“The garments we wear bare our secrets and betray us at every turn. I want to encourage us to put aside the distracting questions of what constitutes ‘fashion’ and move beyond the conventional discussions of identity, subcultures, and social history. What I have in mind is something more expansive and open than that: a kind of philosophy of dress. I want to suggest that in dress we might find a way of apprehending the world, understanding it as it is expressed in an idiom that is found everywhere, if only we care to read it.

“We are, everywhere, surrounded by ideas. For the most part, we unthinkingly suppose that they are found in the form of books and poems, visualized in buildings and paintings, exposited in philosophical propositions and mathematical deductions. Some ideas are born of dogged intellectual inquiry or diligent scientific discovery; they are taught in classrooms, a form of knowledge expressed in the mode of language, number, and diagram. But what if clothes could be understood as ideas too, as fully formed and eloquent as any poem, painting, or equation? What if in clothes the world could open up to us with the tug of a thread, its mysteries unraveling like the frayed edge of a sleeve? What if clothes were not simply reflective of personality, indicative of our banal preferences for grey over green, but more deeply imprinted with the ways human beings have lived, a material record of our experiences, and an expression of our ambition? Could it be possible to understand the world in firmer, felt truths, in the perfect geometry of a notched lapel, the orderly measures of a pleated skirt, the stilled, skin-warmed perfection of a circlet of pearls?

“For all the abstracted and elevated formulations of selfhood and the soul, interior life is so often clothed. Our memories tenaciously retain the texture and forms of dress. My own childhood replays itself as a jumble of sense impressions, often in the color and shape of clothes -- most unforgettably, an emerald green winter coat, fur-lined, hooded, and belted, worn to the circus one afternoon, its silhouette so perfect that every coat after is a vain attempt at recovering it, caught at like a dream. I remember that coat and I see myself in it as I was then: a childish body, unbruised and uncurbed. We outgrow clothes, of course, and yet they stay with us, as though their fibers were imperceptibly threaded into our memory, winding through our experience. But our clothes do more even than this, sometimes more than we can know.

“If through them we seek to declare our place in the world, our confidence and belonging, we do so under the veil of a deception. We select clothes painstakingly as though they didn’t ruthlessly appoint us, indifferent to our intentions and contrary to our will. Old, favored clothes can be loyal like lovers to our cause, while newer ones dazzle and deceive us. There is a naivete in the perilous ways that we trust in clothes because dress never promises to indemnify us, neither from external assault nor internal anguish. Skin turned to sunlight, some of us exult in exposure, as though unclothed we could be closer to truer, freer, more naked realities. E. M. Forster, misquoting Henry Thoreau, wryly cautions us to ‘Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.’ He has the slogan scrawled on a wardrobe belonging to the soulful George Emerson in A Room with a View (although there is another kind of closetedness we might read into Forster’s own Edwardian elegance too). Our clothes can also provide refuge, acting as a canopy under which we shelter our most secret agonies. When despair echoes deep inside, dress can help us pacify and dull pain; a blazer and slacks somehow allay our vulnerability. Yet to trust that our clothes will keep our secrets is a seduction in itself.

“Clothes can be the disguise in which we dissolve, the camouflage that allows us to keep something of ourselves in reserve, as though the only thing we are and own is that which we refuse to articulate in our outerwear. Or else they enable us to acknowledge our responsiveness to life, and we demonstrate it in the deft and quirky ways that we fix a belt, hang a tie, roll a sleeve. The clothes we love are like friends, they bear the softness of wear, skimming the various planes of our bodies, recalling the proportions that they seem almost to have learned by memory and habit. There are certain clothes that we long for and into which our limbs pour as soon as we find a private moment: the sweater in which you, at last, exhale at the close of day, the T-shirt that is the only thing pressed between you and your lover through the long hours of the night. We need not be the sort that wears our hearts on our sleeves for our clothes to already know everything we might say and many things for which we could never find words.”