Threads and Stitches of Self: The Reparative Power of Fashion and Clothing in The Secret Lives of Dresses

Abstract

This study investigates the role of vintage dresses as agents of personal transformation and identity reformation in Erin McKean’s novel The Secret Lives of Dresses. Utilizing Roland Barthes’ semiotic framework alongside Jacques Lacan’s theories of desire and identification, the analysis reveals garments as symbolic matrices in which memory, self-articulation, and emotional maturation converge. The protagonist gradually uncovers her identity through intimate encounters with the antique garments housed in her grandmother’s boutique. Each dress, embedded with its archive of bygone lives, functions as a reflecting surface for Dora’s concealed longings and her emergent, fluid self. The texture of fabric and the cut of seams, therefore, exceed the realm of the visual; they become vehicles of narrative and psychodynamic revelation. This paper contends that, in narrative form, dress is reconfigured from a simple ornamental covering to an active mechanism of self-reconstruction, evidencing clothing’s potential to re-author identity from within the text.