In the mid-1990s, with the rise of supermodels and the advent of the tent shows in Bryant Park, fashion became a spectator sport. For the last decade, we haven’t been able to turn around without bumping into huge coffee-table books on designers old and new, not to mention intellectuals riffing on the semiotics of haute couture. But what’s there to read for someone who thinks more about clothes than fashion, more about the real life of the things we wear?

The answer comes from one of our most brilliant commentators on culture and identity, Elizabeth Kendall, whose “Autobiography of a Wardrobe” (Pantheon, $20) hits bookstores this week. Ms. Kendall is the author of three nonfiction books: “Where She Danced,” about the women of modern dance, “The Runaway Bride,” about screwball heroines of the 1930s, and “American Daughter,” a memoir about her mother and, by extension, the progressive, postwar American woman. The themes at play in Ms. Kendall’s previous books have pointed the way to this one, her own memoir. Here her probing observations are energized by a keen recall of the clothes she wore from earliest memory, and how they fit her forming character — or didn’t fit.

In the introduction of “Autobiography of a Wardrobe,” the author asks us to suspend disbelief and accept that her wardrobe is narrating the book. Ms. Kendall is B., the wardrobe tells us, “My inhabitant, My partner, My Body — My B.” Beginning with a preverbal memory of red corduroy overalls “that smelled clean,” the book consists of 47 short chapters, each a vividly remembered outfit, or trend, or a store that defined a fashion moment and its philosophy (Marimekko, Charivari), or an event defined by the way one dresses for it (dance party girdle, funeral service black).

One turns these pages with anticipation and pleasure, as if going chronologically through a photo album with a worldly companion at one’s side. Spanning the last 50 years or so, Ms. Kendall’s wardrobe brims with collectible perceptions. For instance, “Grandmother liked coats,” she writes.”People do, I think, who have itinerant childhoods.”

She’s wonderful when analyzing status clothes — Shetland sweaters, for example — whose “precise and peculiar Anglophilia” seems to answer a pervasive social anxiety. And when she puts on boy’s pants to go falconing with her father, it is her first freedom from “the smug obedience that belonged to wardrobes then.”

Darker chapters take hold at the center of the book, during college and the searching years after. We learn of the death of B.’s mother in a car accident on a family trip, and we see mourning from the outside, in the way B. hides in clothes, as if she thinks dressing unlike herself will throw sadness off the scent. B.’s emptiness meets its match in a baffling getup she wears “for every occasion”: striped denim bell bottoms paired with a brown leather hat. Losing interest in one’s wardrobe is itself a kind of death.

In the epilogue, the wardrobe leaps 25 years, from the success of B.’s first book, published in 1979 (she wears a cream silk ’20s dress to the book party, like a jazz-age bride), to a recent experience in a dressing room in Russia, where B. tries on a brightly embroidered skirt and suddenly looks old. She isn’t old, her wardrobe tells us, but “she’s had one of those dressing-room jolts that occur when an image in the mirror collides with one’s impulse to look fresh and vital.”

In this moment we realize that one of the beauties of Ms. Kendall’s book is that it is not remotely about beauty. The evolving silhouette of her wardrobe has consistently been about truth — who she is and what she believes in — and about the physical and emotional freedom needed to pursue truth.