Pygmalion

Shaw uses clothes to symbolize a social class. On the portico in Act I, Pickering’s “evening dress” (Act I, Page 15) allows Eliza to identify his class and target him for a sale. Higgins’s shoes reveal that he is not a “copper’s nark” (Act I, Page 17) but a gentleman. Yet clothing is also revealed to be a marker that is superficial and may be unreliable in pinpointing one’s social position. In the first social test, Mrs. Higgins still sees Eliza as a street woman, despite her new elegant dress. At the end of the play, Doolittle may be “resplendently dressed” with a “flower in his buttonhole, a dazzling silk hat, and patent leather shoes” (Act V, Page 110), but he is still a coarse, crude man. Clothes are presented as useful tools for creating a costume or a disguise.

Eliza demonstrates a keen awareness of the role clothing plays in the perception of class. When she arrives at Higgins’s home to buy lessons, she uses the items available to her to attempt to create the costume of a lady. Eliza wears “a hat with three ostrich feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red,” a “neatly clean apron,” and a “shoddy coat [that] has been tidied a little” (Act II, Page 32).