Abstract
'The apparel oft proclaims the man', Polonius advised Laertes.1 Shakespeare's character presented this adage as universal, along with 'neither a borrower nor a lender be', and his assertion that fashion involves self-fashioning will seem familiar to today's readers. A growing literature on the meaning of dress in the contemporary world tells us that clothing assists in the performance of identity. By changing our clothing, we are told, we change our selves. Works on this topic such as those by Marjorie Garber provide a very useful analysis of the current culture. In particular, they tell us something about contemporary views of the 'self'. Yet studies that present clothing as inherently transformative tend to suffer from an underdeveloped historical context. Marjorie Garber, for example, explicitly
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