In theory, I should have been convinced of this book’s brilliance. I’m a girl, it’s about clothes, what could possibly go wrong? But in reality, the practical and the theoretical can be as polarised as Primark and Pucci. John Harvey, despite being a renowned Cambridge scholar, fails to really enthuse on one of my favourite subjects. Despite some perceptive insights about clothing, gender and freedom, I came away feeling distinctly underwhelmed. To use a garment-related pun, this simply wasn’t my bag.

In Clothes Harvey takes as his initial focus ‘the philosophical mistrust of clothes’ – in art, literature and religion. As ‘clothing was implicated in the fall of man’, some might say there is little it can do to redeem itself. Nakedness is often used to evoke feelings of purity and innocence, therefore ‘…[if] Truth is naked, clothes are likely to be lying.’ I was particularly intrigued by this discussion on clothing versus nakedness. Despite the damning view propagated by Heat magazine’s ‘What were you thinking?!’ and ‘Circle of shame’ columns – that sometimes, as Harvey puts it, ‘our worth hangs on a “surface” mistake we have made’ – more often than not, clothing is a means of protection, a ‘soft armour’ which shields us from anxiety and embarrassment.

Clothing can also be a means of repression. I am a big fan of the corset, but this is because I am a beneficiary of the many gifts brought about by social change: I have a choice to wear a corset that fits comfortably, rather than being forced into the ageing strait-jacket style that grips with a stranglehold-force. Harvey expounds on this ‘momentous and extraordinarily slow striptease that women have practised for the past five hundred years, uncovering at the rate of twelve inches to the century their forearms, their upper arms, their shoulders, back and legs.’ I thank Harvey for introducing me to Rita Lygid, the original proponent of the backless dress in the 1920s: a ‘scandal [that] mutated into a fashion’.

Conversely, the prospect of revealing styles becoming ‘acceptable’ in men’s fashion is an unlikely one. As Harvey suggests, despite a historical predisposition to showing some skin, with the togas and mini-skirted ‘Gladiator’ style armour of yore, ‘…for a good deal longer than the past thousand years men have been so wrapped up and swathed and cloaked and clad that you could almost never see more than their faces and their hands.’ Though we have noticed flirtations with male nakedness from designers such as Vivienne Westwood and Jean Paul Gaultier, men’s fashion has remained fixated on layering and ‘the traditional male non-strip tease’.

For women, however, this gradual unwrapping has become bound up with our increasing freedom. Not only can we now undress, but we can dress like men (and yet men are not ‘free’ enough to say vice versa.) My style bible of choice, Grazia magazine, is described in its recent 200th issue as being ‘one of the first [magazines] to champion women’s trousers – not just as a fashion moment, but as a cultural tour de force’.

‘Trends’ are what we have to thank for the constantly shifting face of fashion. Harvey comments that sometimes it all seems like ‘change for change’s sake’ which, on some level, is true. Although he agrees that the visual development of appearance is necessary to reflect ‘the economy and the [changing] habits of life,’ I think that perhaps Harvey spoke too soon when he wrote the following:

Clothes do not seem, at the present time, to be flaunted as banners of group superiority, or used as utensils of class-antagonism…

With the current recession, many consumers are thinking more carefully about their spending habits, yet, it seems there are always those celebrities who seem to want to rub our noses in it. Grazia’s Laura Craik writes in her column, ‘There’s something a little ‘let them eat cake’ about Victoria Beckham’s ever-changing furs, Rolexes and different-coloured Birkin bags for every day of the week. What is she trying to prove: that she’s richer than us? Sweetheart, we know. Now put it away.’ Harvey paraphrases Thorstein Veblen, an economist and author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, who reiterates this belief; it seems to me as true today as it did in 1899.

…the principal purpose of those who bought expensive clothes was to show off their wealth by wasting it.

Fashion can and will continue to be used as a tool of inequity, and I believe Harvey is a little naïve in his summations in this area. He uses the ideas of Georg Simmel, for whom fashion is ‘a playground for dependant natures’ and clothes are ‘evanescent weapons within the class war’. Yet, Harvey juxtaposes these views with his belief that current celebrities, for all their pomp and pride, ‘do not mind if their high priced designer outfits are mimicked in affordable high street versions.’ Hmm, some maybe, but I would wager that if George at Asda launched a copycat version of Victoria Beckham’s new line of dresses (priced between £1,000 and £3,000) the lawyers would be called in pretty swiftly. In fact, there appear to be increasing numbers of lawsuits on this topic – Dunnes Stores v. Karen Millen in 2007, Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku Lovers label v. Forever 21, and so on.

At the other end of the spectrum, Harvey discusses the fact that ‘modern commercial initiatives have made the poor of all the world the workforce of our high street chains’. How hypocritical was it of all those econverts to queue for Anya Hindmarsh’s designer carrier, which smugly announced ‘I am not a plastic bag’. No, plastic you are not, but you were made using cheap labour in China, and since you claimed to be ethical, this did raise more than a few questions about fair trade standards and your carbon footprint. ‘We cannot see the sweatshop through the shirt’ says Harvey. True: sometimes it is carefully hidden from us and other times we are blind by choice.

Although the points above are mostly well made, the second half of the book loses emphasis. Harvey has a tendency to repeat himself; he returns in Chapter 3 to the point about clothes as a price tag advertising wealth and income and how easy it is to wear the wrong clothes, both previously discussed in Chapter 1. I understand that, as garments themselves are famous for overlapping and repetition, this is easily replicated when describing them. I believe it would have made more of an impact to talk about nakedness first and gradually ‘dress’ the book, building upon the base concepts addressed in his introduction. But who am I to argue with a Cambridge scholar?

Surprisingly in a book that describes ‘The Art of Living’, Harvey fails to discuss the darker side of clothes in relation to body image. For example, the hatred of body shape due to obesity or extreme body dysmorphic disorders that affect dress, like anorexia and bulimia. He only briefly touches on pregnancy, and that is only as an extreme comparison to the waiflike ‘angular’ models we see on designer catwalks. The sensitivities of dress are only discussed in relation to the brutal killing of Sophie Lancaster and the severe attack on Robert Maltby in Bacup’s Stubbylee Park, which ironically Harvey handles with a distinct lack of sympathy.

I also find it odd that, for a book about clothes, there are no pictures. I don’t mean to sound juvenile, but surely the whole point of an outfit is its visual appeal. Although Harvey utilises flowery language to describe the relative beauty of garments, I don’t feel that words can ever go far enough. In fact Harvey continually attempts to compare clothes to art, but in doing so, he detracts from his point.
He writes, ‘So clothes are not a symphony, or an epic poem, or a drama by Shakespeare, yet still they can be art, and those who make them, artists.’ Yet, art speaks for itself, as clothes do. To reduce them to mere words is to remove their spirit, their life-blood, and their infinite appeal. In my view, Harvey’s tome, for all its philosophical cogitations, will never live up to the entrancing glossy magazines that inspire me on a weekly basis, because he doesn’t understand what makes clothes so adored.

A wise woman told me on many a shopping trip that when it comes to clothes: ‘It’s not about need, it’s about want.’ Harvey seems to think it’s anxiety that makes society (and women in particular) so obsessively desirous about what we wear, but I think he has missed the point. Despite the many fashion faux pas that litter our lives, put simply, clothes make us happy. They feel good. They fuel our fairytales; our childhood dreams of dressing up and becoming whoever we want. They can brighten our mood and make us feel beautiful at times when nothing else will do. But I will give Harvey credit for the following insight into the feminine psyche.

It is as if, no matter how many clothes we had or saw, they could never be enough…

Amen to that.