Back in the day when I was young and it wasn’t possible to blog randomly on subjects that took your fancy my father’s godmother lived with our family. Doris was born in pre-revolutionary Russia; she was stone deaf with an agile sense of humour and an even more lively line in dancing the mazurka. She was also the owner of The Dress, a work of art in ice blue moiré silk cut narrow on the bust and waist and flaring out into a full skirt.

Even as a dishevelled, tomboyish child I was fond of taking this dress off its padded hanger, measuring its tiny waist against my own and fingering the column of pearl buttons that fastened it from chest to toe. From the buttons grew a tracery of leaves and flowers picked out in beads and gold and silver thread. All of this artifice aimed to recreate a seventeenth century Russian costume and Doris’s mother wore it to a dance which I assume was one of many bourgeois imitations of Tsar Nicholas II’s famous 1903 fancy dress ball. The Dress was – still is – an extraordinary evocation of an era and culture that was about to be swept away by war and revolution.

The ability of clothing, usually made of very perishable materials and often dismissed as a rather superficial aspect of human life, to be so expressive of a particular time and place is a theme which runs through Aware: Art Fashion Identity, currently showing at the Royal Academy of Arts. Although the exhibition is divided into four sections – Storytelling, Building, Belonging and Confronting and Performance – the boundaries between these categories are as porous and fleeting as our own sense of self can be when faced with the jumble of styles and ‘fashion statements’ on offer in a street market or department store. All of the works in the exhibition refer in some way to that classic clothing conundrum – is the outfit a chameleon or a peacock, designed for camouflage or display?

The odd, hybrid constructions made by Mella Jaarsma who was born in Holland but moved to Indonesia in the 1980s explore the way in which personal items like clothing have been commandeered by modern nation states to try and create and impose collective shared identities. Shelter Me, a shrine with a pagoda style roof that can be worn like an unwieldy suit of armour is really a 3-D representation of pancasila, the state philosophy that tries to unite Indonesia’s very diverse population without letting any single racial or religious group dominate the others. Decorated with a rosary, Muslim prayer beads and incense sticks the shrine makes its wearer look rather like a piece of scenery in an Indonesian shadow puppet play.

If Jaarsma’s work uses costume and clothing to project ideas of national identity and unity – ideas that may never fully enter reality but remain the stuff of dreams and government directives – Marie-Ange Guilleminot’s Kimono Memories of Hiroshima attempts to unpick and rewind an actual historical event. Guilleminot became fascinated by items of clothing that survived the nuclear blast in Hiroshima which she then recreated, along with all their individual flaws and signs, entirely in white fabric. The patterns of these ‘ghost clothes’ were then incorporated into kimonos, symbols of disaster but also regeneration and reinvention.

If all of this seems to be loading an awful lot of significance on to a few fragments of cloth there are plenty of pieces in this exhibition which can be admired as objects of random beauty and strangeness without any need for purpose or meaning. Grayson Perry has contributed Artist’s Robe, a hooded, monk-like garment embroidered with staring eyes that seem to emerge from an elemental background of fire and forest, their lashes represented by tendrils of flame and foliage. In Widow Susie MacMurray has made a dress from leather and dressmaker’s pins (see above). At first glance it looks like a fairly conventional statement dress, a silvery column designed for a bit of model/actress/celeb posing. On closer examination it reveals a more archaic side, underpinning (sorry) fashion’s roots as a fetish, a ritual that demands suffering either from those who wear or make it or possibly both. The long pins which completely submerge the leather bring to mind Pin Money and Needle Money, a pair of Punch cartoons dating from the 1840s that sum up fashion’s longstanding entanglement of pleasure and pain. Pin Money shows a privileged young lady having her hair dressed by a servant whilst Needle Money is set in a shabby room where an exhausted woman sews for hours at a time and gets paid a pittance.

Oh dear it’s all drifted back to meaning again but whether it’s looking at the globalised nature of the fashion industry or the way we use clothes to both conceal and reveal this exhibition contains many more ideas than could be fitted into the current It bag.

Aware: Art Fashion Identity is at the Royal Academy until 30th January 2011

Image: Widow by Susie MacMurray © the artist, photo by Andy Stagg, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts, London