Clothes take the ordinary human body and fashion it into something remarkable. Born to the same anatomical legacy, each generation has used garments to shape itself in the image of its own particular desires.

Taking different body parts in turn, The Anatomy of Fashion invites us to view ourselves as we have been in the past. Arguing that analysis needs to aspire to the proliferation and playfulness of fashion itself, the chapters both explore a different aesthetic and examine its wider, and often surprising, implications. In countless different ways, fashion is caught up in the...