Boots can make you feel fat. There will never be another black. Blouses? Even librarians wear them only in films.
BOOK REVIEW
The Meaning of Sunglasses: And a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable
Hadley Freeman; Viking, 234 pages, $24.95
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Good fashion tips, no? Hadley Freeman is the United Kingdom Guardian's deputy fashion editor and a contributing editor to Vogue. She is very British. And yet, who can deny the truisms in “The Meaning of Sunglasses”? Why is it that most fashions only last for approximately six months? “So just as for a five-year-old girl, the once seemingly unsurpassable appeal of Eskimo Barbie wanes with the arrival of Tahiti Barbie.”
I think that says it all, but I'm wrong. There's much more. Neatly collected in a useful A-Z format, “The Meaning of Sunglasses” seems to be culled from Freeman's columns and is the must-read for serious students of sartorial studies. And it makes a perfect bathroom book, which is a compliment if you're a humor writer. At least in this country.
Freeman's being very British is both good and bad: It's fun to see Orwell tossed into a book that is also chatting about pantyhose, but, boy, does it make our country look stupid. Isn't it hard to imagine any fashion magazine here mentioning W.H. Auden? As in, “I went for a facial and was promptly informed that my face was sagging downwards – mirror held up with accompanying fingers indicating the trajectory of the movement – and, my God, the state of my dark circles meant that unless I had some laser surgery RIGHT NOW I would resemble W.H. Auden at the end of his life before the year was out.”
Then, there's Freeman's mention of the Mitfords – in the cardigan essay, naturally: “The cardigan fit in perfectly with the Mitford fashion trend in the early half a decade. This did not, sadly, involve designers advising women to go to prison with their fascist husbands or join the communist party but rather to buy lots of tweed skirts.”
But of course, Freeman is very British (did I mention that?), so she can't help but mention Kate Moss on every other page. Which is fine. Everyone mentions Kate. She's in a Lily Allen song. She's everywhere. And Freeman is right when she says, “The trajectory of a trend from Moss to mass to verboten is both swift and cruel.”
So that works. But sometimes she misses, as in this metaphor: “Generally, men take a Beach Boys approach when it comes to women's outfits: if the overall melody is good, it doesn't matter if the individual lyrics don't make the slightest bit of sense.” I'm trying very hard to think of a Beach Boys lyric that remains an enigma, and, “Surfer Girl” and “In My Room” notwithstanding, none come to mind.
On the whole, though, “The Meaning of Sunglasses” crosses the pond effortlessly and is full of fun and useful news:
Fur: Bad.
Velvet is a fabric reserved for a country club Christmas luncheon.
The fact that many women choose to wear bikinis instead of one-pieces pretty much proves that, at least on the beach, women might not be quite as neurotic about their bodies as generally assumed.
And sunglasses? Very simple. “They make you look cool, they make you look rich, they get you attention because people think you might be famous, and they might possibly stop wrinkles.”
Sorry. Didn't mean to give away the ending.
Jackie Jones is a freelance writer living in Northern California, where people understand boots.
