Docile Bodies
Prison Uniforms and the Dress of Subservience
Prison literature and theory often focuses on the oppressiveness of the system, the callous discipline enforced on the prisoner, the...
Prose
The Clothes horse
The transition to motherhood, it seems, provokes a certain pragmatism in a once-wild woman. Her jewellery? Banished, since the delicate...
Beggars And Choosers
Carlo is concerned about his looks; it’s important to him how his ‘outer shell’ – his coat – appears. Decent...
DRESSING WITH MOTHERS
As daughters, we are privy to a deeply intimate space: a space where our mothers could be themselves, where they...
Adjust, Comply, Recalculate
The sweater promised 100% cashmere. The receipt said 29.9% APR. Both felt soft at first.
Expecting
It’s been a year since my first miscarriage, and the summer sales have returned. I buy a loose kaftan, I...
Losing Control
The Nineteenth-Century Beard Movement in Europe and North America
Viewed from a distance of more than a century, the nineteenth-century beard fashion looks like a basic historical fact. And...
Old Teen
Threva Throneberry pretended for over a decade to be fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen. She presented herself as a fresh-faced, pigtailed...
Joan Crawford’s Mouth
To age in public for a woman is, despite all woke societal efforts to the contrary, still hell; to age...
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...
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...
Magic Carpet Ride
‘There is almost like a desire to distract you,’ said the Turner prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price about the carpets in...