Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes

by Shahidha Bari

Genres: Fashion, Non-fiction
Pages: 312
Rating:

Synopsis:

We are all dressed. But how often do we pause to think about the place of our clothes in our lives? What unconscious thoughts do we express when we dress every day? Can memories, meaning and ideas be wrapped up in a winter coat?

These are the questions that interest Shahidha Bari, as she explores the secret language of our clothes. Ranging freely through literature, art, film and philosophy, Dressed tracks the hidden power of clothes in our culture and our daily lives. From the depredations of violence and ageing to our longing for freedom, love and privacy, from the objectification of women to the crisis of masculinity, each garment exposes a fresh dilemma. Item by item, the story of ourselves unravels.

Evocative, enlightening and dazzlingly original, Dressed is not just about clothes as objects of fashion or as a means of self-expression. This is a book about the deepest philosophical questions of who we are, how we see ourselves and how we dress to face the world.

Sadly, Shahidha Bari’s Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes (as it said on my cover) is perhaps more accurately described by the alternative title, Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes. I probably wouldn’t have picked it up under the latter title, and predictably I didn’t love what I ended up skimming of this: pretentious, full of stuff like “the folds in clothes are symbolic vaginas, obviously” (differently put, but that’s the gist), and prone to gender essentialism. There’s a lot along the lines of how every woman knows what she means when she talks about that special dress that blahblahblahblahblah.

Boring, and then she went ahead and described a trans girl character from a movie… using male pronouns throughout…

I never really understood what Bari meant about writing about a philosophy of clothes that goes beyond how they shape and project identity, because she didn’t seem to get there to me, and I couldn’t be excited or engaged by her prose. Better luck somewhere else.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)