Anne Hollander

Anne Helen Loesser Hollander (October 16, 1930 – July 6, 2014) was an American historian whose original work provided new insights into the history of fashion and costume and their relation to the history of art. She published numerous books on the history of fashion, modernity, and the body including Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits.

Early life Hollander was born Anne Helen Loesser in Cleveland, Ohio. She was the only child of pianist and music historian Arthur Loesser and his wife Jean Bassett, a sculptor. Hollander's mother taught her to sew and make her own clothes. Hollander received a degree in art history from Barnard College, New York, graduating in 1952.

Career Hollander moved in academic circles but never joined a college or university faculty. Her work was both erudite and original, providing new perspectives on areas that previously had not been considered or had been regarded as unimportant. Her first book was Seeing through clothes (1978; reprinted 1993) where she insisted on talking about cloth and drapery before talking about clothes.

Hollander describes the relationship between dress and art as follows: "In a picture-making civilization, the ongoing pictorial conventions demonstrate what is natural in human looks; and it is only in measuring up to them that the inner eye feels satisfaction and the clothed self achieves comfort and beauty". And she extends the point to the conception of the naked body: "It can be shown that the rendering of the nude in art usually derives from the current form in which the clothed figure is conceived. This correlation in turn demonstrates that both the perception and the self-perception of nudity are dependent on a sense of clothing – and of clothing understood through the medium of a visual convention". "Thus all nudes in art since modern fashion began are wearing the ghosts of absent clothes – sometimes highly visible ghosts".

In her second book, Moving pictures (1991), Hollander divided post-1500 paintings from Europe and the United States into the cinematic and non-cinematic. In Sex and suits (1994), she analysed the male suit and its function. In 1979, Hollander married the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Nagel commented on his wife's meticulous attention to detail about her own appearance: "She thought it was an art" he said, adding that she believed people should check their appearance from all angles: "She thought you should always use the double mirror before you leave the house".

Death Hollander died from cancer at her home in Manhattan. At the time of her death, she was working on a book about costume in literature, from Homer to the present.

Selected publications Seeing through clothes. Viking, 1978. Moving pictures. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991. Sex and suits. New York, Knopf, 1994. Feeding the eye: Essays. University of California Press, 2000. Fabric of vision: Dress and drapery in painting. National Gallery, London, 2002.