[In the following excerpt, Harries compliments The Language of Clothes, arguing that Lurie's statements regarding clothing and dress are witty and authoritative.]

“Clothes hurt us”, writes Quentin Bell, “in a pecuniary, a physical, an aesthetic and frequently a moral sense; they are (very often) expensive, unhealthy, ugly and immodest.” From this perspective, the pursuit of fashion is an irrational activity—and an irresistible subject for analysis. Why do we dress as we do? …

Laying bare the subtext of popular culture has been Alison Lurie's speciality ever since she revealed that Rabbit and Owl were A. A. Milne's parents. And in The Language of Clothes (first published in 1981, now issued in a revised version by Bloomsbury), she is as insistent as [Colin] McDowell that there is more to clothes than meets the eye.

McDowell's argument is “deliberately discursive”. Alison Lurie's is an elegant, well-ordered, unified construct, a full-dress exposition of a single metaphor. Clothes, in her view, are a medium for unconscious communication, a language with its own vocabulary, grammar and syntax. We may “speak” with an accent or local dialect: rural British dress, for instance, she finds to be distinguished by its determination to harmonize with the surroundings. “Tweed and wool and homespun repeat the textures of grass and bark and leaf, while corduroy … mimics not only the feel of moss but the look of a ploughed field. These materials are made into baggy, rumpled, rounded garments that echo the uneven rounded shapes of the landscape—of bush, tree and hill.” Some scatter their sartorial speech with archaisms like the cravat and the embroidered waistcoat, with swear words and slang (the trainers below dress trousers), and with the occasional foreign expression to denote sophistication. Others are prone to impediments rooted in psychological disorder—the froth of frills and ribbons on a middle-aged bosom, corresponding to a childish lisp, or the repetitive stammer of a jacket worn week in, week out. Accessories may be viewed as the adverbs and adjectives of the language of dress—“modifiers in the sentence that is the total outfit”.

With wit and authority, Lurie sets out in sequence the ways in which our clothes reveal our status, occupation, sexual preferences, political opinions and geographical origins. After reading The Language of Clothes, one is nervous to walk down the street for fear of the barrage of information being transmitted by others. The wearing of fur, it seems, betrays a yearning for the brute strength of the animal who supplied it. Hence, perhaps, the fall from favour of Persian lamb? Think twice before you zip your handbag neatly, given that it is, like the muff, widely recognized as a symbol for the pudenda. …

Lurie concedes, grudgingly, that practical considerations—comfort, durability, availability and price—may enter into what people wear, in the case of less articulate dressers at least: “Especially in the case of persons of limited wardrobe an article may be worn because it is warm or rainproof … in the same way that persons of limited vocabulary use the phrase ‘you know’ or adjectives such as ‘great’ or ‘fantastic.’” …

Clothes may be donned out of joie de vivre, as well as in deference to bloodlust, capitalist imperatives, class warfare or the Zeitgeist. Then again, as Alison Lurie writes, “Thinking seriously about what we wear is like thinking seriously about what we say; it can only be done occasionally or we should find ourselves tongue-tied, unable to get dressed at all.”