Seeing Through Clothes

The author explores the rich and complex heritage of western pictorial art as it has represented the human image - clothed, partially clothed, draped and nude. The civilized eye, she suggests, is always eager for human images, and even more eager for styles in the human image. And we get our ideas about how we look and how we should look not so much from each other - or from political or economic contraints or from notions of comfort and social correctness - as from the powerful and persuasive aethetic ideal that is suggested by the human image as we know it in art. In linked chapters devoted to the topics of drapery, nudity, dress and undress, costumes and mirrors.