Volume 25, Number 19 · December 7, 1978
From Rags to Rags
By Alison Lurie
The Woman's Dress for Success Book
by John T. Molloy
Warner Books, 187 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Seeing Through Clothes
by Anne Hollander
Viking, 504 pp., $25.00
In Fashion: Dress in the Twentieth Century
by Prudence Glynn, illustrated by Madeleine Ginsburg
Oxford University Press, 243 pp., $19.95
Mirror, Mirror: A Social History of Fashion
by Michael Batterberry, by Ariane Batterberry
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 400 pp., $29.95
Avedon: Photographs 1947-1977
with an essay by Harold Brodkey
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, unpaged pp., $50.00
As semiotics becomes fashionable, more and more writers tell us that fashion is semiotic—a language of signs. No one has yet provided the structuralist grammar of clothing I suggested in this magazine two years ago,[1] or even a serious study of a single dialect. There are, of course, plenty of dictionaries of a practical, indeed a materialistic kind. For over a hundred years at least books and magazines have been busy translating the current language of fashion, telling women what to wear to seem simultaneously sexy, proper, rich, and beautiful.
Review, 4465 words
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