The Thoughtful Dresser The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter

"You can't have depths without surfaces," says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book, The thoughtful Dresser,a thinking woman's guide to what we wear.For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are. How we look and what we wear tells a story. Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility. Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany.The Thoughtful Dressercelebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.

Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for the Art of Reportage in 2006. Her most recent novel, The Clothes on Their Back, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. She writes for The Guardian, the Telegraph, and Vogue.