There is only a glimpse of the book’s original cover visible beneath the frayed edge of the bright-pink silk, but it reveals a marbled design in shades of blue with a red-leather spine. Marbling was a technique that arrived in Europe from Japan in the seventeenth century and it had become hugely fashionable.

a deep-seated perception of dress as superficial and inconsequential – that to be interested in clothing is to lack seriousness. Yet here we all are dressed in clothes, making daily decisions about how we will face the world. We might use dress as our armour, a protective carapace to shield us from censure, or we might use it to express our place