The concise dictionary of dress, an exhibition in the working stores of V&A

Located within the working store for the V&A’s vast reserve collections of furniture, ceramics, glass, jewellery, textiles, fashion and fine arts, The Concise Dictionary of Dress began with a journey through a turnstile, into an industrial goods lift and up to the first in a sequence of intriguing definitions in a walk-through dictionary of dress…
Cast objects and photographs, tableaux of clothing and accessories were arranged amongst the rolling racks and wrapped objects stored at Blythe House, the former headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank in Olympia, west London. The anatomy of the building revealed surreal and evocative interventions in unexpected places; metaphors of repression and ceremony; fragments of the clothed body briefly glimpsed.
Commissioned by Artangel, The Concise Dictionary of Dress re-described clothing in terms of anxiety, wish and desire, as a series of definitions created by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and accompanying installations designed and assembled by fashion curator Judith Clark.

The Concise Dictionary of Dress is also a 128-page hardback book. Illustrated in colour and with written contributions from Adam Phillips and Judith Clark and specially commissioned photography by Norbert Schoerner, it was published in April 2010 by Violette Editions in association with Artangel priced £25.00.

The second edition of the Artangel Podcast was released on 19 May 2010 and saw Artangel Co-Director Michael Morris take a walk through the V&A's vast, maze-like stores at Blythe House - in the company of the building's longstanding manager Glenn Benson. Click here to listen, download or subscribe.
retrieved from:
http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2010/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress/about_the_project/the_concise_dictionary_of_dress
on 30 September 2011