Press coverage
The Independent, 7 May 2010
V&A Magazine, Issue 21, spring 2010:
"This spring a new installation, The Concise Dictionary of Dress, allows visitors to get a glimpse behind the scenes of Blythe House, a west London storehouse for the V&A's reserve collection. The project challenges accepted notions of fashion through encounters with new "definitions" commissioned by Artangel from fashion curator Judith Clark and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips" (Kate Jazwinski)
New Statesman, 16 May 2010:
"After ascending in an industrial lift, weaving our way through a corridor and up again via a spiralling staircase, we are led out through a small door and on to the roof, squinting into the sun. It takes a while to stop marvelling at the panoramic view of London, but we are eventually directed to a cupola. Here is a woman in a bonnet and a late-18th-century dress. She has her back to us. She shimmers in translucent resin, the stiff, icy folds of her skirts swept back, as if ruffled by a strong wind. On the A5-sized cards we are duly handed, we read that this work is called Armoured. We are offered various definitions for "armoured". Some of them appear contradictory: "Hardened for the elements; soft-centred." Others, once unwrapped, reveal a beautifully articulated truth: "Inviting attack by being prepared for it, provocative." And like much of Phillips's writing, this one is teasing: "The need to make undressing a new kind of pleasure."" (Fisun Güner - read full article)
The Independent, 7 May 2010:
"The event is called The Concise Dictionary of Dress and it consists of a kind of scattered installation set up inside the vast spaces of Blythe House, a large Victorian building which used to house the administration for the Post Office Savings Bank, but is now the repository for the stored collections of various London museums, including the Science Museum and the Victoria and Albert. It is, in short, a very well organised and very well guarded national attic, packed with valuable artefacts and objects, stored in room after room of specially designed cupboards and drawers." (Tom Sutcliffe - read full article)
Aesthetica Magazine Blog, 28 April 2010:
"A wrought iron staircase leads you out onto the roof towards an exposed cupola containing the first of a sequence of intriguing definitions in a walk-through dictionary of dress. Due to the multi-sensory applications of this installation you are immersed from the very beginning – taking you both physically and mentally to a new dimension." (Read full article)
The Arts Desk, 27 April 2010:
"The most successful intervention is, perhaps not coincidentally, also the simplest: it is Plain, set in the extraordinary textiles store, a hangar-sized room with hundreds of rows of fabrics wrapped in Tyvek, the material used by conservators to preserve textile goods. Here Clark has wrapped seven dresses in the same material, and set them out as though ready for exhibition. The white-tiled room, with its thousands of white fabric rolls, surrounds these seven white ghosts, showing in model form how space inhabits exhibitions, and is excluded from storage: display equals space, while conservation is a negation of space." (Judith Flanders - read full article)