Symbols Cleopatra and Frankenstein Coco Mellors

The Blue Slip Dress: A Symbol of Intimate Performance

What Is the Blue Slip Dress?

The blue slip dress is a garment Cleo wears at her City Hall wedding to Frank. She finds it at a vintage store on Perry Street: a “liquid silk slip” that costs much less than everything else. She slides it over her head and later describes the sensation as taking a knife to the sky, skimming a bit of blue off the bottom. From the start, the dress carries ambiguity — Cleo herself worries it might actually be a nightgown.

Where the Dress Appears

The blue slip dress first appears in Chapter Two (June), during the wedding day. Cleo buys it instead of white, eats a hot dog on the courthouse steps, and later dances with Frank at the party. The dress reappears symbolically later in the same chapter when Cleo notices a small silk tag on the inseam. The tag reads “Intimates,” confirming her suspicion: she has worn a nightgown to her wedding. She bows her head in private embarrassment. She then asks Audrey , “Does it look like I’m wearing a nightgown?” Audrey reassures her she looks like “a fucking angel.” The dress is not mentioned again in later chapters, but its resonance lingers through Cleo’s growing awareness of her performance of marriage.

How the Meaning Changes

Initially, the blue slip dress symbolizes Cleo’s rejection of tradition. She doesn’t wear white because she finds the idea ridiculous, given her sexual history. The blue silk feels like a rebellious choice, a way to mark the marriage as unconventional. But the revelation that it is a nightgown shifts the meaning. A nightgown belongs to the private sphere — the bedroom, intimacy, sleep. Wearing it to a public ceremony blurs the boundary between private self and public role. Cleo’s embarrassment suggests she did not intend to reveal that layer of vulnerability. The dress becomes a symbol of her unconscious anxiety: she has not fully prepared for the performance of being a wife. She is still, in some sense, a private person playing at marriage.

Later, the dress also connects to Cleo’s broader struggles with identity and mental illness and trauma. Her shame about the nightgown echoes her shame about her scar — the visible mark of her suicide attempt that she hides from strangers. Both the dress and the scar are intimate things that should remain hidden but sometimes become public. The dress foreshadows how her marriage will become a stage for her deepest insecurities.

Connection to Characters and Themes

Cleo is the wearer, and her reaction to the tag reveals her discomfort with the marriage’s public face. Audrey dismisses the concern, showing how even close friends may not perceive Cleo’s internal turmoil. Frank never comments on the dress — his own performance (white tuxedo, top hat) contrasts with Cleo’s quiet unease. The dress touches the theme of love and marriage by questioning whether the ceremony can ever be truly private. It also connects to gender identity and performance: Cleo is performing the role of bride, but her costume is a nightgown, hinting at a more authentic, unsanctioned self beneath. Later, Quentin also wears a silk slip dress while cross-dressing, but that is a separate expression of gender fluidity; Cleo’s slip is about the contradictory demands of female performance in marriage.

Four Study Questions with Answers

  1. Why does Cleo choose a blue dress instead of white?
    Cleo rejects white because she associates it with virginity. She lost her virginity at fourteen and has been sexually active since. The blue dress represents her desire to be honest about her past and to avoid the traditional bridal symbolism. Yet the dress also becomes a source of anxiety, suggesting that rejecting convention does not shield her from the pressures of performance.

  2. What does the tag “Intimates” reveal about Cleo’s subconscious?
    The tag shows that Cleo picked a nightgown without consciously realizing it. This suggests her subconscious sees the marriage as an intimate, private act rather than a public ceremony. The discovery makes her feel exposed, as though she has accidently revealed a part of herself she meant to keep hidden. It mirrors her later feelings of shame about her marriage and her own vulnerability.

  3. How does the blue slip dress blur the boundary between public and private life?
    A nightgown belongs to the bedroom, a zone of sleep, sex, and vulnerability. Wearing it to a wedding — a public celebration with thirty guests — mixes those domains. Cleo’s embarrassment when she sees the tag indicates she did not intend to expose her private self so openly. The dress becomes a symbol of how marriage itself blurs that line: what is meant to be a private bond is enacted before witnesses.

  4. How does the dress connect to Cleo’s struggle with identity and performance?
    Throughout the novel, Cleo worries about being an artist who cares more about the idea of being an artist than about creating art. Similarly, she marries Frank without dreaming about a wedding — she is performing the role of a wife without being sure she wants it. The nightgown-dress is the physical emblem of that performance: she looks like a bride but is really in her sleepwear, unsuited for the role. Later, when she separates from Frank and enters therapy, she cuts her hair and strips away such performances, moving toward an authentic self.

Internal Links for Further Reading