Dedicated Followers of Fashion Bien Sur

Well, of course, this book Paris Fashion by Valerie Steele, is going to remind me of other books I've reviewed on the Slackers because I like books about France/Paris and about clothing as both a socio-political and highly personal artistic statement.  This book is "A Cultural History," which traces what women wore in the French capital from the Dark Ages through the mid-1980s.  The section on the Revolution recalls me reading of Queen of Fashion - What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, although Steele covers that era as part of a natural progression of style.

I am concurrently reading The Frenzy of Renown -- Fame and Its History, and both books posit that not only fame but fashion requires an admiring, imitative audience.  The person seeking celebrity and the individual desiring to be a trend setter need to know their milieus, time, place and admirers.  To Steele, Paris was and to an extent continues to be "the ultimate stage ... to act our the drama of seeing and being seen."

..." fashions only acquired meaning within the context of various scenes of fashionable rendezvous ... where fashion performers and spectators interacted ... The scenes of modern urban leisure were precisely those where fashion was displayed to greatest effect.  In one way or another, all these scenes were intimately associated with the "libido of looking."

In another similar vein, both PF and TFoR, a couple of chapters into the respective chronologies, move from the actor-hero-style setter to the recorder-observer-author as the arbiter and interpreter of success.  Steele drifts into Balzac, Baudelalaire and Proust as writers who recognized fashion as a character-defining expression.  While the authors have achieved more fame than any of their contemporary couturiers, they knew how clothing telegraphs class/station of life, wealth/aspirations and sexuality.

Fashion yet remains a decorative art with a short half-life subject to public fancy; fame is historically timeless.  Clothing is universal; dress is regional; being chic entails flagrant personal expression to be noticed; but once copied, being uniquely and individually on-edge mutates to a fad of the masses that is cheapened by loss of style.  Steele concludes her history with an exploration of the difference between what I call the tension between wearing a uniform and wearing a costume.  Actually, one could interpret a uniform as a costume of camouflage.  A fine line distinguishes the gaudy, trying too hard costumer from the trend setter who can adapt and personalize a look to draw the eyes of others without flaunting too loudly, thereby creating the essence of chic.  Steele contrasts the rich wives who frequented Worth versus the mistresses who had more expensive dresses, often from the same fashion designer, but no where respectable to wear them ... except maybe at Longchamps ... which gets me off on a tangent-rant about the lack of dress code at the track today

I conclude a person cannot be famous for what he or she is wearing ... one can only be noticed and recalled rather than remembered and modeled.  What will I wear to work tomorrow?

Off to an Unsatisfying Start

My idea for selecting books this year is to pick one word and find a book that fits it.  This is a mediocre substitute for my original idea of reading books with only one word in their titles.  So, whatever word I searched, the first book I finished this year is Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes? by Jena Pincott.  In a sense it is a reprise of 2011 lust list, its subtitle being Bodies, Behavior and Brains -- The Science Behind Sex, Love and Attraction.

Pincott's structure is based on almost 100 questions and answers, the questions are those asked at every girl's pajama party and every woman's coffee klatch.  The answer are larded with "scientific" evidence from studies at various universities.  Because the book is only 308 pages long, each question receives concise or short shrift.  The entire thing reminds me of dealing browsing on the health or science section of Yahoo news.  Sound bites, nothing really thought provoking, almost ephemeral. 

The only thing that surprised me was back to my six degrees of separation game ... Pincott cites one experiment that employed the Nash equilibrium and I have been plodding through A Beautiful Mind for months. 

The pile of books on the nightstand hopefully will provide more thoughtful reading.  My search for lobster has linked me to a book about Maine-iacs and I have others on fame and fashion.  For the sake of my compulsion to alphabetize, I'll reference the subject of this treatise as "Attraction."