Women in Clothes

By: Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton, Mary Mann, others

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman, Karen Sepulveda, Keisha Zollar, Fred Berman, Soneela Nankani, Nancy Wu, Emily Woo Zeller, Dara Rosenberg, Erin Moon, Piper Goodeve, Julia Farhat, Saskia Maarleveld

Length: 19 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities - famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old - on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives.

It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than 50 questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Sasha Grey, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations.

Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, and function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women's style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always telling impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2018 Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Loved this book!

Everyone should read this! Women: for a better understanding of ourselves & Men: for a better understanding of who women are. Thank you for such an open and honest read. 🙏

Fashion, Style, and Life Coming Together

Women in Clothes by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, Leanne Shapton, Mary Mann, others is a fascinating and amazing book. The editors developed a survey of more than 50 questions about fashion, dressing, body image, culture, and all aspects of style. This book is the curated result in words and pictures (the pictures are included in the recorded editions via PDF/download). In its best moments, the book reveals a lot about the lives of women and how fashion reflects their lives and how they communicate and interpret their lives through their fashion choices. It touches upon religion, race, sociology, psychology, politics, the environment, economics, and the rights of humans and animals. It includes honest and profound stories about choices and how they impact lives. It is also clunky at times. There were a few long sections that needed to be edited further, or perhaps even cut from the final product. However, this is such an important, engaging work that I am willing to overlook those minor flaws. This book is a must read for anyone who loves fashion and perhaps feels alone in that love in the Post Pandemic world. Healing and inspiration came about for me from listening to this book because I mourn the fact that we no longer seem to have as many reasons to really dress with style anymore. Listening to this book reignited my enthusiasm and passion for fashion and style. It is a shame and really a tragedy that the originators of this survey project simply shut it down, rather than expanding its reach by creating an interactive website where fans could fill out the survey and share their experiences and the original participants could update their reactions. The survey questions are inspiring and many people will find it useful and fun to answer them, even if their answers will never become part of the official project. I am holding out hope that the editors might update the questions to include a section on the ways in which the pandemic impacted and changed the way we think about fashion and how we communicate through the use of fashion now. The narration performances by Gabra Zackman, Karen Sepulveda, Keisha Zollar, Fred Berman, Soneela Nankani, Nancy Wu, Emily Woo Zeller, Dara Rosenberg, Erin Moon, Piper Goodeve, Julia Farhat, and Saskia Maarleveld are very good and support the material well. I think the recordings were done using Canadian pronunciations which may cause confusion on certain words and phrases. Overall, the narration performances are good. I would recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of or participant in fashion and style and to anyone who has an interest in becoming a participant in fashion and style.

An all-time favorite

This was a fascinating book. I thought it was going to be about clothes, and it was. But it ended up being about so much more, really the women IN the clothes. I listened to the audiobook a few months ago and it's still making me think even now.