Shahidha Bari explores one of our most intense, but often secret relationships- with our clothes. Dressed is an evocative, ingenious and daringly original exploration of the hidden links between what we wear and who we are.
Shahidha Bari is a writer, academic and broadcaster working in the fields of literature, philosophy and art. Born in 1980, she studied at Cambridge and Cornell. She was one of the first ever BBC Radio 3 New Generation Thinkers (2011) and a winner of the Observer/Anthony Burgess Prize for Arts Journalism (2015). She teaches cultural theory at the University of London and is a Fellow of the Forum for Philosophy at the LSE. She writes for the Financial Times, Guardian and Frieze among other newspapers and journals. She features frequently on BBC Radio 4, and presents BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas programme Free Thinking. She lives in London.
Bari’s investigation into how we construct our selves, individually
and collectively, is a sensual and intellectual pleasure from start
to finish.
*Deborah Levy*
A deeply original, compelling thinker and a brilliant writer.
Dressed is the finest philosophy of clothes since Tomas Carlyle’s
Sartor Resartus in 1834. Bari’s writing is limpidly clear, informed
by a rich literary knowledge, theoretically and historically
informed, sensuous and deeply textured, like a piece of luxurious
fabric. It is also funny. But make no mistake: this is a work of
philosophy. It just happens to be about clothes.
*Simon Critchley*
Dressed is a feast of a book, a supreme example of the new kind of
essay – exploratory, reflective, full of the personal energy of
Shahidha Bari herself and also her wide knowledge.
*Marina Warner*
[A] clever, subtle book… Although [Bari's] writing is critically
informed…her tone is insistently personal, intimate even… Between
her main chapters she drops in lyrical accounts of her own
encounters with specific items of clothing… Bari wants us to think
not so much about what clothes say as how they make us feel.
*Guardian*
[There are] many delectable facts waiting to be discovered in
Shahidha Bari’s Dressed… Dressed is irresistible when Bari riffs
with extraordinary breadth and depth on the cultural meanings of
the items she describes… I put Dressed down having been dazzled by
Bari’s learning and insights... In the end, Dressed is an argument
for taking apparently frivolous things seriously... More than this,
though, Bari communicates the joy and powerful sense of
interconnected humanity clothes can bring.”
*Literary Review*
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