Fashion

How we dress can be a deeply personal matter. But can dress also be the object of deeper artistic enquiry? And can it tell us something more about the societies in which we live? These are the questions at the heart of Look Again: Fashion, part of our Look Again series of books exploring the National Collection of British Art.

From Piet Mondrian and Yves Saint Laurent to Louis Vuitton and Yayoi Kusama, there is a long-standing relationship between art and the high fashion world: artists can influence designers, and avant-garde fashion can also inspire avant-garde art. But what about the everyday dress that features in so many of the works in Britain's national collection of art? What can we learn by inspecting the turban on the head of a footman, the fabric gathered in the lap of a seamstress or the pleats of a dress swirling around the neck of a girl walking on her hands on a beach?

In Fashion, esteemed academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari guides us through the surprising insights that come of these questions - and reveals that thinking about dress can take us into the heart of society, culture, and politics.

Look Again is a series of short books from Tate Publishing, opening up the conversation about British art over the last 500 years, and exploring what art has to tell us about our lives today. Written by leading voices from the worlds of literature, art and culture, each book sheds new light on some of the most well-known, best-loved and thought-provoking artworks in the national collection, and asks us to look again.