YES, as the title suggests, this book talks a lot about clothes - silk gowns and vintage cocktail dresses, leather jackets and red snakeskin shoes, rags to riches.

But this is not your usual novel about fashion, written by a disgruntled magazine editorial assistant and studded with designer names. Orange Prize-winning British author Linda Grant takes the familiar phrase used to describe so many immigrants - 'they came to this country with only the clothes on their backs' - and turns it into a meditation on how people use clothes as a way to reinforce identity, to help themselves transform from who they are to who they hope to be.

The narrator is Vivien Kovaks, the daughter of Jewish-Hungarian refugees who immigrated to London in 1938, before the outbreak of World War II. Once safely installed in their rent-controlled apartment, they live a law-abiding, low-profile life, 'not so much peaceful as inert'.

Then there is her uncle Sandor Kovacs, a person apparently so vile that her father changed the spelling of his surname to distance himself from him. As a child, Vivien was told by her parents that they wanted nothing to do with her uncle on the grounds that he was a notorious slumlord, renting out squalid rooms to the desperate black immigrants from the Caribbean spilling into London in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet, the one time Sandor turns up on their doorstep in 1963, when Vivien is 10, the girl brought up in donated hand-me-downs is left with an indelible image: 'A man in an electric blue mohair suit, black hand-stitched suede shoes, his wrist flashing with a fancy watch attached to a diamond bracelet.'

Though her uncle is dismissed from the door by her father after a shouting match, Vivien seeks him out more than 10 years later when, now a young widow with no goals, she comes across his picture in a book about slum housing.

In the interim, he has been arrested, imprisoned and released for his slumlord crimes. Concealing her identity from him - though he guesses as much - she begins working for him, recording his dictation of his life story. As he peels back the layers of their family history, she discovers that things and people are not always as they appear.

Naturally, most of the interesting clothes belong to Vivien, their transformative powers obvious: From her awakening from awkward immigrants' child to London fashionista when an eccentric neighbour dies and leaves behind a stash of vintage clothing, to her experiments with punk outfits when she hooks up with Claude, her uncle's rough and edgy tenant.

But clothes are also a poignant reminder and reflection of identity. In his account of his past, Sandor describes how he was forced into a labour service by the Hungarian Fascists during the war. Already the dandy, he marched 'off to labour service in a suit which would not leave his back for a further four and a half years', until 'they no longer resembled clothes, but a kind of fungus excreted by his skin'.

Outlined like this, what Grant is doing might seem simplistic, even tedious, but she is too deft a writer to let her stitches show. It would be all too easy to say this book proves the phrase 'clothes make the man'. In fact, it does the opposite: The man makes his clothes, using them in often quixotic attempts to become what one not yet is.

Like many other man-made things, clothes reflect the aspirations of their owners. By trying to understand what people wear, we can try to understand where they are coming from and where they hope to go. As another phrase goes, we walk in their shoes.

If you like this, read: A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (2005, $17.66 with GST, Books Kinokuniya)

Two Ukrainian British sisters learn more about their family's past when they attempt to free their father from the clutches of a gold-digging Ukrainian immigrant.

ysteph@sph.com.sg