Books: Wife Dressing

I've been meaning to review Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife for ages; it's been sitting here on the little typing table I use as an auxiliary desk (which should have a big bin on it labeled "stuff you should get to today but probably won't").

Make no mistake, this is a book primarily about "dressing for HIM" (the sub-subtitle is "With Provocative Notes for the Patient Husband Who Pays the Bills") and, although Fogarty was a very successful designer, she downplays that quite a bit (she spends more time talking about her eighteen-inch waist!). You get the impression that perhaps her Mister (one or all of them; she married three times) wasn't entirely comfortable with a breadwinning wife and that this book, in part, was meant to reassure him that he, too, was important in her life ... even if she was selling thousands of dollars of dresses every year.

But once you get past that, the book is full of gems, such as:

A travel wardrobe is personal. ... It is a condensation of your regular wardrobe, not a separate entity. After all, you're still the same person whether you're at home or far away, and you'll want familiar garments with you. Never cut your gear so close to the bone that you leave your personality behind.

(italics Fogarty's)

or how about this?

As for flagrant bad taste, there aren't too many examples. Shorts on a city street is one of the worst. This shows a lack of self-respect and a contempt for the people who are properly dressed. .... Strapless dresses in town are as bad. If a dress is strapless, it's either a cocktail dress that should be worn after five or else it's a sundress and should stay in the sun.

And my favorite:

The art of courage and discretion is a clarion cry for individuality, a turning away from slavish adherence to every fashion or beauty trend. Courage and discretion go hand in hand: the courage to dare to be yourself, the discretion not to overdo; the courage to do something unusual, the discretion to temper it.

That's good advice for everyone, whether there's a husband in the picture or not. In fact, it's even good advice for husbands themselves.

Books!

First off is Yeah! I Made It Myself, by Eithne Farry, which has been languishing under a pile of language-related books I have to review for I don't know how long. Since I came back from London, at the very least. Which is a shame, because it's a charming book.

I fell into immediate sympathy with the author, who declares (in the first fifty pages) her love for bias tape, sewing with furnishing fabric, and bright colo[u]rs.

But, be aware this is much more of a punk-rock, you-go-girlfriend-type book than a Martha Stewart "here are my 105 downloadable templates" type book. Most of the measurements given are approximate; the "diagrams" are done in what looks like magic marker. If you need constant reassurance that you are "doing it right", this is not the book for you; if you want to feel as if any way you do it is right (within reason), jump right in.

This book would be a perfect present for a teen friend who wants to sew but is put off by the embellished-quilted-vest crowd you see on a lot "traditional" sewing books ... just keep an eye on your curtains.





The other book that's up for review today is 99 Ways To Cut, Sew, Tie & Rock Your Scarf I was really looking forward to this one, because I'm always interested in ways to make clothing-type stuff from things that aren't necessarily fabric (although of course with scarves it's changing one clothing-type thing into another clothing-type thing, or, in this case, 99 other clothing-type things).

All of the 99 versions in this book have women's names, and, believe it or not, my copy fell open to "Erin" ... which is a balloon skirt. Not an auspicious start, although your opinion of balloon skirts may differ from mine. (My opinion is I hate 'em.) I think this was a sign that I'm not the intended audience for this book: first off, I don't really ever "rock" anything I'm wearing -- I prefer to "power-pop" my clothing, the choruses are better -- also I'm not a big fan of the halter top, versions of which I would estimate take up a good quarter of the "99 ways". One other reason why I figured I wasn't the audience for this book: none of the illustrated models are wearing eyeglasses! (Sunglasses don't count.)

However, if you are a halter-top fan, and you have been looking for a good quick balloon-skirt pattern, this book is totally for you. The instructions are clear and easy to follow and there's a great glossary of terms at the end. And even if you don't want 47 scarf-based tops that you can't wear a bra under, the "Jolene" kimono-style jacket is really lovely.

