Two dishy new books by veteran fashion journalists help explain why news from the runway has become increasingly irrelevant. In The End of Fashion: The Mass Marketing of the Clothing Business(William Morrow. $25), Wall Street Journal writer Teri Agins describes how creative wunderkinder like Isaac Mizrahi were forced out of business because they didn’t market to the mainstream consumer and how designers like Ralph Lauren made billions by selling us what amounted to a snazzy pair of khakis. “Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger were living proof that the end of fashion was already here,” Agins writes. “Designers without portfolios, neither had apprenticed in Paris, nor studied fashion in school or anywhere else. They didn’t sketch; they didn’t sew; they hardly designed. They were the haute couturiers of marketing.” Agins has a gift for bringing the business of fashion to life. She sits with Emanuel Ungaro as he hand-stitches a couture dress that looks stunning even turned inside out. She cruises the mall and riffs on the American passion for department stores. She goes to Wall Street and deconstructs Donna Karan’s IPO. It may indeed be the end of fashion, but Agins makes it an entertaining ride.
In A Dedicated Follower of Fashion(Phaidon. $29.95), Holly Brubach collects 15 years’ worth of essays from The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Like Agins, Brubach has benefited from writing about fashion for publications that don’t depend on the industry for advertising. The charm of Brubach’s essays is her dedication to not only covering Fashion as dictated by London, Paris and Milan, but also what passes for fashion in regular life: men with gold chains and neon-colored Speedos on Jones Beach, the popularity of size-16 dresses from Lane Bryant and the rise of eyeglasses as fashion accessories. Brubach writes about clothes as more than garments; they’re symbols for our collective state of mind. “At some point along the way, it occurred to me that fashion is in fact architecture’s feminine counterpart,” she writes. “Buildings and clothes are the primary components of our everyday landscape and they embody the ideas and the attitudes of the time in which we live.” While it may be true that, fashionably speaking, we are living in a Gap world, these are two couture-level books: thought-provoking, rich and complicated by design.
