Grimmelshausen's novelDer Abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch opens with the following sentence:

Clothing has meaning. It is, as Entwistle points out in her important monograph in 2000, used to express and shape social realities and to construct individual identities (114). As the quotation indicates, people can use clothing to represent themselves as someone they are not. Social status and identities can be manipulated and even forged through certain uses of dress, if identifiable rigid social norms for dress exist within the group. This gives rise to the possibility of play: clothing can be compliant, deceptive, or outright transgressive. Clothing with its almost unlimited and complex options for signification thus allows the individual to play with identities, but, more important, it gives the narrator a useful tool to play with the identity of his characters, as well as with his own. From this perspective, the opening sentence is designed to send a signal to the reader that clothing and its playful and potentially transgressive use will assume a central role in the novel.

Clothing and bodies in Simplicissimus, I will argue, engage in an unstable relationship that is a major source signaling the protagonist's unstable identity. Simplicissimus's identity is continuously renegotiated throughout the novel through a mechanism described by Munns and Richards in another context: “Bodies and clothes endlessly redefine each other to forge, adapt, adopt — and deny — varieties of selfhood […]” (Munns and Richards, 9).