After a Fashion
‘Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden - what a sorry set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear!’ (Herman Melville). Here are some of our favourite books about clothes.
£12.99
Collected Tales
The acclaimed translating team conclude their selection of Gogol’s best short fiction with The Overcoat, in which Akaky Akakievich, an impov... See details
£11.99
The Thoughtful Dresser
Linda Grant is unapologetically passionate about clothes, and she writes about them with fierce intelligence and wit: ‘I consider it to be absolute... See details
£19.99
The Sartorialist
Fashion photographer Scott Schuman started his blog thesartorialist.com to bridge the gap between what he saw being worn in fashion shows and the c... See details
£7.99
Skin Lane
Neil Bartlett’s wonderfully creepy novel is set during the 1960s in London’s fur trade district near Cannon Street. Bartlett powerfully evokes the ... See details
£9.99
Sartor Resartus
In one of the 19th century’s strangest works of literature Carlyle impersonates the sceptical editor of the works of Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, philos... See details
£40.00
Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England
Few garments have survived from before the 18th Century. As a result, historians of dress and fashion have to rely on secondary evidence, chiefly f... See details
£18.99
Dressed in Fiction
Anne Hollander writes:
In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James’s del...
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£15.95
The Fashion System
For Barthes the fashion system is made up not of objects but of signs, and his analysis of the language of fashion magazines is one of the key text... See details
£15.99
Adorned in Dreams
When Adorned in Dreams was published Angela Carter described it as ‘The best [book] I have read on the subject, bar none’ (LRB 5 Dece... See details
£29.99
The Dress of the People
John Styles does for the poor what Aileen Ribeiro’s Fashion and Fiction does for the rich. Using an array of evidence, most strikingly the s... See details
£11.99
The Afghan Amulet
Embroidery expert Sheila Paine became intrigued by an amulet on an antique dress from a remote part of Pakistan, and armed only with a small rucksa... See details
£23.99
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
Adam Phillips writes:
The one thing we never know about people when we meet them is their history, but the one thing we cannot help kno...
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