Never mind that the original 1865 illustrations show a scruffy little girl in a boxy pinafore that looks like a Victorian version of dungarees. Disney’s Alice, with her vanilla curls and waist cinched to a handspan by a frilled white apron, broke out of Lewis Carroll’s quirky story and became a star in her own right. Since 1951, Disney’s slender, fair-haired movie-screen Alice has all but obliterated other Alices.
What’s more, the origin story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – the 33-year-old author’s choice of a seven-year-old girl as his literary muse – has long been flagged as inappropriate to modern sensibilities. Perhaps, then, it is time to cancel Alice?