Shahidha Bari is a critic, academic and broadcaster. She is a Professor at LCF at the University of the Arts London.
You can watch Shahidha on BBC Two as one of the presenters of Inside Culture and you can hear her on radio as a host of BBC Radio 3's Arts and Ideas programme Free Thinking and occasional presenter of Front Row.
You'll find her writing in Aeon, The Financial Times, Frieze art magazine, The Guardian, The Observer, The Times Literary Supplement and others.
Shahidha is a Fellow at the Forum for Philosophy at the LSE, and a trustee for the Brontë Society and Art Night. She is a Creative Director at the audio production company, Tempo & Talker.
Among her many roles, Shahidha has been a judge for the Forward Poetry Prizes, the Baillie Gifford Prize and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize. Currently, she is a member of the judging panel for the 2022 Booker Prize.
She is the writer of Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes. Her forthcoming book Look Again: Fashion, a study of dress, culture and identity, is part of a new series exploring the Tate Britain collection.
"Dressed is irresistible ... I put Dressed down having been dazzled by Bari’s learning and insights ... Bari communicates the joy and powerful sense of interconnected humanity clothes can bring"
"A deeply original, compelling thinker and a brilliant writer. Dressed is the finest philosophy of clothes since Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus in 1834 ... limpidly clear, informed by a rich literary knowledge, theoretically and historically informed, sensuous and deeply textured, like a piece of luxurious fabric. It is also funny. Make no mistake: this is a work of philosophy. It just happens to be about clothes."
"Lively, entertaining and provocative ... Bari tells us throughout Dressed, we should look to give dress the attention it deserves."
"Dressed is a feast of a book, a supreme example of the new kind of essay – exploratory, reflective, full of the personal energy of Bari herself."
"Bari’s investigation into how we construct our selves, individually and collectively, is a sensual and intellectual pleasure from start to finish."
"A fascinating cultural exploration of the layers of meaning inherent in the ways we dress ourselves, from Madonna's denim jacket and the paintings of Titian to Cary Grant's tailoring. If you think choosing what to wear is essentially a trivial activity, read this and you'll soon clothe your thoughts entirely differently."
"[A] clever, subtle book… [Bari's] writing is critically informed…her tone is insistently personal, intimate even… Between her main chapters she drops in lyrical accounts of her own encounters with specific items of clothing… Bari wants us to think not so much about what clothes say as how they make us feel."
