Dedicated Follower of Fashion

If you’re an advocate of Dress Up Fridays, the following reads on Borrowbox might be right up your runway! Shop Girl will appeal to anyone with an interest in fashion, shops and shopping. Readers will be familiar with Portas, an expert in shop display and branding, through her appearances on Mary, Queen of Shops and other TV shows.

This book traces her life from her childhood in Watford as a mischievous member of a very Irish family, to the tragic deaths of her parents and the beginnings of her career in John Lewis as the ‘shop girl’ of the title. The book ends with a fascinating insight into her work in window display at Harrods which she saw as,  “art, drama, a fantasy landscape where everything could be played out, a performance”.

Taking a different tack entirely, Fashion and Class by Rachel Worth explores how fashion, fabric, and society are interwoven. Beginning in the 18th century, she follows the complex ways in which we have expressed class identities through our choices of, and relationship to, clothes. Committed readers of history will find this to be an in-depth account which brings considered academic research to bear on a fascinating subject.

Also based on detailed and thorough archival research and available on audio book is Dressed for War by Julie Summers. This lays bare the world of the British edition of fashion magazine Vogue from the Blitz to the swinging sixties through the lens of editor Audrey Withers’ stewardship. Using great writers and photographers, Withers went beyond fashion in her coverage of the period arguing that to avoid politics when commissioning magazine content was in itself a political act, “a tacit approval to things as they are.”

Readers will experience another perspective on fashion design through Get a Life: The Diaries of Vivienne Westwood, based on this notorious designer’s online diary which she began writing in 2010. Westwood, an icon of the fashion industry is always passionate and provocative and discusses here her activism and experiences in fashion, art, politics and the environment with honesty and authenticity.

A good companion read on audio book is the designer’s full memoir Vivienne Westwood, in collaboration with biographer Ian Kelly, which charts the ideas, people and events that have formed her, from her working class childhood through the explosion that was Punk to her current status as a doyenne of the fashion world.

Returning to the relationship between clothing and self-expression, Legendary Artists and the Clothes They Wore by Terry Newman makes connections between the ways in which great artists worked and dressed. Newman, an accomplished fashion journalist, examines here the work of artists Andy Warhol, Robbert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring and Frida Kahlo, amongst others, as well as the influence of art and artists on fashion designers including Comme des Garcons, Marc Jacobs and Vivienne Westwood. Combining entertaining anecdotes, insightful discussion and an array of imagery, this book is both an engaging account of the subject and a visual feast.

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Submitted by Teresa B. in Pembroke Library.