Layer After Layer of Loving Devotion
My mother tells a story about wheeling me around in a supermarket shopping cart as a toddler, wearing so many...
Prose
How You Should Dress
Once, in early summer, after work I went to a house party where I did not know anyone very well....
Perfume Ladies
In comes the occasional man, too. But usually, there are just all these girls who all buy a bottle of...
Golden Girls: How South Asian Women Preserve Legacy Through Gold
Solid gold bangles, intricate tikkas encrusted in jewels, magnificent chokers covering the entirety of a woman’s neck — all of...
Expecting
It’s been a year since my first miscarriage, and the summer sales have returned. I buy a loose kaftan, I...
Blue Polyester Hug
Giving my grandfather a hug, even as an adult, was something I did almost every time we visited him for...
Beggars And Choosers
Carlo is concerned about his looks; it’s important to him how his ‘outer shell’ – his coat – appears. Decent...
What Fashion Is Not (Only)
Fashion is often characterised as a representation of society, its ‘most precise reflection.’ Yet, specular reflections are optical illusions based...
Moths
Next I take out my morning suit – made in 1938 by Airey and Wheeler of 129 Regent Street for...
The Clothes You Could Have Worn, The Lives You Could Have Lived
It is hard not to feel that for all its personal entangling, clothing is a social skin that is outside...
The Grey Agenda
Bolton and Browne are two of the most influential men in fashion today. Both of them are gay and both...
All The Ways Mascara Runs
What Erotic Thrillers Have to Tell Us About the Parallels Between Hedonism and Fear
Movies about sex are also movies about power; the way women in these films are dressed says something about the...