Again, though, this is a sewing book for non-sewers: almost every project can be made without a machine, and the emphasis is heavily on "find the scarf (preferably in a thrift store) today, wear it out tonight."

I actually got two copies of this, so if you want one, here's how to get it: be the first person to tell me where I can buy two more yards of this cotton poplin camouflage fabric:



I had just enough for a skirt ... I thought. Then I saw that I'd dropped the center-back pattern piece on the floor. D'oh! So help me out, and get a free book! Email or comments are both fine ways to enter. If you leave a comment, though, make sure I can reach you to get an address for the sending of your prize!

Book Review: The Meaning of Sunglasses

I was recently sent a copy of Hadley Freeman's The Meaning of Sunglasses to review. I wasn't exactly sure that I would enjoy it; you all know how I feel about most of the fashion-industrial complex. Also I have exactly one pair of (prescription) sunglasses, and they're decidedly not designer (they're very nice tortoise cats-eyes, classic, I've had them for years): what on earth would I find to like in a book called The Meaning of Sunglasses?

The answer, of course, is "quite a bit". Hadley's voice is wry and quite often exasperated and she doesn't take either herself or the fashion industry too seriously. We also agree on the core issues, e.g., dresses:

A good dress will never make you feel fat, it can be worn with flats or heels, and everybody can find a style that suits them—absolutely none of these statements can be applied to trousers with 100 percent certainty.

and shoes:

The brilliant thing about the sudden and surprising emergence of the thick heel—aside from the fact that, after 2000 years, shoemakers seem to have come to grips with the idea of weight distribution—is that it doesn't look like you're trying so hard to be sexy, and this, in itself, is sexier.

Of course, there is much that Ms Freeman and I disagree on: she's very down on orange coats (my favorite coat of the fall was traffic-cone orange); she's not a fan of Liberty ("Liberty prints have a kitsch appeal and so can only be worn in measured doses"), and neither does she like cardigans ("it is a rare woman who gets too excited about buying just one cardigan, never mind four or five" — I must be a rare woman, then ...). Wacky eyeglasses also come in for a little bit of finger-wagging. But her tone is such that I know if I met her in a bar wearing my orange coat, a cotton cardigan over my riotous Liberty-print dress, with bright-blue eyeglasses, she'd roll with it, and we'd have a great time.

Another plus: I laughed out loud several times, especially at this bit about Karl (He-Must-Be-Stopped) Lagerfeld: "Now he looks like a psychotic sixteenth-century German courtier, just as he'd intended."

Ideally, this is a book that a close girlfriend would give you as a gift, with the funnier parts called out with little post-it tags. At $24.95, it's just slightly too expensive (and the content slightly too lightweight) to really justify as a fashion-library addition. Also, if you read it straight through (as I did), some of it has the feel of reworked newspaper columns (Ms Freeman writes for the Guardian), with some repeated phrases and jokes. In fact, while you're waiting for someone to give you this book, I recommend subscribing to her RSS feed.

As for the sunglasses ... you'll have to read the book to find out exactly what they mean. This is a spoiler-free zone, people!

Book Review: Basic Black

I was asked if I wanted a copy of Basic Black for review, and I said "yes, of course." Cathie Black is the president of Hearst Magazines; I am a magazine junkie: why not?

Basic Black is not only very readable (unlike quite a few other how-to-succeed-books I've come across) it's also very enjoyable. Ms. Black has a practical, friendly tone that comes across well on the page, and her advice is of the "this worked for me, I think it will work for you" variety rather than a one-size-fits-all manifesto. The whole book leaves you feeling refreshed and optimistic about the world of work and your place in it.

Here's one of my favorite bits:

If you want to be an innovator, express yourself like an innovator. Dress in something with verve rather than a corporate uniform. Take your team offsite and do something wacky. Wear a costume to a sales meeting [...] and recruit a few others to do the same. Pick a theme -- have people dress like cartoon characters.

I really wish I'd recruited people to dress like cartoon characters more often. It's absolutely on the to-do list now!

