in rags

She loomed into the room in a starchy nightdress, and her sparse hair was tied up in rags.

He had every reason to be in rags, but he didn’t want to be seen that way.

While looking for a place where Catholic tradition held that Mary and Joseph took Jesus after fleeing to Egypt, he entered a neighborhood in Cairo teeming with people living in the street, dressed in rags and hungry and thirsty.

“Weird Barbie could have been in rags or in a crazy costume that was just pieces of things put together,” Durran says.

Listen, if you haven’t in a while, to the ebullience of his vocal in “Rags to Riches,” which he cut in 1953 and which Martin Scorsese revived decades later for the opening sequence of “Goodfellas”: Has any man ever sounded happier describing his empty pockets and his torn and tattered clothes?