The Concise Dictionary of Dress

A brilliant amalgam of psychoanalysis, literature, art and couture, The Concise Dictionary of Dress is bestselling author and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and fashion curator Judith Clark's inventive recasting of dress in terms of anxiety and desire. The book is structured as a dictionary, but an unusual one. " Phillips' entries in The Concise Dictionary of Dress are paired with photographs of installations that Clark created among the rolling racks, rambling corridors and high-security vaults of the Victoria & Albert Museum's vast reserve collections at Blythe House in west London. Cast objects and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories and metaphors of repression and ceremony continue the conversation. Phillips said that viewing the works at Blythe House is "like looking up a word in a dictionary and finding a picture instead of more words; it is not clear whether the word and its definition are the caption, or vice versa."