"When the sartorial becomes the political"

A couple of weekends ago, Miriam Cosic reviewed in The Australian a memoir on fashion titled The Thoughtful Dresser by Linda Grant, a former winner of the Orange Prize and a short-listee for the Man Booker prize. Miriam starts her article by recalling her stint as a fashion journalist and how often this meant that (male) colleagues put her down:

FOR a few fascinating years I was a fashion journalist and became used to receiving backhanded compliments from male colleagues: you're so well read, educated in politics andphilosophy, how can you be interested in this stuff?

...

Imagine that comment being handballed to a sports journalist. Or writers in any other area of interest to men.

I've heard the New York Times journalist Maureen Dowd decry the same "backhanded compliments." How many of us hear comments like that? Anyway, Miriam writes that Linda Grant's book "is a meditation on clothing, and femininity, and power." It sounds like a great read!

Grant is the grandchild of immigrants who left eastern Europe for the political freedoms of Britain. From them, by emotional osmosis, she came to understand intimately the importance of appearance in the adjustment of migrants. Unable to be located exactly on the class ladder by means of their accent, for example, or the school they attended, they could remake themselves and their offspring afresh in their new land.

Even when her mother was subsiding into dementia at the end of her life, a shopping expedition for clothes could revive her. Her "last full, coherent, grammatically intact message", Grant writes, was uttered to her sister. "I like your earrings," their mother said.