Danish top model Mona Tougaard explores the thinking of Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, who became notoriously popular in early 1890s London.

Ellie Grace Cumming styles Tougaard in edgy, intelligenstsia fashion lensed by Alasdair McLellan [IG]. ‘Pictures From an Institution’ was shot at Magdalen College, Oxford in 2023 for d la Repubblica February 18, 2023./ Hair by Anthony Turner; makeup by Bea Sweet

AOC did not know that in 1887, Oscar Wilde became the editor of ‘The Lady’s World’, a high-end, monthly magazine produced by Cassell and Company.

The Victorian Web digs deeply on Wilde’s short but controversial tenure in challenging how magazines narrated women’s lives and roles in society. Fascinating!

As a committed individualist, Wilde believed that women should be allowed far more autonomy than they were afforded by patriarchal Victorian society. He also shared his mother’s opposition to gendered writing, resistance she had expressed in forthright terms when, as a young woman, she had been offered control of the ‘woman’s page’ of The Nation newspaper. Echoing his mother’s distain, Wilde quipped in a letter to Wemyss Reid: ‘artists have sex but art has none’ (Complete letters, 298).