Guidelines to Attaining the Best of Beauty

Fashion, the Inside Story by Barbaralee Diamonstein (Rizzoli: $19.95, paper).

This book is essentially edited transcripts of a series of interviews between the author and such fashion designers as Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren, Geoffrey Beene, Adolfo, Norma Kamali, Mary McFadden, Perry Ellis and more. While Diamonstein’s interviews are not as revealing and brash as, say, Playboy’s tete a tete with Calvin Klein, they nonetheless provide much insight and information on how the fashion business really works.

Diamonstein, who is the interviewer/producer of a series of cultural programs on the Arts & Entertainment network, asks good questions and frequently gets some fascinating answers. But more importantly, she also asks the routine questions and gets answers that make this book virtually required reading for anyone who wants to know how and why the American fashion industry works today. In addition, the book is elegantly designed. And it features an impeccably photographed selection of clothes that look eminently wearable in 1985, though they may have come from seasons of 5, 10, 15 or even 30 years ago.

Always Beautiful by Kaylan Pickford (G.P. Putnam’s Sons: $19.95).

Pickford’s message that beauty is not restricted to the young is a powerful one. Not new, but one that is being heard increasingly as America’s baby-boomers discover such things as gray hairs and crow’s feet.

While Pickford, billed as “America’s most successful over-40 model,” contends that “beauty doesn’t hold still but changes with the seasons. You have it no matter what season you’re in,” she still offers plenty of tips on how to make it better. Most of these you’ve heard before (walking is “the easiest aerobic exercise, learn to enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables as close to their natural state as possible, manicure nails regularly for their health as well as their appearance”). But Pickford issues them and more with a great deal of personal enthusiasm and conviction. And from the photographs sprinkled throughout the book, it’s obvious she must practice what she preaches.

Bargain Chic by Roberta Plutzik (Lyle Stuart: $7.95).

Though the advice offered by Plutzik for cost-cutting is sound and occasionally colorful, the manner in which this book was produced (pedestrian, black-and- white photographs, for example, and very few of them at that) is hardly appealing.

Perhaps if real models had been hired to wear the bargains Plutzik has chosen to write about the book might be more inviting.

But for those who truly want to know more about the fine points of bargain hunting, descriptions such as those of Plutzik’s Tornado Shopper may be inspiration enough.

“Once Tornado locates the clearance racks, osmosis begins,” the author writes.

“In a flash, Tornado searches for tiny visual clues to a garment’s quality, price and value, gently brushing the corner of a sleeve or the inside of a collar or waistband to get a ‘psychic feel’ for the bargain potential of the merchandise. . . . In a flash, aided by built-in bargain radar, Tornado blazes to another department for an even better bargain.”