“Sitting there in her chair, baring her soul, she is all woman; I don’t think that about the Barbie dolls on Fox News,” says Welsh-born director Siri Bunford of the narrator of Too Much of Me, her incendiary portrait of the pressure that comes with thinking about clothes.

Adapted from a passage in the book Women in Clothes, the performance crystallizes the pain, pride and desire for redemption that an ordinary woman experiences when trying to fit into her maternity dress. “She feels invisible for complex reasons,” explains Bunford. “We talk a lot about how women are portrayed in magazines and the media, the need to conform to the female stereotype, and that can be pernicious, but in all honesty, if you’ve got half a brain, why does all that nonsense stick?” 

Inspired by a JH Engström photograph, Bunford, by laying bare her subject, subverts the notion that our self-worth is driven by what we wear. “It’s important she presents herself to us without a disguise, without the connotations that her choice of dress would bring,” says the director. “I wanted it to feel very painterly, to highlight the whiteness of her skin against the darkness of the background.” 

Part three of The Way We Dress premieres July 22.