Women in Clothes

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives.

It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations.

Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

• ISBN10: 0399166564
• ISBN13: 9780399166563
• Publish Date: 4 September 2014
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Out of Print: 30 June 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: Riverhead Books,U.S.
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 528
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780399166563

Reviews

[clementine]

I think I'll have to do a full review of this on my blog; there's just so much to talk about. I really loved it. The way it was organized worked so well for me: it wasn't just survey response after survey response. It was a bit haphazard. There'd be one person's story about a certain garment, then an interview with someone, then one question and a bunch of different women's answers, then a poem, then some sort of visual component. Some things were recurring, but there were a lot of one-off moments too, like when one of the authors and a scent scientist went to a coat check room and smelled people's coats. I think if it had just been a lot of interviews it wouldn't have been so engaging or easy to read quickly. The structure of it worked for me. It was hard to get bored because there was always something new.

There was a certain diversity and a certain lack of diversity. I liked that there were women of different cultural backgrounds and that there were several interviews with sweatshop workers. There were lots of different ages presented, as well. I felt that the book was lacking diversity in terms of sexual orientation (there were a few non-straight women featured, but I think there could have been more, and more exploration of what it means to dress outside of a heteronormative context), and most of them seemed to be fairly well-off. And so many of them were writers or other creatives. This makes sense in one way; people who are creative may be more likely to care about their appearance. And the writer types certainly had a lot of very interesting, lucid things to say about their clothes. But I would have liked more everyday women to be featured!

That said, I did still love this. It's a beautiful book. I loved the formatting, the thickness of the paper, the cover design, the visuals. I LOVED that the methodology was laid out. I enjoyed that the three creators' voices were present throughout the book, guiding and shaping it, but that there were so many other women represented. I really loved some of the more provocative content that was included. One of my favourite pieces was by a conservative Muslim woman who was very critical of fashion, makeup, even nail polish. It's not a popular opinion in Western culture and was pretty much opposite to what all of the other featured women wrote about their relationships to clothes, but I'm so glad that this dissenting opinion was included. I don't entirely disagree with it, in fact.

It's a very smart and artistic book - it's not a how-to guide. It's more of a (pop) sociology text. Obviously I love taking things that are seen as frivolous and looking at them in a more serious and intelligent away, treating them as though they are important (because they are!) and examining their roles in everyday life. So I suppose I was predisposed to like this book anyway. Yes, it did have its issues, and yes, some of the features were more interesting than others, but when I look at it as a whole, I just really, really like it.