Cintra Wilson's new book opens with a sentence about style - described as something that can either liberate or enslave us - and closes celebrating it as a magic, connective and irrepressible power. Yet this superficially simple circularity contains all sorts of exciting things.
Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style (W. W. Norton & Company) is indeed a journey across American style that lasted three years in the life of its author and that took Wilson from her childhood and teenage memories in San Francisco ("The Macramé Belt") to New York, passing through Washington DC with its "paleo-conservative ruling-class menswear", the fashion politics of the Sundance dress codes in Salt Lake City, and cracking Wyoming fashion in a local store while being utterly confused by Miami ("The Sand Belt") with its 100% semiotic hooker style adopted by ordinary women (that makes Wilson wonder what the hell do you wear there if you're a prostitute...).
The author approaches every single place she visits with a willingness to learn: in Kansas ("The Gun Belt") Wilson is mesmerised by over the top taxidermy displays at Cabela's, a huge outdoors store where you can find any weapon, gun and gadget for hunting and fishing ("most of the animals are on gigantic, if not life-size, facsimiles of natural settings, and stuffed into surreally ultraviolent attack poses, as if they'd been arranged by Art Basel conceptual pranksters, or a giggling group of 17-year-old sociopaths raised in a militant animal-hating cult"); while she is intimidated by the luxuriously ordered environment at the Los Angeles vintage boutique Lily et Cie to the point she thinks she is shopping for Gutenberg Bibles.
In each chapter Wilson is code-breaking – trying to interpret the great enigma of style hiding under the huge "vagina hats" donned by the ladies at the Kentucky Derby, or in the rural fashions witnessed at the Iowa State Fair.
From Chapter 11 on, Wilson studies Brooklyn, Manhattan and New York, taking the reader through some terrifically adventures through luxury boutiques. Wilson turned an expert in taking trips to such fashion temples between 2007 and 2011 when she was the Critical Shopper for the New York Times. Some truly hilarious experiences await Wilson inside the stores or in the changing rooms – from finding a Margiela jacket that looks like "something the Nazis might have done to Cookie Monster", to a puzzling cape-cum-shorts-cum tank top garment by Bless that makes her state "If Healther Locklear had a parasitic twin emerging from her sternum who happened to be a nun, this would be something they'd both agree they could wear to Starbucks".
Wilson's trips often become a way to ponder on certain phenomena including "masstige", a fusion of "mass" and "prestige" to indicate designers compelled to put their names on downmarket lines of affordable luxury; wearing fictionally distressed garments that falsify and fetishise real work, almost as if our clothes had been more active than us, and the process the fashion industry has adopted in the last few years - co-opting and appropriating social movements to maintain the status quo.
Wilson's writing is brash and loud, and her prose is a mixture of fire and gasoline: one of the most hilarious descriptions is about a shoe sale that inspires her a tragicomic comparison between a war zone and the shop floor where exhausted women are battling to find that perfect shoe on sale (or end up desperately looking for the other shoe that has gone missing in action in the shop...).
Dialogues are also terrific, in particular the brief exchange between Wilson and a Dolce & Gabbana shop assistant: after selecting over $30,000 worth of garments – actually just three pieces in total – and being invited to try them on in a dressing room with real cheetah fur covering its door, she tells the sales assistant "I'll be in here for a while. I am going to do a pile of blow and clean my gun." Rather than calling the authorities, the unperturbed shop assistant who welcomed her in the shop with a glass of champagne, simply replies: "So, I guess you'll be needing another drink".
While visiting various stores and shops, Wilson also has a few revelations: she has an epiphany in a Victoria's Secret boutique where she realises the message at the bottom of the lingerie on sale is that girls should think of themselves as "confections", and therefore as "something" to be used, devoured and then discarded with their pink "wrappers"; the ill-fitting clothes at Calvin Klein make her realise they are designed for the Asian market and therefore imply that America has lost its place as the gravitational centre of the aesthetic universe, while the dubious contents of the Reed Krakoff's boutique in Madison Avenue prove that, if you have the money to open such a space in this location, then you can officially claim you are a fashion designer.
Fear and Clothing is witty and funny, but Wilson doesn't write just about fashion in it, but touches upon politics, economy, financial markets, society, anthropology and philosophy, especially in the last pages of the book. Fashion-wise her travels lead her to a very final discovery that is under the eye of everybody: fashion stood absolutely still in the last ten years, there are indeed so many designers, trends and options, that everything is back at the same time and nothing terribly new has been generated.
What's left then? Just us with our own styles, doubts, and wardrobes, those "laboratories" where we chemically experiment with our daily disguises. We may be a bundle of social insecurities, weaknesses, anxieties and fears, but, if everyone is already taken, as Oscar Wilde says, then it's truly worth being ourselves and get on in life as glamorously as we can with our own ideas, obsessions and passions. After all, the fashion industry can package specific trends, but can't clone our personal style, and, while what we wear may make a different statement if we wear it in New York or Los Angeles, the clothes we choose to put on our bodies define and reflect ourselves and therefore work for us just because we're wearing them.
A final note about Fear and Clothing: Cintra Wilson should turn this volume into a TV series or maybe we can just send her reviewing ALL fashion weeks in the world. In our age in which celebrities with a dubious taste and high profile bloggers (co-opted by huge fashion corporations) too often reign supreme, the fashion industry could definitely do with her energy, vitriol, passion, enthusiasm and, above all, her honesty.
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