We look for the clothes that are right for us, and normally, in the end, we find them. It is a little like finding the right pieces for a jigsaw puzzle. But finally we have an outfit, or a set of outfits, that are us. No one else will use quite the same combination: so we have a fabric “self”, our show self for other people. Inside the clothes we have our private self, which we never declare entirely. We know, on the other hand, that our choice of clothes may give away some of our dreams.

Yet clothes are hardly individual things. They were more individual in the past, maybe, when tailors and dressmakers made garments to order. Nowadays almost all clothes come off the peg, mass-produced; and even in the past they were worked to a limited set of patterns. Perhaps too we do not want clothes to be very individual. We expect clothes to have something standard about them, to be recognizable as belonging to a known type or style of dress. In this way clothes help us to join with other people, however “personal” our choice of a blouse may be.

Clothes meet this double need, of being standard yet also individual, by being, each garment, in some way “special”. Yet even the most special design in the store will have been manufactured, we know, by the thousand.