Entertaining reading for fashionistas and Johnson fans alike.
An iconic fashion designer tells the story of how she left behind a Rockwell-ian New England youth to become an eccentric fashion superstar.
Johnson grew up in a picture-perfect Connecticut family during the 1940s and ’50s. The second of three children, she learned early on to rely on her “bubbly, oddball personality to make my way in the world.” Her first dream was to become a dancer with the Rockettes in New York City, but by the time she was in college, she gravitated toward art. An admirer of Mademoiselle layouts, she entered the magazine’s fashion guest editing contest and won; a senior editor then hired her in the art department. To make ends meet, Johnson began making simple, striking clothes that quickly became popular among other women, including actress Kim Novak. She then began designing clothes full-time for Paraphernalia, a clothing boutique that became home to other 1960s avant-garde fashion designers such as Daniel Hechter and Paco Rabanne. Her unique creations caught the eyes of celebrities like Julie Christie and the Velvet Underground, a band for whom she became the chief clothing designer. After marrying and then divorcing guitarist John Cale, she opened a “designer collective” clothing store with Paraphernalia colleagues and also did freelance work, which eventually won her the Coty Fashion Critics’ Award in 1971. Not long afterward, she became a single mother and embraced an edgier aesthetic, which included clothing lines done in Lycra, a fabric then used only for athletic wear. By the 1980s, Johnson was the owner of a successful chain of stores, until her company was bought out by designer Steve Madden in 2010. This candid book by a pioneering female entrepreneur and American original, illustrated with photos and quirky doodles, also offers details about motherhood, marriages to drug addicts and control freaks, and the obstacles one faces when battling breast cancer.
Entertaining reading for fashionistas and Johnson fans alike.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56141-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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