Linda Grant: The Thoughtful Dresser

Sybarite

Reader
Novelist Linda Grant doesn't claim to be a stylist or even a fashion buff. What she enjoys, she explains, are good clothes. And shoes. And handbags.

So what she has set out to do in her new book is to explore why clothes are important ? and why making an effort to think about how we dress is not wasted time.

This accessible ? and in places very, very funny ? book is not what you'd call a work of scholarly rigour, but Grant still manages to get across a number of messages with enjoyable ease.

She illustrates, with just a cursory look at the distant past, how humans have always cared about how they look ? about how they present themselves, from the earliest adornments and tattoos. Which, as she points out, makes a nonsense of the view that fashion is only a product of capitalism and consumerism, and that shallow women are just manipulated into contemplating matters sartorial.

She also illustrates the inherent misogyny in the view that thinking or talking about clothes is an indicator of vapidity. Men base so many of their responses to women on how women look, and criticise them if they don?t look 'good', but also criticise the time they spend achieving that look.

As Grant points out, we have to wear clothes: a man begging on the street might have plenty of people pass by and ignore him. But if he's naked, the police will turn up pretty quickly and take him away. Clothes, in our society, are not an option. It might sound howlingly obvious, but if that's the case, why do some people consider it to be an indicator of a weak mind ? or a capitalist plot ? when people enjoy thinking about clothes, shopping and dressing?

Why, for instance, is shopping derided more than, say, watching football or playing dangerous sports or playing shoot-em-ups on a computer ? or any other predominantly male form of pleasure?

Grant rails against clothing being limited to the strictly utilitarian, and peppers the book with anecdotes about her own mother ? the daughter of immigrants ? who understood the way clothing could be used to help fit in. And there is a series of interviews with Canadian style doyen Catherine Hill, an Auschwitz survivor whose teenage life was possibly saved by a moment of old-fashioned, female vanity.

The point that, in the 19th century, department stores were a new and liberating place for women, where they could go unchaperoned, is made too (see Zola's The Ladies' Paradise). And how new designs (by designers, thus stressing the importance of designers) for shoes and dresses also helped in the process of liberating women (from corsets etc).

We read how Coco Chanel created the timeless little black dress as long ago as 1926, and how, in the aftermath of WWII, women swooned for Christian Dior?s beautiful New Look.

Grant is quite clear that fashion ? in terms of the catwalks etc ? is not 'real' clothing, but a form of art, and every bit as valid as a painting or a piece of music. However, she also believes that our innate desire to look aesthetically good ? to be attractive ? is "irrational".

But that begs the question of whether art in general is irrational ? indeed, whether it's irrational to consider aesthetics in anything that could be strictly utilitarian (architecture, for instance). And unless you think it is, then it's difficult to conclude that clothing should adhere to a different ethos.

Grant ends with the story of a single red, high-heeled, patent shoe that she spotted on the top of a display of shoes at Auschwitz, where they'd been stolen from owners who were mostly destined for the gas chamber.

She dares us to denigrate the unknown victim of the Holocaust who had worn or carried with her on that final journey, shoes that she loved.

And she leaves us with a challenge ? to live and to make the most of it. Including in the enjoyment of what we wear.

This feels a little like Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion: as he was eventually provoked by fundamentalists into writing, so Grant has been poked with a stick by those (including women) who pour derision on others for taking care over what they wear.

And while it doesn't have quite the force of Dawkins's work, it?s an enjoyable, interesting and welcome rebuttal to a particular attitude and critique.
 

Beth

Reader
The thoughtful reviewer. Thanks, Sybarite, for this.

Sybarite said:
She illustrates, with just a cursory look at the distant past, how humans have always cared about how they look ? about how they present themselves, from the earliest adornments and tattoos. Which, as she points out, makes a nonsense of the view that fashion is only a product of capitalism and consumerism, and that shallow women are just manipulated into contemplating matters sartorial.

She also illustrates the inherent misogyny in the view that thinking or talking about clothes is an indicator of vapidity. Men base so many of their responses to women on how women look, and criticise them if they don?t look 'good', but also criticise the time they spend achieving that look.

Touch
 
Interesting points, some of which I believe Linda Grant may have tried to make with her Booker shortlisted The Clothes on their Backs. Unfortunately, for me, putting so much emphasis on the clothes the characters wore was the least appealing aspect of the book.
 

Sybarite

Reader
Thank you both, ladies.

Colette, I think that this book grew, in part, out of The Clothes on Their Backs, and that she found that she wanted to explore the issue even more than she had been able to in that fictional form.

There is much that is fascinating, but one of the things that she didn't discuss in the book was female sexuality. We seem so afraid to admit, these days, that women are sexual beings and that they want to attract lovers. Given the whole existence of 'lipstick lesbians', this isn't just about dressing to attract men either.

Coincidentally, I've been having some lengthy discussions with my new editor recently about this whole issue (which was why, when I saw it advertised, I bought the Grant book). Both of us feel that many of those who say that women shouldn't think about dress etc etc want to quash female sexuality; want to deny it, indeed, and supress it. It's like a new form of puritanism. And one of things that annoys me personally is those other women who put down their sisters who do enjoy shopping, clothes etc, suggesting that attire should be nothing more than utilitarian. It's no less a form of repression than if men insist that a woman has to dress a certain way. It's simply a different side of the same coin.

Incidentally, Grant does also touch on the idea of self creation and how clothes are just one of the ways in which we make ourselves, which itself is something that interests me in terms of what might even be viewed as degrees of human self-awareness.
 

Beth

Reader
And one of things that annoys me personally is those other women who put down their sisters who do enjoy shopping, clothes etc, suggesting that attire should be nothing more than utilitarian. It's no less a form of repression than if men insist that a woman has to dress a certain way. It's simply a different side of the same coin.

Incidentally, Grant does also touch on the idea of self creation and how clothes are just one of the ways in which we make ourselves, which itself is something that interests me in terms of what might even be viewed as degrees of human self-awareness.

Guilty of the first paragraph, working to better understand the second paragraph so as to not continue with the behaviors in the first. I haven't so much put down as patronize and poo poo while luxuriating in the textures and colors of my own clothes. They don't jump off of the store hanger. I have to spend time trying things on, what not. And it's mostly a pleasure. Maybe it's just the element of giggling girlhood which says that choosing clothes is all about attracting a lover. It's really so much more, like you write above, a way of self-invention, expression, art. My closest friend is a fashionista. She's nothing near vapid. She's creative, always easy in what she wears, always stylish, and comfortable. I think I'll buy her this book!
 
I seem to be more into buying books than clothes these days (a sign of age for me, I think), but I don't recall any put-downs from women for my clothes buying sprees. Jokes, yes (I was excessive) but not put-downs. Maybe it's just how I took it!
 
G

gumbowriters

Guest
Linda Grant's book is stuffed with fashion heroes and heroines - Christian Dior, Coco Chanel, Scarlett Johansson (‘always sexy'), Helen Mirren (ditto) . But one of her greatest passions is for the revolutionary early-20th-century couturier Paul Poiret - ‘the forgotten genius who almost single-handedly liberated women from the Victorian corset'.
 
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