What do you think?
Rate this book
Harvey, John
- GenresFashion
144 pages, Paperback
First published August 21, 2008
1 person is currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
John Harvey
4 books2 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Dr. John R. Harvey has been a Fellow of Emmanuel, University of Cambridge since 1967. He was full Lecturer for the English Faculty from 1979 on, and became University Reader in Literature and Visual Culture in 2000.
He was the chairman of the College's Picture, Plate and Furniture Committee, and the Picture Guild and was the College's Vice-Master from 2004 to 2006.
His novel The Plate Shop won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize.
Dr. John R. Harvey has been a Fellow of Emmanuel, University of Cambridge since 1967. He was full Lecturer for the English Faculty from 1979 on, and became University Reader in Literature and Visual Culture in 2000.
He was the chairman of the College's Picture, Plate and Furniture Committee, and the Picture Guild and was the College's Vice-Master from 2004 to 2006.
His novel The Plate Shop won the David Higham Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 25, 2023
Let’s face it, clothes are tricky things. They delude, conceal, obfuscate, lie for us and are ontologically deceptive in that they manufacture ways of being in the world that may bear little relation to our authentic selves…… whatever that may be. Equally, they reveal and expose us, subject us to shallow fads (as Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor discovered) and provide second or third skins. They adorn and protect, develop our personas in ways that might be playful or provocative or both concurrently. They are, in short, seldom to be trusted. It is a wonder, then, that they have not really attracted more philosophical attention. There has been some attention given to fashion (such as Baumgardner and Kennett’s addition to the Philosophy for Everyone series Fashion: Thinking With Style and assorted other pieces of work, such as by Barthes), but these are about fashion, not clothes, a system, not the stuff of that system.
This is a subject so big and so commonplace – as Leah Borromeo suggests, “it’s the one type of art that everyone owns”, but that’s fashion again. As John Harvey notes in this rich, elegant, engaging and crying out to be revisited mediation-cum-essay, ‘fashion’ is a label often used to both denigrate and elevate clothes. In only 126 pages Harvey takes us through a stimulating discussion of the untrustworthiness of clothes, the perils, joys and wonder of fashion, clothes as persona performers, the dialectic between clothes and the body they encase (or not), uniforms (including things we may not think of as uniforms) and clothes as art – beauty, elegance and chic.
These adjectives shouldn’t be taken as suggesting that I agree with him. For instance, in many aspects of the essay he both over- and under-states the gender divide of clothes while also quite properly noting that men’s body exposure-via-their-clothes is close to the state of women’s body exposure in the mid 18th century or that part of the marvel of contemporary fashion is the adaptation of the men’s suit to women. Not always agreeing doesn’t mean to say I reject his case, though; nearly every page set me to musing, thinking, reflecting on the historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural and economic implications of the points he was making.
Alongside this intellectual stimulation, Harvey set me to reflect on clothes – the tracksuits-as-uniform I see around me everyday, the cheek/chic of Hussein Chalayan’s worn artpieces, Mihara Yashuhiro’s designs for Puma and the hang of an Armani suit as well as the t-shirt I’d put on that day, the drape of the cloth in Orazio Gentileschi’s Rest on the Flight from Egypt and countless other aspects of clothes – those mundanities of our lives that we often take for granted. On top of all that, he writes beautifully – the evocative prose carried me along, made me smile and pull up abruptly; it the prose I’d expect of a novelist who teaches literature and visual culture at Cambridge University. It is also accessible; Harvey wears his philosophy deceptively lightly but it runs deep in a text uncluttered by many references but with a further reading list that manages to straddle the classics and a couple of the new that are a little surprising, or at least a little out of the ordinary.
It is a rare book that I expect I’ll re-read in the next six months – but this one I suspect I will. Highly recommended.
This is a subject so big and so commonplace – as Leah Borromeo suggests, “it’s the one type of art that everyone owns”, but that’s fashion again. As John Harvey notes in this rich, elegant, engaging and crying out to be revisited mediation-cum-essay, ‘fashion’ is a label often used to both denigrate and elevate clothes. In only 126 pages Harvey takes us through a stimulating discussion of the untrustworthiness of clothes, the perils, joys and wonder of fashion, clothes as persona performers, the dialectic between clothes and the body they encase (or not), uniforms (including things we may not think of as uniforms) and clothes as art – beauty, elegance and chic.
These adjectives shouldn’t be taken as suggesting that I agree with him. For instance, in many aspects of the essay he both over- and under-states the gender divide of clothes while also quite properly noting that men’s body exposure-via-their-clothes is close to the state of women’s body exposure in the mid 18th century or that part of the marvel of contemporary fashion is the adaptation of the men’s suit to women. Not always agreeing doesn’t mean to say I reject his case, though; nearly every page set me to musing, thinking, reflecting on the historical, sociological, anthropological, cultural and economic implications of the points he was making.
Alongside this intellectual stimulation, Harvey set me to reflect on clothes – the tracksuits-as-uniform I see around me everyday, the cheek/chic of Hussein Chalayan’s worn artpieces, Mihara Yashuhiro’s designs for Puma and the hang of an Armani suit as well as the t-shirt I’d put on that day, the drape of the cloth in Orazio Gentileschi’s Rest on the Flight from Egypt and countless other aspects of clothes – those mundanities of our lives that we often take for granted. On top of all that, he writes beautifully – the evocative prose carried me along, made me smile and pull up abruptly; it the prose I’d expect of a novelist who teaches literature and visual culture at Cambridge University. It is also accessible; Harvey wears his philosophy deceptively lightly but it runs deep in a text uncluttered by many references but with a further reading list that manages to straddle the classics and a couple of the new that are a little surprising, or at least a little out of the ordinary.
It is a rare book that I expect I’ll re-read in the next six months – but this one I suspect I will. Highly recommended.
Read
January 31, 2009i browsed this, and frankly felt like i could have written it. i think i will do my own version. some interesting points going into our relationship to clothes and how our presentation affects our psyche, but really....not as well written as i had hoped.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews