An inventive recasting of dress in terms of anxiety and desire
A brilliant amalgam of psychoanalysis, literature, art and couture, The
Concise Dictionary of Dress is bestselling author and psychoanalyst
Adam Phillips and fashion curator Judith Clark's inventive recasting of
dress in terms of anxiety and desire. The book is structured as a
dictionary, but an unusual one: Each entry--for words including "armor,"
"brash," "comfortable," "conformist," "diaphanous," "essential,"
"fashionable," "loose," "measured," "plain," "provocative," "revealing,"
"sharp," "tight" and so on--is elucidated by a litany of highly
unconventional definitions. "Loose," for example, is defined as "1.
Never knowingly over-attached; a disappearing act. 2. A moveable feast;
not conforming to contour or arrangement; subject to influence and
gravity; seeking direction. 3. Of uncertain boundary." Phillips' entries
in The Concise Dictionary of Dress are paired with photographs of
installations that Clark created among the rolling racks, rambling
corridors and high-security vaults of the Victoria & Albert Museum's
vast reserve collections at Blythe House in west London. Cast objects
and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories and metaphors of
repression and ceremony continue the conversation. Phillips said that
viewing the works at Blythe House is "like looking up a word in a
dictionary and finding a picture instead of more words; it is not clear
whether the word and its definition are the caption, or vice versa."
Judith Clark is Reader in the field of Fashion and Museology at
London College of Fashion, where she is Director (with Amy de la Haye)
of M.A. Fashion Curation. Clark opened the first independent gallery of
dress (Judith Clark Costume Gallery) in 1998, and has since curated
major exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, ModeMuseum
in Antwerp, the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and Boijmans van Beuningen in
Rotterdam.
Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips is the author of 14 acclaimed
books, most recently Side Effects and On Kindness (written with the
historian Barbara Taylor). He is the editor of the New Penguin Freud
translations, and a regular reviewer for the London Review of Books.
Norbert Schoener is a German photographer and filmmaker, and the
author of The Order of Things. He has exhibited at White Cube, Comme
des Garçons and Chapman Fine Arts.
