Lucy Moore
You Are What You Wear
Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes
By Shahidha Bari
Jonathan Cape 320pp £25 order from our bookshop
A telling French phrase to describe a girl who has lost her virginity is elle a vu le loup (‘she has seen the wolf’). This is just one of the many delectable facts waiting to be discovered in Shahidha Bari’s Dressed. It comes as part of a discussion about Little Red Riding Hood in a chapter entitled ‘Fur, Feathers and Skin’. To give a sense of Bari’s cultural range, her other reference points include Anna Karenina’s fur cloak, Rubens’s sexy Helena Fourment in a Fur Wrap (with asides on how Titian and El Greco handled similar subjects), Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, the 1925 film Joyless Street, in which the young Greta Garbo is caught between poverty and prostitution, and Angela Carter’s dark and glittering fairy tales. (I was sorry there was no mention of Meret Oppenheim’s erotically surrealist fur cup and saucer, or of Roald Dahl’s bewitching reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood as an avaricious prepubescent assassin.)
In Dressed, Bari, a cultural historian, tackles an immense subject: the clothes we choose to wear and why and how we wear them. As she puts it in her introduction, ‘Clothes tell our stories, some that we would rather not tell, others that we hardly know ourselves.’ The book is
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The day Simon and I Vespa-d from Daunt to Daunt to John Sandoe to Hatchards to Goldsboro, places where many of the booksellers have become my friends over the years, was the one with the high puffy clouds, the very strong breeze, the cool-warm sunlight.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa
Some salient thoughts on book collecting from Michael Dirda with a semi tragic conclusion that I suspect many of us can relate to from the @Lit_Review #WednesdayMotivation
Sign up to our newsletter! Get free articles, selections from the archive, subscription offers and competitions delivered straight to your inbox.
http://ow.ly/zZcW50JfgN5