The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter

"You can't have depths without surfaces," says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book, The Thoughtful Dresser, a thinking woman's guide to what we wear. For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are. How we look and what we wear tells a story. Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility. Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany.

The Thoughtful Dresser celebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.

"You can't have depths without surfaces," says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book, The Thoughtful Dresser, a thinking woman's guide to what we wear. For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are. How we look and what we wear tells a story. Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility. Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany.

The Thoughtful Dresser celebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Grant begins with a question: what kind of person arrives at Auschwitz with a pair of red high heels? A single such shoe now lives in the museum's famous pile, among thousands of drab others. But this fascinating query gets left behind in favor of occasionally perspicacious, more often rambling musings on why what we put on our bodies counts. "Only babies don't worry about what they look like," she writes, "and only because no one has yet shown them a mirror." In between the usual points about identity (we dress to project who we wish we were) and pleasure (ornamenting ourselves is an ancient, joyful pastime for both sexes), Grant sharply defends her interest.

Anyone claiming fashion to be the purest sort of frippery belies a misogynist agenda. Rather, various trends helped women achieve independence -- the frame leather handbag, for example, allowed nineteenth-century ladies to be out of the house for great lengths of time. Because these arguments have appeared elsewhere, Grant frequently resorts to reminiscences about her mother's champion shopping skills, as well as her own forays into vintage, modish minis, and, now, expensive labels. Changing styles not only mark time and help us hide its ravages but also satisfy an innate desire for the new. If asked, she'd probably argue that the identity of the concentration camp prisoner makes no difference, because we already know the fundamentals: she liked shoes, she sometimes felt carefree, she was one of us. As with a catalog, this blog-turned-book is best thumbed through. Whether you buy depends on what you have at home.

--Jessica Allen

Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for the Art of Reportage in 2006. Her most recent novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. She writes for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Vogue.