About the Book
Gaurav Monga's Costumes of the Living functions less as naked commentary on contemporary fashion than as a sartorial taxonomy of the human system and its emotional minutiae. Through a series of shifting sketches, fragments and confessional monologues, identities are modified or exchanged, the living are transformed into the dead, the past and the present change places, space becomes time and time becomes spatialized, clothes become bodies and bodies clothes; familiar garments stand revealed as extended physiologies and carriers of sympathetic magic. Clothes, Monga reveals, are often less mere garments than subsumed environments, domestic economies, anonymous lovers and judges, passing from body to body, moving with their owners, sometimes sinister mimics or co-conspirators, at other times material witnesses of grief, fear, desire and metamorphosis.
