When Hotel du Lac won the Booker Prize in 1984, Anita Brookner apparently received the announcement with characteristic drollery. ‘I think I shall go out and get a pair of shoes resoled,’ she remarked. ‘That will help me keep my feet on the ground.’ It’s a sentiment as eminently sensible as the tweed skirts and long cardigans worn by Edith, the heroine of her novel. But Edith is not so sensible inside. And, as Brookner’s novel demonstrates, clothes can function in complicated ways in fiction. 

Edith is caught between an affair with David, a married man, and Geoffrey, her tedious fiancé. When she abandons Geoffrey at the altar, her scandalised friends despatch her to an austere Swiss hotel. There, she meets Mr Neville, a ‘man of quality’ with inclinations for Panama hats, linen jackets and, it turns out, for Edith too. Suffice to say, Edith’s inward life is more fraught than her sedate cardigans and tweeds would suggest. For Brookner, clothes can be deceptive. Our most ordinary exterior uniforms conceal the extraordinary interior realities each of us possesses. ‘Suddenly I caught sight of myself in the glass in the Ladies and saw my extremely correct appearance and thought, I should not be here! I am out of place!’ Edith exclaims. She resolves, nonetheless, to remain, at least ‘until everyone decides that I am myself again’. 

But what does it mean to be oneself in the first place? As Brookner slyly observes, sometimes there is a gap between how we might present ourselves to others and what we really are inside. Mr Neville, for instance, is all hat-doffing attentiveness, but ‘a heartless man, I think’, Edith quietly intuits. ‘Anyway, he’s not bad looking,’ remarks a straight-talking guest at the hotel, ‘And you’re not bad looking, Edith, when you put your mind to it. Your clothes are terrible, if you don’t mind my saying so. Or even if you do. Still, that’s your affair.’ 

Could that be true? Are our clothes only ever our own affair? As Brookner wryly observes, our clothes, like the matter of whom we choose to love and how we decide to live, are social decisions: buffeted, dented and distorted by the prevailing mores and expectations of our times. It is no small detail that Brookner was an art historian as well as a novelist. She asks us to see this complexity in her characters, in what they wear and how they move through their worlds.  

Douglas Stuart studied and worked in the fashion industry for over a decade before Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize in 2020. At the centre of his story is Shuggie’s mother Agnes, a stylishly charismatic figure whose glamour decays over the course of his turbulent childhood in a Glasgow housing scheme. When we first meet Agnes, she is in a party outfit, smoking a cigarette into the night sky from a 16th-floor window: ‘She wanted to show the city this claret velvet dress.’ Later, Stuart dresses her in a rhinestone-sleeved pink angora jumper and a purple mohair coat, gifting her a wardrobe that is vivacious and determinedly out of keeping with her circumstances. As her sobriety deteriorates and debts spiral, her clothes betray her: a mink coat grows matted in the pouring rain, semi-sheer Pretty Polly tights snag on Artex walls. 

Agnes’s life is one of repeated struggle: ‘Every day with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat and faced the world.’ Her longing for beauty amid the disorder of her life is part of the book’s tragedy. It’s also what makes Shuggie’s final act of tenderness – reapplying the colour to his mother’s dead lips – so devastating. 

It is an entirely different social world that Nick Guest finds himself navigating in Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize 2004-winning novel The Line of Beauty. Having befriended the well-heeled Toby Fedden at Oxford, Nick becomes the cuckoo in the nest of Toby’s affluent, Thatcherite family. Hollinghurst is partly tongue-in-cheek when he describes Gerald Fedden, the newly anointed Tory MP, gamely ‘welly wanging’ in his constituency of Barwick, dressed in a pinstripe suit and red tie. But the target of his satire is an immediately recognisable political archetype whose real power is serious. Nick, by contrast, is forced to borrow his great-uncle’s dinner jacket. Whiffs of ‘long-ago dinner-dances in Lincolnshire hotels’ periodically emanate from it, vainly masked by liberal spritzes of French perfume.  

For Hollinghurst, while clothes form part of the novel’s dark comedy of manners, they also signal intimacy. Nick longs for the streetwise Leo. He fixates upon the details in their erotic encounters, noticing how ‘the label of Leo’s skimpy blue shirt’ reveals the store signature ‘Miss Selfridge’, the high-street label popular with teenage girls. He treasures that knowledge like a secret. Later, Nick desires Leo so much that he imagines being his jeans ‘in their casual rhythmical caress of his strolling legs, their momentary grip and letting go’. It’s a sentiment that is both absurd and deeply, desperately true. Desire asks for proximity, and clothes are often the closest things we have to another’s body. They can retain the shape, smell and warmth of the wearer. They are intimate objects made public.  

Sometimes our clothes are freighted with unbearable intimacy, the carriers of fugitive emotions. In Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, which won the International Booker Prize in 2024, a passing encounter between Hans and Katharina in East Berlin rapidly becomes a consuming love affair, spanning the turbulent final years of the German Democratic Republic. When Hans first takes her to his home, his wife, Ingrid, is not there, but Katharina notices Ingrid’s lipstick on an abandoned cup, her cardigan removed from the back of a chair. Later, Ingrid finds a passport photograph of Katharina tucked into the inside pocket of Hans’s clothing. The intimacy of the inside pocket magnifies the pain of the betrayal: to be inside a garment is to be facing inward, held close to the chest. 

In George Saunders’s Booker Prize 2017-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a heartbroken Abraham Lincoln cannot give up his dead son. The novel’s gambit – that 11-year-old Willie is now a spirit, caught in the liminal space between death and the afterlife – is intricately realised. Yet what Willie leaves behind is simple, small, deeply affecting: ‘pale blue pyjamas’, a ‘tiny wadded up mitten’ in one of Mrs Lincoln’s old coat pockets. These garments are very little, almost nothing, and everything too. 

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, which won the Booker Prize in 1992, features Hana, a young Canadian army nurse who cares for a disfigured and nameless burn patient in an abandoned Italian monastery towards the end of the Second World War. Her possessions comprise one dress, a shirt to sleep in and tennis shoes, slightly too big, salvaged from a dead soldier. Hana takes them out of necessity, but to choose to walk in the shoes of others is also one way of understanding the act of reading itself.  

Writers like Brookner might strive to keep their feet on the ground, but the point of reading is to be carried away. The conjuring trick of clothes is that they give substance to what we imagine: the weight of a mohair coat, the scent of an old dinner jacket, the label revealed on the upturned collar of a shirt. And books, like clothes, offer us the chance to see ourselves differently over and again.