Though there have been many exhibitions devoted to fashion in its various forms, The Concise Dictionary of Dress stands out in exploring the particular sensations that arise from dress, such as comfort, conformity, pretentiousness and plainness. A collaboration between costume curator Judith Clark and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, the Concise Dictionary of Dress asks how two-dimensional pieces of cloth enchant their wearers, whether by giving them heady illusions of grandeur and conspicuousness, or by posing as invisibility cloaks.

Scattered around the red brick Victorian fortress of Blythe House, a one-time Post Office Savings Bank and now the storehouse of the V&A, are ‘definitions’ of dress in the form of Clark’s installations and Phillips’s verbal riddles. In the course of my guided tour I learned that Clark and Phillips conceived of their definitions separately, leading to contradictions: clearly, this is not a dictionary that aims to refine interpretations, but rather one that allows them to multiply in ivy-like unwieldiness. For instance, Pretentious, Clark’s display of dresses that appear confected rather than sewn and proclaim themselves autonomous artworks through their excessive embellishment, sits oddly with Philips’ definition of the pretentious as ‘something pretending to be something that it is’.

If the exhibition skirts the issue of precise definition, it addresses the tension between museum cataloguing and display. In the regimented atmosphere of the store house, where objects are filed away according to period and material, there is something delightfully rebellious about these anachronistic collages of objects, assembled according to pattern or mood. Loose - composed of a sealed foam shoe, a Wedgwood buckle and a sword from the V&A’s metalware collections - features, like a traditional bridal trousseau, ‘something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue’. If Blythe House is an 18°C, dimly-lit heaven that promises its objects eternal life, The Concise Dictionary of Dress restores them to the Babylonian hubbub of multiple associations. Until Jun 27

KATERINA PANTELIDES