Clothing the body is a human activity par excellence and clothes, insofar as they are an embodied everyday practice experienced by all cultures, tend to migrate with their owners. Clothes offer protection, operate between the self and others, and might also function as mementoes connecting past, present, and future. Attentive to the ways in which clothes affect and are affected by the body, authors writing about contemporary refugeeism have concocted powerful images of the (un)clothed body to render the depersonalization to which refugees are often subjected, the uncertainties surrounding their condition, and how material culture objects might help them preserve a sense of self-continuity. Engaging intertextually and ekphrastically with a wide range of media and art forms, Emma Lee’s The Significance of a Dress (2020) reimagines the narratives embedded in those tex(tile)s moving across borders. Focusing on those poems centered on refugeehood, this article seeks to examine how Lee uses clothing as a catalyst for exploring issues of identity loss, vulnerability and resilience, whilst illuminating the human dimension so often erased in mass media reports on refugeeism. The analysis will be prefaced by a discussion on the nexus between clothing, mobility and dispossession, where the concept of “clothescapes” is introduced as an analytical tool to theorize how individuals, clothes and different environments interact.