One of the things I really appreciated about Ms. Black and her book was that she doesn't think that feminism and business are incompatible. She worked for Ms. and for USA TODAY -- and you don't get more mainstream than USA TODAY! And when people grumbled that she hired "too many women" (whatever THAT means) she made her point in a very direct, concrete, and nonconfrontational way: at a holiday lunch for Hearst executives, she was supposed to make some brief remarks after the meal. She stood up and said: "Some people seem to think I hire too many women. I just want you to know I'm listening to their complaints. So I thought I'd do a little survey. Would the women executives please stand up?" A third of the room stands. Then she asks for the male executives to stand ... and when dozens of men get to their feet, her point is made.

One of her best points, I think, is a slightly-kinder "Get over it," urging women not to dwell on their mistakes but to pick themselves up and move on. "If I needed three days to get over every day I was criticized, I'd never have gotten anything done in my career," she warns. It's more important to get things done than to get things done perfectly, and better to try and fail than never try at all.

If you're looking for a book for a recent college graduate, especially one interested in working in publishing or media (or sales, for that matter), this is an excellent choice, and it's not bad for people who have been in the work world for a while, either.

Books Books Books

The post office has delivered some fun books lately for me to share with you -- I love getting review copies, especially of novels, because then reading for fun magically becomes Work with a capital W. As in, "Honey, I'd love to put away the laundry right now, but I really have to finish this book for Work. You understand, don't you?" Of course, my husband twigged to this little ruse years ago, so there's some eye-rolling involved (and if I'm eating chocolate while "Working" all bets are off) but still. It's fun.

One of the books that was sent to me was this one, Violet on the Runway, which I suppose is technically YA, although it certainly has what we used to call Adult Content. All I know is that if I had come across this when I was thirteen, I would have read it three times, and even as an adult, it was truly entertaining. The people are whole and well-rounded and I liked Violet very much, as the ugly duckling who turns out to be a swan (and who might be happier as a duckling). It was so nice to read a fashion-y book that didn't go overboard with the brand names, didn't seem like an extended game of paper dolls, and which featured people you could like and understand. An excellent book for your favorite fashion-mad teen (and if you're careful and don't get chocolate on the pages, you can read it yourself first).




I was also sent The Collection, a novel set in part in the workrooms of Coco Chanel; kind of a The Devil Wears Prada, only with Coco as the Devil. I tend to like historical fiction, and this was a nice change from kings of the realm and so on. Unfortunately, the characters were a bit flatter than my ideal -- I kept waiting for Isabelle to do something dramatic -- but the plot was such that I read it all in one sitting, so that must mean *something*. (Weirdly, I also got an email blast from The New Yorker yesterday inviting me to a reading of this novel at the Eileen Fisher store in the Water Tower Mall. Is Eileen Fisher the new Chanel and nobody told me? It certainly makes a kind of sense.)

Lastly, this is probably better suited for my other blog, but Burgess Unabridged is just an adorable book, and I'm so glad that Walker has brought it back in print. Gelett Burgess was, in fact, the guy who coined the word blurb, which makes me insanely happy, in a meta kind of way, that I was able to blurb this book. (Not many people get to blurb the blurber.) Burgess Unabridged is a collection of his other neologisms, none of which ever had the success of blurb, but which make for interesting reading, nonetheless. Like the word kipe, which he defines as "A woman's glance at another woman." Leaving aside the heteronormativity of that for the moment, doesn't that word describe every two-figure illustrated pattern envelope you've ever seen? Or his word gorgule, meaning "elaborate bad taste," something we always know when we see it -- and now have a handy word for. Burgess Unabridged is illustrated, too, by Herb Roth, in a kind of Aubrey Beardsley-meets-Gahan-Wilson style.

There. A little light reading for a Wednesday?

The Little Black Book of Style by Nina Garcia

Collins recently sent me a copy of The Little Black Book of Style to review; not one to turn down free books, I said "Yea, O Publisher, send unto me," and I was glad I did.

