While I was in Arizona I read Linda Grant’s The Thoughtful Dresser . Actually, devoured is probably a better word than read, and that was followed by my mother’s devouring of the book, and plenty of discussions, readings out loud of key passages, etc… Basically, it is the best non-fiction novel about fashion in the entire world. So all of my fashion-loving readers, those of you that don’t have it, go and buy it. Borrow it from the library. Tell your Mom to buy it, and share it with her. Nominate it for your book clubs. Do whatever it takes, but read this book. (And a special little note to all of my over 50 readers, yes, I know all about you ladies, and I am telling you that this book is an absolute must-read.)

The full title of the book is The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter. It reads like a really long, interesting newspaper article, and Grant’s stories are so incredibly close to my life, my mother’s life, in fact, any woman’s life. It is a well-written exploration and analysis of the fashion scenarios we all face on a regular basis.

Here’s the blurb about the book, from Amazon.

““You can’t have depths without surfaces,” says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book, The Thoughtful Dresser, a thinking woman’s guide to what we wear. For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are. How we look and what we wear tells a story. Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility. Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany. The Thoughtful Dresser celebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.”

My mother and I were incredibly cheesy during our holiday in Arizona and we chose to read each other passages aloud from the book, even though we’d both read it. Some related to her and her mother (the author appears to be the same age as my mother), others to our views on fashion and shopping, and the emotions surrounding clothes.

I am probably risking some copyright infringement here, but I need to share some passages from the book with you all. Read this quickly in case I get asked to take it down! Originally I bookmarked about 30 pages from the book that I felt I HAD to share with my readers, but now it is reduced to much less than that, for copyright reasons, and also because you should all just go and get the book yourself.

The first is a passage about shopping. Whether it is about a coat, a pair of shoes, or a ring, I am sure everyone has had a similar experience to this, and I love how Grant has so beautifully articulated how we all feel when we find the perfect garment and it is way out of our price range.

“There are two ways of shopping. One is a mission expedition, the search for the scarf with a bit of red in it to go with the navy linen jacket. Or a new winter coat [...] The second is [...] not actually shopping at all, but an exercise in pleasure in self-education, just to see what is in the shops.

The mission shop is a military exercise. Suppose one has as the aim the purchase of a winter coat, which, one decided, will not be black but a colour. The expedition involves a survey of the winter coats and their styles this season, the length, the arrangement of the buttons [...] Then, having arrived at what color you’re looking for – say a deep chocolate brown – you start to try on coats.

It is axiomatic that the coat which is the right chocolate brown and the right style and the right length and which fits like a glove will be by Armani and costs £1,500. Everything now descends in increasingly depressing order from that utopian perfection which you cannot afford. It has established itself as the Platonic ideal of coats for which you will spend the rest of your week (or perhaps your life) searching.”

Grant’s thoughts on sexiness:

“When we dress to feel sexy, as opposed to to dressing to look sexy, we’re doing something so complicated I can’t even begin to understand it, and perhaps only a psychoanalyst could. We are going with our instincts, [...]

It is not the dress that is sexy, it is the person in the dress. Whatever she wears, Victoria Beckham is not sexy. Whatever she wears, Scarlett Johansson always is. And so is Helen Mirren. These are ineluctable facts.”

Helen Mirren, left, is sexy. Victoria Beckham, right, is not.

A lovely story about why it is important to take care of your clothes:

“A friend told me that as a child she had been forced to listen to a bedtime story, a cautionary tale about a little girl who did not look after her clothes, and feeling neglected and unloved, they ran away while she was asleep and went to live in the wardrobe of another, tidier child. You could give a child nightmares with this scenario.”

Grant on her mother’s style:

“[My mother's] generation, at least the women who liked clothes and fashion, deplored sloppiness of any kind. They worked ladylike chic for all it was worth. You would not see my parents on their annual trip to London dressed in windbreakers, shorts, and huge shoes with velcro tabs, heaving backpacks, like a party of mature anthropologists on a field trip.”

Just reading that passage send shivers down my spine…there is nothing I hate more than tourists in big cities dressed like they are about to climb a mountain.

And lastly, a very interesting passage about fashion and 9/11.

“…if there was ever an indictment of the vacuity of the fashionable mind and its stubborn (occasionally heroic) insistence on ignoring reality, it was the revelation that on September 11 the Yves Saint Laurent store on Madison Avenue, which had just taken delivery of its $2,500 purple gypsy peasant blouse with puff sleeves, received over forty calls to find out if they were still open and if the blouse was available.”

Now, I am sure my regular readers all know that I rarely say “You MUST buy this…” but in this scenario I must insist that you all try to get your hands on this book. (I should note here that I will in no way profit from sales of this book or anything like that…I don’t know Linda Grant, although I hope to soon, as I have already sent her a love letter about how much I adore her book.)

Go forth and read! You won’t be disappointed, this is the most beautiful tale of fashion, clothing, style, and the emotions they evoke. Here’s the Amazon link to purchase the book.

Title quote from The Thoughtful Dresser.