Featured Book: Women in Clothes

WE INSIST ON CREATING METAPHORS for our relationships with clothing, for their utility as a vehicle for expression, for their heirloom power, for their musty, tactile archival presence, because the intrigue of the sartorial has been trivialized as a shallow or commercialized pursuit. In Women in Clothes (Blue Rider Press), editors Sheila Heti (a Maisonneuve contributor), Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton delve into the minds, hearts and closets of a large (642, to be exact), eclectic group of women, and like the vintage store we all wished we’d grown up next to, there is something here for everyone. The book is a turning out of people’s pockets, sharing stories from a diverse background of contributors. Months before its publication, I heard Heti read at the Toronto Reference Library. Sections of that reading appear in the book, and she contextualized it by explaining that ...