ABSTRACT
Choosing a wardrobe, as Emma Tarlo says early on in her book, is always associated more with fashion magazines than with any intellectual gravity. Seldom do we find a serious involvement of the problem of what to wear with one's social, historical, political and cultural identities. While there exist many studies on the psychological conflicts which governed political action and thus shaped identity, there are few works on the relationship between the ruler and the ruled based so exclusively on dressing, undressing and redressing. Since identity-formation is linked so closely with representation, clothing becomes the inevitable, if not the ostensible issue to examine. Tarlo is concerned with the way certain kinds of clothes determine specific identities of individuals, families, caste, class, religion and nation just as, for a long time, it was the lack of clothing or nakedness that was the preoccupation of a number of European ethnologists and historians and which governed their representations. It is the author's intention to depart from similar essentialisms while venturing her defence.
