Dressed

A fascinating cultural exploration of the layers of meaning inherent in the ways we dress ourselves, from Madonna's denim jacket and the paintings of Titian to Cary Grant's tailoring. If you think choosing what to wear is essentially a trivial activity, read this and you'll soon clothe your thoughts entirely differently.

Caroline Sanderson, Bookseller, Editor's Choice

[There are] many delectable facts waiting to be discovered in Shahidha Bari’s Dressed… Dressed is irresistible when Bari riffs with extraordinary breadth and depth on the cultural meanings of the items she describes… I put Dressed down having been dazzled by Bari’s learning and insights... In the end, Dressed is an argument for taking apparently frivolous things seriously... More than this, though, Bari communicates the joy and powerful sense of interconnected humanity clothes can bring."

Lucy Moore, Literary Review

[A] clever, subtle book… Although [Bari's] writing is critically informed…her tone is insistently personal, intimate even… Between her main chapters she drops in lyrical accounts of her own encounters with specific items of clothing… Bari wants us to think not so much about what clothes say as how they make us feel.

Kathryn Hughes, Guardian

Dressed is a feast of a book, a supreme example of the new kind of essay – exploratory, reflective, full of the personal energy of Shahidha Bari herself and also her wide knowledge.

Marina Warner

In Dressed Shahidha Bari offers up lively, entertaining and provocative readings of clothes in our daily lives and in culture more widely... Drawing on an impressive range of materials, Bari includes novels, short stories, fairy tales, films, photography and more in her analysis... Bari tells us throughout Dressed, we should look to embrace our personal style and give dress the attention it deserves.

Helen Saunders, Times Literary Supplement

Bari is attuned to how clothes feel, sound and smell, as well as how they look… [she] thinks collectively and in more sensorially rich ways about our imbrication with objects and with one another’s lives.

Lisa Cohen, London Review of Books

Bari’s investigation into how we construct our selves, individually and collectively, is a sensual and intellectual pleasure from start to finish.

Deborah Levy

A deeply original, compelling thinker and a brilliant writer. Dressed is the finest philosophy of clothes since Tomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in 1834. Bari’s writing is limpidly clear, informed by a rich literary knowledge, theoretically and historically informed, sensuous and deeply textured, like a piece of luxurious fabric. It is also funny. But make no mistake: this is a work of philosophy. It just happens to be about clothes.

Simon Critchley