Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Rags
By Anne Hollander
The Language of Clothes
by Alison Lurie, with illustrations assembled by Doris Palca
Random House, 273 pp., $20.00
The Fashionable Mind: Reflections on Fashion, 1970-1981
by Kennedy Fraser
Knopf, 270 pp., $14.50
Alison Lurie has speculated in some of her essays on the ways dress can be understood as a language, and she presumably intends to show how in The Language of Clothes. She begins, after a preliminary bow to semiology, by analogizing the parts of dress to the parts of speech and styles of dress to styles of utterance. In this vein she deals at length with clothing as it corresponds to verbal phenomena such as slang, cliché, polite formulas, insults, lies, expletives, and ritual speech, generally expanding the hackneyed term 'statement.' There is no end to the exfoliations of the theme: foreign languages and their fluent or inept use, foreign accents, stammering—Lurie sweeps over a broad range of spoken behavior, remarking on how it might be matched up with habits of dress. Fortunately, she is not entirely serious about all this—she does not really think ruffles are like adjectives—and she has another purpose in using the analogy. Indeed, her book is less and exploration of dress as a possible language than a very different kind of manifesto—it is an attempt to demonstrate the superiority of language to clothes.
Review, 3552 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |