Nightstand

The Meaning of Sunglasses, and a Guide to Almost All Things Fashionable
By Hadley Freeman
Viking

Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary has inspired specialty imitations in the fields of higher education, business jargon, nuclear power, and Russian literature. It's only fitting that fashion, an area in which words and their ostensibly corresponding meanings often have yet to meet, should inspire the next. And the tart-tongued Hadley Freeman, deputy fashion editor at The Guardian and a contributing editor for British and American editions of Vogue, has fulfilled the mission with satisfyingly vigorous vitriol.

In a style ranging from breezy to flip to amusingly disgusting, Freeman skewers fashion's silliness, while allowing that it sometimes involves what humans wear and do, and in that sense might be worth discussing now and then with a little gravity.

She does so from Accessories to Yoga (I guess she thought a separate entry on Zara would be a bit much, though alphabetical compulsives will miss that, as well as I, K, N, O, Q, U and X).

The letters she engages, though, she gives a mighty good workout, with an industry insider's savvy and a somewhat jaded journalist's venom. She's got a lot of great one-liners, fueled by a fun, if frightening, imagination, and a knack for wild farcical overstatement. Consider this, on "the tweeness, the girliness, and the general fussiness of the ruffle ... actively sought in order to achieve Chanel's often cartoonish style."

"Your feelings" toward it, she decides, "pretty much depend on whether the Audrey Tautou film Amelie made you want to dance out of the cinema and hand out daisies to strangers on the street or run out of the auditorium and rip off your own head in order to flush the ocean of vomit out of your body just that little bit faster." I was of the latter group emerging from Amelie, but still sentences like that sometimes had me checking the book cover to see if the volume was really decorous enough to be about fashion or if I'd been confused.

Freeman has this to say about the trench coat: "It's a coat, but not very warm; it's for outdoor wear -- but shows every spec of dirt; it's similar in color to many women's skin -- which just makes them look jaundiced. And yet, and yet, on it lingers, haunting the pages of fashion magazines like an old smell of cabbage in a dead relative's apartment."

Her toss-offs don't always work so well, though, and in one case, at least, the approach is pretty offensive. "In a scenario that recalls the film Sophie's Choice, you have to choose sometimes between looking fashionable and looking good," Freeman says with reference to certain jeans styles. Um, Freeman attended Oxford, so let's assume she knows Sophie's Choice was also a book. And while it's been a while since I read the book or saw the movie, I'm sure that Sophie's choice was something very different. (Yes, I have heard of irony. Seinfeld plausibly got away with this kind of bit in the Schindler's List episode, but that had a much greater character history and longer setup, and it still made me queasy. Freeman's attempt here is just bad taste.) 

That dispiriting lapse, while it should be edited out at the earliest opportunity, is the exception, though. Overall, Freeman's wit shines through divertingly. Handbags are to be decoded, not admired. Drugs are not only unhealthy, but financially imprudent: "Why spend a couple of hundred on white powder that will be gone by the morning when you can get something much more long-lasting and gratifying, like a pair of Prada wedges? You see, not everyone in the business is superficial."

And she's similarly helpful on layering, for which "matters aren't helped by fashion shoots involving models dashing around country piles wearing all manner of silk slip dresses and heavy tweed coats and anoraks that purport to show how glamorous layering can be but, in fact, to the untrained eye, look more like documentary footage from a 1930s lunatic asylum."

Bierce would enjoy her company, don't you think?