The ObserverSociety books This article is more than 4 years oldReviewDressed: The Secret Life of Clothes by Shahidha Bari – review
This article is more than 4 years oldThere’s a gap for a smart book about our relationship to clothes, but sadly this isn’t itAs anyone who has ever seen me gazing at a rack of jumble-sale silk scarves will know, I’m not someone who thinks it’s stupid to take clothes seriously. When we get dressed, we tell people all sorts of things about ourselves, some obvious and some more tenderly private. And yet our sartorial semaphore receives little close attention. Writing about clothes generally means fashion writing – and fashion writing, whose engine is commerce, cares mostly for novelty. It understands – or assumes – that you might want this season’s dress. But it isn’t really interested in emotions that run deeper than covetousness and vanity; in the pain you still feel across your heart, say, when you remember your grandmother’s evening bag, left in a taxi when your mind and hands were elsewhere.
Shahidha Bari’s Dressed, then, should have been purest catnip for me, the kind of book I’ve longed for half my life. Its high-minded intentions are obvious even before you open it: thanks to her publisher, which has been generous, it is more than elegant enough to inhabit one of those fashion emporiums for the thinking woman where hardbacks slyly cosy up to the latest trainers and piles of white T-shirts. In her introduction, moreover, Bari makes some pretty grand claims, writing that she would like to put aside the “distracting questions” of what constitutes fashion, replacing them with what she calls “a kind of philosophy of dress”. For her, there exists the possibility that clothes can be understood as “ideas”, and that in their comprehension it might be possible to understand the world “in firmer, felt truths”.
Her voice is entirely unmodulated, her words steadily piling up, like balled tights in a crowded sock drawerOne gathers, reading on, that she is not talking here about control pants. But what is she talking about, exactly? To be truthful, I am unable to summarise her arguments for the simple reason that I’m not sure she has any. Her book consists largely of long, rather overworked accounts of paintings, films and novels in which certain clothes appear – the dress worn by Ariadne as imagined by Titian, say, or the suits favoured by Patrick Bateman in American Psycho – which are then analysed with recourse to, among others, Roland Barthes, Hélène Cixous, Derrida and Freud. On and on this goes to the point where you barely widen your eyes, let alone snigger, when a ballet dancer’s pointe is described as “a phallus, a quivering responsiveness… ever erect” by one of the sources cited in the book, the critic Susan Leigh Foster. (See also: the handbag as a womb.)
I suppose there are people who are still in thrall to this sort of thing; it’s not Bari’s fault that I cured myself of literary theory long ago – though it would be tricky even to parody what she has to say, in the section devoted to bags, about secrets (“When we decide to reserve our secrets for ourselves, turning to taciturnity, we hold something back, keep it even…”). But my real problem with Dressed hasn’t to do with its thinking. It’s more a matter of tone. Sometimes, we get a glimpse of the richer, more exciting book it might have been: when Bari describes the “beastly” origins of muslin, say, which was traditionally carded from cotton plants using the jawbone of a catfish, or when she reminds us of what Simone de Beauvoir said in The Second Sex about adolescent girls (“torn between the wish and the refusal to display”). For the most part, however, Bari is interested neither in history, nor in talking to other people (she has, so far as I can see, done no interviews at all). Her voice is entirely unmodulated, her words steadily piling up, like balled tights in a crowded sock drawer.
She never makes jokes, nor is she moved to anger, not even when talking about the more grotesque designs of Alexander McQueen; the snippets of memoir she serves up at the beginning of each chapter are smaller than Lucy Locket’s pocket, and so coy that I am still not sure they are memoir. She is seemingly as afraid of judgment as she is of questions of taste and class – aspects of clothes that seem unignorable and vital to me. I understand that she isn’t interested in fashion, per se. But still, Diana Vreeland, a dash of whose daffy wit she could really use sometimes, and even that great genius Balenciaga, make not a single appearance between them. The search for a smart book about clothes, I’m afraid, goes on.
This article was amended on 10 June 2019 to clarify that it was a source cited in the book, not Bari, who wrote the description, quoted in this review, of a ballet dancer’s pointe.
Dressed: The Secret Life of Clothes by Shahidha Bari is published by Jonathan Cape (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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