When We Dream About Clothes
On a recent Saturday morning, I dream about clothes. On a single rack in a sparse space hang voluminous skirts...
Prose
Fifty Shades Of Matte Gray
Recently, the trend on Sean Cody is flat-fronted shorts and soft, monochrome shirts. The clothes match the sets, which are...
From Style Icon to Fashion Victim
Masculinity and Spectacle in the James Bond franchise
In a new millennium, Bond is faced with many difficult tasks; these have included parachuting into the London Olympics beside...
To Cap It All
In 1977 I bought my first flat cloth cap – in navy cotton twill with leather detailing on each of...
Putting On a Zoot Suit
The zoot suit was an icon of its time, born from the bespoke draped silhouettes of London’s Savile Row in...
Self-Fashioning as Resistance
The wakashu, traditionally played by teenage boys, represented a specific subculture within Edo Japan. Wakashu are described by kabuki scholar...
Trousers & The Most Precious Ornament
A man in his own clothes is as much sexless as possible. He shaves his face so that, if he...
Covering Women on the Beach
When the burkini appeared in the news a decade ago, it carried with it a dense web of historical associations,...
Dressing like a Gypsy
The Gypsy costume that won me prizes in school carnivals in the late 1970s and early 1980s had little to...
Alice ’71 in Wonderland
Two years after the Paris 1968 student riots, Parisian couturier Jacques Esterel launched a timely couture collection for men and...
Cult Status
In March 1997 thirty-nine people were found dead in a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, an upscale suburb of...
The Face of Death
In his 1946 Theses Against Occultism, Adorno addressed the swiftness with which occultism, when translated onto the political stage, could...