This gladness took the form most often called smugness, as the lovely and talented Nina Garcia agrees with me on all the important points of style, to wit:

"Your closet should be full of only pieces that look good on you and make you feel good about yourself" (see my post here)

"A stylish woman makes me want to walk up to her and say "Where did you get that? ... I just have to find out where it is from. A flea market, her grandmother's closet, wherever." (see my post about clothes & stories here)

"Go a little crazy. Be a little dramatic. Have a lot of fun." (the 'crazy' skirt, here)

Now, I know, I know, Ms. Garcia is on The Television, and I am not (or, I am, but rarely, and never talking about fashion) so perhaps I should not be saying how happy I am that she agrees with me, but how glad I am to agree with a internationally-known arbiter of style. But if you have been reading this blog for a while, this is a book you won't get into arguments with, or mutter "What is she thinking?" on every other page. Instead, you will do a lot of nodding (when you aren't gazing lovingly at the Ruben Toledo illustrations).

The one point on which Ms. Garcia and I will have to agree to disagree is the necessity of having a faaaaaabulous handbag. I think that a Chanel 2.55 bag is quite possibly the most horrible handbag ever, totally boring, and expensive to boot. (And it doesn't have a pocket for my Treo, which tells you where I'm coming from.) Nor would I wait a gazillion years for a Hermés Birkin bag, even if I thought that kind of money was chump change. (In fact, I hate the whole handbag-industrial complex, and come the revolution I will cheer as they are driven through the streets in a tumbril.)

The fashion-advice bits (aside from the handbag stuff) are straightforward and sensible; the brief biography she allows herself is interesting and the quotations scattered through the book are apt (although one wishes they were SOURCED, but not everyone is as OCD about that as reference book editors ...). Her what-to-wear-when advice is pretty good -- I wish she had forbidden wearing black as well as white to weddings but I may have to silently resign myself to being the only person alive to follow that rule.

It's a small book, though, and it is padded with the plots of important fashion movies (!) and thumbnail 'who-dat?' sketches of fashionable rock stars (!!) and an incredibly brief timeline of 'fashion history', none of which is especially useful to anyone who was born before 1995. The paragraphs (one each) given to Africa and fashion and Asia and fashion were also a bit painful, and could have been cut without harm to the book or Ms. Garcia ... there is also a series of Q&As with various fashion-y people, the quality of which is uneven. Some of them are funny, revealing, and generous, and some of them seem to have been emailed via a Blackberry from the back of a cab.

In short, if you want a petite, elegantly-designed, sensible book on style, this is for you. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but there's nothing stupid, either (except for maybe those Africa- and Asia-in-fashion paragraphs), and that's not to be sneered at. I recommend it!

Saturday Night Hat

Caroline was nice enough to send me a copy of Saturday Night Hat by Eugenia Kim, and I *really* like it.

First of all, and I know this is the kind of thing only an editor would notice or appreciate, but one Joanne Paek is given credit, right on the cover, for technical writing. That's awesome, because, well, technical pattern writing is HARD. And no matter how good you are at the doing, the writing of the doing is a completely different skill. I really admire Kim (and her publisher, Potter Craft) for not only hiring a technical writer, but giving her prominent credit. That's a sign of a generous spirit and consideration for the readers.

And that generous spirit continues through the book. Kim outlines half-a-dozen classic hats with as many variations each. I'm not especially a hat person (okay, I love hats, but that thing you do when you look in the mirror and take one thing off before you leave the house? What usually comes off, in my case, is the hat) but I'm definitely going to make her beret, and probably the cloche and the fedora as well, if I can figure out a way to keep the latter two from fighting with my glasses. Some of her hats are worth wearing contact lenses for, and that's saying something.

One last thing: isn't that bib dress on the cover adorable! I love it with the fedora (although I also believe that cowboy boots are fashion-victimy nine times out of ten. Of course, every time I see that tenth woman on whom cowboy boots are *perfect*, I change my mind ...)

Thank you, Caroline! What a great book!