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The Clothing Left Behind: A Collection Of Stories, Grace Coleman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Beyond its material use, clothing can have powerful emotional effects such as easing grief from personal loss or serving as a memory recall aid for individuals with dementia. It was during my graduate program that I became interested in exploring the idea that clothing can be powerful beyond its aesthetic. Peter Stallybrass’s essay Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things highlighting clothing’s ability to evoke memories and emotions was influential in setting me on my path to research clothing’s connection to memories. Whether it was embodied identity, grief, dementia, mourning rituals, or collective mourning, I was looking at …