Fashion has been the love of my life since I was a little kid pouring over magazines and watching shows on fashion TV in the middle of the night. But I’ve always known fashion is not about clothing, its about feeling and it’s about people. That’s why I love to read the stories about people who work in fashion, who have been impacted by fashion and those who love it just as much as I do.
In Dress Code, fashion director Veronique Hyland makes the connection between clothing and our culture.
She argues that fashion is an integral part of all of our lives and explains the ways that it means so much more than the outfit hanging in our closets. The essays are great at helping the reader contextualize clothing in a world where social media and politics, inform the way we shop and style ourselves.
A New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2022 * An Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of 2022 * A Town & Country Must-Read Book of 2022 * A Fashionista Summer Read
"Smart, funny, and impressively thorough."-The Cut
In the spirit of works by Jia Tolentino and Anne Helen Peterson, a smart and incisive essay collection centered on the fashion industry-its history, its importance, why we wear what we wear, and why it matters-from Elle Magazine's fashion features director.
Why does fashion hold so much power over us? Most of us care about how we dress and how we present ourselves. Style…
Everybody (Else) Is Perfect is a memoir about the author, but it speaks to the ways fashion and beauty have created impossible standards for us all to live by.
Korn was the editor-in-chief of NYLON, which from the outside seems like one of the most glamorous jobs in the world. But, as she details, things are not always as they seems. While brands and magazines promote body positivity and feminism on the inside they’re doing anything but.
From the former editor-in-chief of Nylon comes a provocative and intimate collection of personal and cultural essays featuring eye-opening explorations of hot button topics for modern women, including internet feminism, impossible beauty standards in social media, shifting ideals about sexuality, and much more.
Gabrielle Korn starts her professional life with all the right credentials. Prestigious college degree? Check. A loving, accepting family? Check. Instagram-worthy offices and a tight-knit group of friends? Check, check. Gabrielle’s life seems to reach the crescendo of perfect when she gets named the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of one of fashion’s most influential publication. Suddenly…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
If you have any interest in the supermodel era of fashion, Champagne Supernovas is a great look into a piece of it.
The book gives you an inside look at the style scene in the 1990s highlighting moments with Kate Moss, Alexander McQueen, Marc Jacobs, and more. It details some of the most powerful people’s personal struggles, and how the culture they had been thrust into only made it worst. It’s glamorous, sure, but the exploration of the underbelly of popular culture makes it that much more exciting to read.
“Terrifically exciting and fun” (Publishers Weekly), Champagne Supernovas is “a lucid, smoothly executed look at a pivotal decade in the legacy of American fashion” (Kirkus Reviews) as told through the lives of Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, and Alexander McQueen—the three iconic personalities who defined the time.
Veteran pop culture journalist Maureen Callahan takes us back to the pivotal style moment of the early 1990s—when supermodel glamazons gave way to heroin chic, when the alternative became the mainstream, and when fashion suddenly became the cradle for the most exciting artistic and cultural innovations of the age. Champagne Supernovas gives you the…
If you prefer something more visual when it comes to books about style, Worn in New York is certainly that.
It’s a fun look at specific pieces of clothing that were, well, worn in New York by influential people. Each one is a first-person account of a specific item and it corresponds to a photo of the piece. One of my favorites is the story and image of actress Aubrey Plaza’s page uniform that she apparently stole when she worked at NBC.
The boots a passenger had on when his plane landed on the Hudson River. The tank top Andy Warhol's assistant wore to one of their nightclub outings together. The jacket a taxi driver put on to feel safe as he worked the night shift.
These and over sixty other clothing-inspired narratives make up Worn in New York, the latest volume from New York Times bestselling author Emily Spivack. In these first-person accounts, contributors in and out of the public eye share surprising, personal, wild, poignant, and funny stories behind a piece of clothing that reminds them of a significant moment…
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for…
Other People’s Clothes isn’t exactly a fashion book but it’s so stylish that it deserves a place on my list.
Two American girls in Berlin find themselves deeply embedded in a massive party scene and a murder mystery. All the while there is incredible clothing and weird costumes. It reads like you’re in the scene with them, trying on strange hats and jackets, staying out late, and spinning out of control.
'Full of delicious layers . . . I felt drunk reading it.' Emma Jane Unsworth
Intoxicating, compulsive and blackly funny, Other People's Clothes is the thrilling debut novel from Berlin-based American artist Calla Henkel.2009. Berlin. Two art students arrive from New York, both desperate for the city to solve their problems. Zoe is grieving for her high school best friend, murdered months before in her hometown in Florida. Hailey is rich, obsessed with the exploits of Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears and wants to be a Warholian legend. Together they rent a once-magnificent apartment from eccentric crime writer Beatrice…
Worn Out: How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion’s Sins is in part, a story about working in fashion from the author’s experiences in the offices of Teen Vogue and InStyle, to one of garment workers on the factory floor around the world. It’s also about just how much impact our clothing has on the world, and why the industry has gotten away with horrific labor practices, and overproduction for as long as it has. You’ll read about four women who have experienced abuse, wage theft, and more just to make the clothing we wear.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria…
This delightful fable about the Golden Age of Broadway unfolds the warm story of Artie, a young rehearsal pianist, Joe, a visionary director, and Carrie, his crackerjack Girl Friday, as they shepherd a production of a musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream towards opening night.
