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Dressed : the secret life of clothes

Bari, Shahidha K.2019

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Summary

Some of us love clothes. We collect them, clamour over them, and use them to express our identity and individuality. For others, clothes are a uniform that barely warrant a thought. But for all of us, clothes matter. They carry memory and meaning. They bear the invisible record of our internal lives as well as the chain of human hands that made them. Shahidha Bari reveals the secret language of our clothes. She asks us to look beyond superficial questions of fashion to explore what we mean by the garments we wear, and the ways that our clothes can, by turns, declare and deny who we are. By encouraging us to see that clothes matter, Shahidha Bari also forces us to rethink our relationship to dress for a more sustainable future. Ranging freely through literature, art, history and philosophy, Dressed tracks the hidden place of clothes in our culture and our everyday 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. Dressed is not a book about clothes as fashion objects or as a means of self-expression. At its heart, it is a book about the bigger philosophical questions of who we are, and how we see ourselves and our place in the world.