The Radicalness of the Accessory
Book review

http://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/3940
Date Written:  2013-07-01
Publisher:  Against The Current
Year Published:  2013
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX20070

A book review of Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being 1.and Exchanging Clothes:
Habits of Being 2. edited by Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz

Abstract: 
-

Excerpt;

Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz’s first two volumes of the four-part series in progress, Habits of Being, reveal that clothes, accessories, and fashion are anything but trivial. Rather, the manner in which we accessorize -- the shoes or boots we wear, the hats and ties that adorn us, the handbag we carry -- as we make our way to work, to school, to a party or a protest, reveal our cultural, political, social, economic and ontological status.

Habits of Being takes seriously a most fundamental aspect of our being: that we clothe and accessorize our bodies, and this usually unexamined daily routine, a habit, exposes essential aspects of our identities and desires.

Habits of Being includes essays from historians, fashion designers, scholars of textiles and interiors, psychoanalysts, literary and film critics and others who take seriously the accessorizing of the body and render visible the body as an accessory. These essays, many of which first appeared in the Italian series Abito e Identità, contribute to the interdisciplinary study of identity and subjectivity through the examination of daily accessories.