Fun to read and as ephemeral as the latest fashion trend.
Behind-the-scenes look at the fashion industry from high-profile editor/stylist/TV personality Zee.
The author’s first fashion gig came when he was 6 years old and told a friend to lose the knee socks that made her look like a baby, charging her 30 cents for the advice. The fashion-obsessed Canadian first dipped into journalism at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, where he and photographer Carter Smith created a fashion-centric campus tabloid. He went on to become a stylist at W and creative director at Elle, and he is now editor in chief of Yahoo Style and a TV red carpet commentator. Zee chronicles his career in this loosely organized memoir/fashion handbook that reads like a string of blog entries: a mixture of advice, shop and celebrity talk, and a rundown of the grueling demands of fashion industry jobs. When there’s a job to be done, “no one cares about roadblocks, obstacles, or dilemmas that you have to overcome along the way, or the floods, fires, and family emergencies that always come up.” Zee, though, gets a rush from such assignments as pulling together clothes from American designers Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, and Calvin Klein for a 14-page W spread featuring Gwyneth Paltrow in less than 24 hours. Among the luminaries he’s worked with are photographer Annie Leibovitz; designer Tom Ford; models Cindy Crawford and Kate Moss; and actors Julia Roberts, Jessica Biel, and Scarlett Johansson. He owns up to his own fashion mishaps—e.g., the dress he chose for Hilary Swank for the 2003 Oscars, which landed her on the “Worst Dressed” list. Tips range from how to define your personal style to how to crash a fashion party. And if you wonder how they get all those clothes for fashion shoots, you’ll find out in this book. Zee comes across as an affable, talented, hardworking multitasker who loves talking and writing about fashion.
Fun to read and as ephemeral as the latest fashion trend.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-04294-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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