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Quite a lot of the time I spend working on antiquarianism in the romantic period and when Mary Kay asked me if I'd like to do a lecture before I had a chance to say yes or no

she said we don't want antiquarianism so antiquarianism is one of the things this isn't about.

It's not exactly about clothes either and it's certainly not about fashion. What it is about is women

and clothes and something that happens between them, which I think one might think of as a kind of third

rail of female experience.

And I thought about this a lot over the years, but my thoughts were focused when I saw, I went

with a friend from the LRB actually, to see Isabel Rupert in Paul Ververhvern's 2016 film,

L.

That film, if you haven't seen it,

begins with a rape, a violent rape,

about which the victim, Upaire, is ambivalent.

And this fact, of course, sent critics,

particularly male critics,

scuttling to and fro in all directions,

wondering whether it was really feminist

or post-feminist or anti-feminist or just in some baffling way French.

In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw went for provocative, and I think we can have the slide now there we are I think that's the sort of

moment that he had in mind when he called it provocative and then he threw the critical kitchen

...