Narrative Thread

Our clothes are some of our most emotionally charged possessions. Sometimes we hold onto them for obvious reasons – the wedding dress you will almost certainly never fit into again, or the favorite alpaca overcoat you inherited from a parent, still imprinted with the faint smell of a long-discontinued fragrance. At other times clothes take root in our lives in different ways, from less obvious paths, yet you still can't part with them. Sometimes, as a result, without our quite realizing it, a 'wardrobe' becomes a 'collection'. Mark C. O'Flaherty draws together conversations around collecting fashion from those 'collectors' whose passion for clothes developed into something deeply significant in their lives, with commentary by three leading scholars in the fashion world, on fashion and identity, design and memory. The result is a unique contribution to our understanding of fashion; it tells us the stories behind the clothes from our past and how they shape our present and future. It's about what we hold on to and why, and how those garments tell us and others who we are. It is also a fascinating, close-up investigation of a wide range of designers' garments. With never-before-seen images of rare designs from their private collections, Narrative Thread gives us access to these visually stunning, eclectic examples of influential fashion design, worn by key individuals, allowing up-close and detailed analysis of the objects and, at the same time, allowing insight into the narratives they create for their owners and those created by their designers. Bringing together the otherwise divided fields of material, object-centered approaches to fashion, and social, historical and cultural approaches, Narrative Thread offers an invaluable resource for an understanding of fashion's past and present – and its importance in our lives.