SOURCE: Harries, Susie. “Performance Fashion.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4662 (7 August 1992): 10.

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...