I’ve all my life loved clothes, everything about them. I like fabric and stitches and pleats and darts and tucks and frills and French seams. What clothes mean and the messages they convey, the transformations they can bring about and the different sorts of treatment they provoke, none of these things seems to me the least bit superficial. What clothes actually do to the way you look, I’ve known, for a long time, is only one part of their power.

I’ve always felt there was an aspect of glamour that contained a moral element. I can’t explain it exactly but it’s something to do with optimism, cheer and celebration, glamour being a language that denotes great faith in life. I’m amazed when people of intelligence won’t see that clothing is important beyond the sphere of appearances. Yet I’ve never really questioned my beliefs about clothes and where they came from, not until two years ago when I began working on a memoir, My Judy Garland Life, and revisited the enormous part that fashion played in my childhood years.