Adam Phillips - an interactive interview

Click play to hear the answers that interest you

Adam Phillips at Blythe House. Photograph by Julian Abrams

When it came to devising and creating The Concise Dictionary of Dress, what was your role?

How did you go about writing the definitions - what was your process as a writer?

How, in your eyes, do they differ from standard dictionary definitions?

Dictionaries have a certain kind of authority to them. There’s a sense of looking something up to be told what to think. Was this idea in your mind at all, as you worked on the project?

What kind of significance do you ascribe to the clothes we wear?

As collaborators, on a practical level, how did it work between you and Judith Clark?

Describe Blythe House.

Apart from this exhibition, what can you find there?

How did you come to work with Artangel?

What was the thinking behind your definition for the word Conformist?

Please can you talk about how the Conformist definition relates to the physical installation, to the Windrush embroidery?

How do you see the relationship between a person being a conformist in terms of the way they dress and in a wider, social sense?

What did you mean by the phrase ‘unwitting double agent’?

How about ‘compliant and therefore enraged’?

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All of Adam's definitions plus Look it Up, his essay on the nature of dictionaries, can be found in the project catalogue, published by Violette Editions.