Clothing in art is open to extensive interpretation because the study of fashion is multidisciplinary. As a visual language, clothing can be ‘read’ to signify time, identity, social and economic status, religion, nationality, psychology, traditions, and so much more from various perspectives. Aileen Ribeiro, professor emeritus in the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, is a trusted source who has long written and contributed on the topic of looking at clothing and dress throughout art history. Ribeiro has published many reference works that are (at least in my specialized fashion-focused library collection) essential, such as the following incomplete list: Dress in eighteenth century Europe, 1715–1789 (1984), The art of dress: fashion in England and France 1750–1820 (1995), Ingres in fashion: representation of dress and appearance in Ingres’ Images of Women (1999), and Dress and morality (2003). Ribeiro's latest publication, Clothing art, her largest text yet, builds upon her past work and explores the interconnectedness between art and fashion, but in particular, the depiction of dress through the lens of the artist from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the early twentieth – over 300 years of artistic interpretation.

A substantial and sturdy volume of 572 pages, Clothing art is beautifully illustrated with 170 full-colour images (many of which are full page) and 80 black-and-white illustrations. The intended readers for this book are advanced researchers who wish to see a different perspective on clothing in art, but the way the text is arranged and divided it could also be accessible to college-aged researchers. Ribeiro explains that ‘one of the aims in my work generally, and in this book specifically, is to encourage historians of dress to recognize how important art is as a source of information, but never to lose sight of the fact that works of art are works of art first and not just repositories of fashion references. We must be aware of the different ways in which artists ‘see’ clothes and depict them, and be able to recognize that changes in an artist's style or technique will affect how clothing is seen in his or her work. Ultimately, this book hopes to convince those who write on the history of dress that the evidence of art is crucial to their discipline’.

Clothing art is divided into five parts, each with an introductory essay summarizing the theme, and subdivided into fourteen chapters. This book begins with an essay entitled ‘Seeing dress in art’ and ending the series of parts and chapters is a counterpart essay entitled ‘Seeing art in dress’. Clothing art contains Ribeiro's extensive notes, a very select bibliography, illustration credits, and an index. The sections are presented in chronological order, but explore main developments in the history of clothing in art and each of the parts could be read independently based on the reader's preferences and area of interest. Many chapters are further divided into more specific discussions and essays which are easy located via highlighted subtitles within the text.

The first part of this book, ‘Portraying dress’, examines the role and practice of clothing in portraiture, how artists see and dress themselves in self-portraiture, what happens ‘in the studio’, the styling of portraiture, and exact or imaginative artistic representations of clothing in painting. The second part of the book, ‘Identifying the nation’ has three case studies to illustrate the connection between dress and nationality in art: Chapter 3 - Going Dutch in the seventeenth century, Chapter 4 - Fashioning the court of Louis XIV, and Chapter 5 - Reading dress: class, character, and identity in Hogarth's work. The idea of ‘dressing up’ in the third section of this volume is an inevitable discussion when studying clothing and fashion. Ribeiro goes into background detail about the significance of the masquerade, looking east towards the Ottoman Empire, addressing the perception of Ancient Greece and Rome and the depiction of classical dress, and lastly the notion of romance through historic dress in painting.

The remaining sections of Clothing art covers the second half of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth. Part four, ‘Painting modern life’ discusses the many ways artists were responding to fashion in relation to the notion of modernity. Chapter 10, Dressing stories reveals how women's dress in narrative art carries more layers of meaning then men's dress and a small case study on the painter Alfred Stevens further illustrates this point. Chapter 11, Reigning taste: depicting fashion in the second empire has essays on Winterhalter's fashion styling and ‘Worth and the founding of Haute Couture’, and Chapter 12, Artist and fashion delves into ideas of clothing men, dressing women, and ‘la vie moderne’. The theme of the last section of Clothing art is ‘Dressing artists’ which leads into the discussion of artistic or alternative dress or how artists responded to mainstream high fashion by their choice of dress, but also the notions of beauty and aestheticism in the language of clothing in art. For example: Pre-Raphaelite style; the art of beauty and the art of dress, and discussions on ‘Watts, Whistler, Wilde, and Godwin’, past/present, and east/west. Finally, Ribeiro ends her study with the last chapter entitled Reforming dress which looks at how ‘new ideas on women's clothing, influenced as much by health and practicality as by aesthetics, were linked to their radically change life-styles’ in the early twentieth century.

Clothing art is truly the culmination of Ribeiro's life's work and will be one of the go-to reference resources for my curatorial department, particularly for docents that lead tours on topics of fashion in art within the context of our Museum's collection. What is missing from this reference book, which makes it an incomplete history on the topic of dress in art, is the discussion of earlier periods such as the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The author acknowledges the lack thereof, but hoped that other scholars would dive into this time period in the near future as it deserves a dedicated study. As for ending the text in the early twentieth century, Ribeiro felt that ‘it seemed obvious to end when figurative art appeared to be about to decline, and when fashion- hitherto dominated by Europe -- was shortly challenged by the United States’. Either way, Clothing art remarkably uncovers and reveals numerous facets of how one can ‘read’ clothing in art – from the artist, the subject, and many other influences surrounding the work of art. All in all, I highly recommend Clothing art for any academic, museum, and public library.