The Concise Dictionary of Dress

內容簡介

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In this collaboration between a psychoanalyst and a costume curator,Adam Phillips re-describes dress in terms of anxiety, wish and desire.His definitions for words we associate with fashion and appearance are paired with installations by Judith Clark secreted amongst the Victoria & Albert's vast reserve collections at Blythe House in west London.In this deeply idiosyncratic book, says Phillips, 『a dictionary of language and installation plays off information against evocation,getting it right against the gorgeous eccentricity of personal association'. Offering multiple definitions for each word, Phillips broadens the scope for our interpretation and questions the precise nature of what indeed constitutes a definition. And in his lengthy introduction to this book, Phillips also assesses what dictionaries are, how we use them and why they matter. Clark herself presents a written analysis of her installations in answers to questions posed anonymously to her by authorities in fields as varied as cultural
theory, fashion history, arts curation, neuroscience and psychogeography.
In addition to the texts by Phillips and Clark and a catalogue of the works exhibited, The Concise Dictionary of Dress replicates the visitor's hour-long journey through Blythe House in a book-length photo-essay, a personal tour that is as individual in its perspective as the work itself.

About The Author
Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London, is a psychoanalyst and writer. He is the author of fourteen acclaimed books, most recently Side Effects, and OnKindness written with the historian Barbara Taylor. Judith Clark is a curator of dress, who also lectures widely. She is Reader in the field
of Fashion and Museology at London College of Fashion, where she is Director (with Amy de la Haye) of MA Fashion Curation.