Fashion, humor and history? Sign me up!
I am a big fan of Jennifer Wright. I follow her on Twitter, she’s amazing, and I really enjoyed It Ended Badly and Get Well Soon which are both snarky looks at history both well and unknown. Killer Fashion follows a similar conceit but it is way too short!
Atop their heads ladies would wear ribbons and baubles everywhere. But those ornaments they affixed turned all their heads to candle wicks.
I am a big fashion girl. It’s how I make my living, I dissect every red carpet and I follow fashion news pretty regularly. I went to school for fashion and actually learned about most of the trends and garments discussed in Killer Fashion in a more serious manner than this quick read.
Crinoline skirts were all the rage during the Victorian age. But those who weren’t burned up crisp might blow aloft and fly off cliffs.
Wright devotes one page of text and one page with a cartoon accompanied by a poem to two dozen trends of yesteryear including corsets, fontange, and long skirts as well as harmful materiels like asbestos. This is a great concept but I felt shortchanged by its brevity. This is a cute read. If you like fashion and taking a humorous look at the past then spend twenty minutes of your day reading Killer Fashion.
4.5 rounding down because it is so freaking short that I can’t even write 300 words about it without transposing who essays!
Do you have any other history of fashion books you would recommend?
It sounds like a fascinating topic that I would want a much deeper view on! I remember my last semester of undergrad, I looked through the fall classes catalog and was cursing myself for graduating on time because they were offering a Gender Studies class called “The Politics of Fashion.”
I was a Fashion Merchandising Major so most of the fashion history I received came from actual textbooks. My sister always likened my classes to Legally Blonde (although I never took History of Polka Dots). My husband (an electrical engineer) and I started dating my senior year; he was shocked when one of my senior level classes involved making weekly collages from magazines ?