Home > Work > The Thoughtful Dresser
1 " Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. "
― Linda Grant , The Thoughtful Dresser
2 " Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb to your deathbed. "
3 " If you want to understand the life of a foreign city, how people go about their day-to-day business, what they buy and what they look like, go to the supermarket. I rarely have the need to purchase a box of breakfast cereal or a loaf of bread while abroad, but watching others do it tells me more about a place than being led around in a crocodile behind a tour guide’s umbrella. "
4 " At the core of misogyny is this paradigm: that men judge women by how they look, their physical beauty and its adornment by dress, while characterising the need to look beautiful as concrete evidence of female triviality. "
5 " Was it funny or sad that she was making a friend out of a jacket or a pair of shoes? When I mentioned it to someone else, who had also made a life-changing move some years earlier, she understood at once. For she felt that the clothes she brought with her were her only constants: the clothes were what she could depend on when everything else was in a state of flux. They were familiar objects from the past, reliably transported into the present, across time and space. And the new clothes she bought were her companions. "
6 " Clothes as text, clothes as narration, clothes as a story. Clothes as the story of our lives. And if you were to gather together all the clothes you have ever owned in all your life, each baby shoe and winter coat and wedding dress, you would have your own autobiography. You could wear, once more, your own life in all its stages, from whatever they wrapped you in when you emerged from the dark red naked warmth of the womb, to your deathbed. As if the textile itself has memory, formed as it does out of its intimate closeness with our bodies, a coat or a dress or a pair of trousers is a witness to the fact that once we went for a job interview, or on a hot date. Or that we got married. The dress was there with us, it’s proof of who we once were. The clothes we wear, they comfort and protect us; they allow us to be who we want to be. "
