the reading of garments

stories about clothes

The other day someone gifted me the book What Artists Wear by Charlie Parker, published 2021 by Penguin Books, which I’d been meaning to get my hands on. Because a) I work with fabric and sometimes use garments in my art, and because b) I’m fascinated by clothes.
Parker, a fashion journalist with great knowledge of and deep connections to the arts (he was a Turner Prize juror in 2019) writes brilliantly about the meaning and the symbolic, political and artistic connotations of clothes worn and/or utilized by artists throughout history.