Welcome to the latest edition of Looks from Books, which aims to prove that you can look smart, while still being book-smart, too. Fashion inspiration can be found between the pages of your favorite stories, on well-designed book covers, and in your favorite characters… if you read closely enough.

Summer still remains the perfect time of year to run around in tee shirts and shorts, go on adventures, and try exciting new things – just like you did when you were a kid. Inspired by this “ageless” season, we’ve turned to the pages of one of our favorite children’s stories for a similar bit of inspiration… J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan!

A vintage cover of the original printing of Peter and Wendy as a novel, via Amazon

Table of Contents

Inside Cover

Peter Pan, the character, was created by Sir James M. Barrie, in the earliest years of the 20th century.

Peter Pan made his first appearance in a section of Barrie’s novel The Little White Bird, which was published in 1902, and written for adult readers. However, after the success of his 1904 stage play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Would Never Grow Up, starring the same character, Barrie published the work in a novel adaptation, titledPeter and Wendy, in 1911.

As lore would have it, the inspiration for the character of Peter Pan hit close to home for Barrie. The idea of a boy who would never age, and would be forever separated from his mother, grew from the death of Barrie’s older brother (and his mother’s favorite) in an accident on the ice, the day before the boy would turn 14.

The basis for the attitude and dynamics of the champion of youth and his associates, the Lost Boys, grew from a young family of boys, the Davies children, to whom Barrie told the first stories of Peter.