BY DESIGN : BOOK REVIEW / FASHION : So, Can You Learn Style From One of These Books?

* SIMPLE ISN’T EASY By Olivia Goldsmith and Amy Fine Collins ; HarperSpotlight $5.50, 203 pages

* STYLE By Elsa Klensch with Beryl Meyer ; Berkeley Publishing Perigee Original $14, 228 pages

* DRESS CODE: Understanding the Hidden Meanings of Women’s Clothes By Toby Fischer-Mirkin ; Clarkson Potter $23, 248 pages

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Ah, self-presentation. Just about everyone’s favorite subject. Are the stylish born or made? Can the visual be conveyed through the verbal?

Publishers and countless writers seem to think so. Season after season, year after year, they turn out tomes designed to turn the dowdy into the dashing, the frump into the fabulous. Celebrities and unknowns alike volunteer as our guides on the path to sartorial enlightenment, promising that with practice and smart shopping, we can transcend the lives of drudgery that our ill-chosen clothes, hairstyles and makeup have consigned us to.

And so it is with three new offerings.

“Simple Isn’t Easy” is founded on the assumption that American women are simply lousy shoppers. Olivia Goldsmith, a confessed sinner, is the author of the novels “The First Wives Club,” “Fashionably Late” and “Flavor of the Month.” The book is, as she puts it, written in her voice. Amy Fine Collins, Harper’s Bazaar style editor and 1995 International Best-Dressed List member, functioned as constant consultant and editor. Sounds like a recipe for something useful and maybe even fun to read.

Goldsmith tries hard to be clever and amusing. She gets points for wordplay with such chapter headings as “Fear and Clothing” and “Weight a Minute! Or, a Waist Is a Terrible Thing to Mind.” But the reader is also subjected to a liberal sprinkling of unamusing, overlong personal anecdotes: “Let me tell the truth: I had more than enough. My closet proved it! There was the time in London in August. Harrods, Harvey Nichols, Nicole Farhi, Joseph Tricot, Charles Jourdan, all of them had their final summer markdowns.” (That particular paragraph gets a whole lot worse.) And there are repeated worshipful citations of Collins, such as: “I was lucky. I had Amy’s help.”

It’s too bad, because underneath all the prattle is some sound advice: “make your imperfections your trademark”; “it is seldom a good idea to . . . force yourself to be the opposite of what you are”; “liberate yourself from those wretched little rules that strait-jacket you . . .” and the fact that true style often lies in doing the opposite. Gleaning those pointers, though, is like sifting through a cat box.

Similarly, “Style,” by the ever-impeccable Elsa Klensch of CNN’s “Style With Elsa Klensch” fame (talk about finding your thing and sticking with it) reminds us of the importance of knowing oneself and proceeding with confidence.

Some of her pearls: “Style is not about beauty or wealth or even fashion. Style is rooted in a woman’s knowing herself well enough to develop a consistent image, and then having the courage to project that image”; “I believe that style is an informed expression of your inner self”; “style can’t flourish when you limit your own vision of yourself.” And the writing, if not always exactly, uh, stylish, is at least straightforward.

If you need to know the basics--how to build a wardrobe on neutral colors and versatile cuts, how to camouflage common figure problems, travel tips--then there is much useful information here. But the sophisticated reader will encounter a lot that she already knows. And anyone past the eighth grade will be insulted by some of the suggestions in the many charts. Among “Essentials for the Beach,” for example, we are reminded to take sunscreen, sunglasses and flip-flops.

And it’s unfortunate that all involved in this project padded it with a lot of runway pictures that don’t really say much and oversized illustrations that add little to the topic at hand. This reader kept thinking that in “Style” is the basis for a terrific inspirational speech.

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If Goldsmith and Collins and Klensch represent the idea that it’s the individual first, the way she looks second, fashion writer Toby Fischer-Mirkin in “Dress Code” seems to take the opposite tack--that people form impressions based on what you wear, and not always the impression you intend. In attempting to teach us to see ourselves as others do, Fischer-Mirkin “spent five years interviewing psychologists, fashion analysts, art curators and social researchers about how fashion has evolved and how it reflects outwardly our internal desires and conflicts.”

The problem is that we are often not told who these people were, how the researchers’ studies were conceived and defined, and what they sought to show, and who the respondents were. Perhaps Fischer-Mirkin sought to avoid boring the reader, but without that kind of information, we’re left wondering about such assertions as: “Because the breast cone is a metaphor for the male phallic symbol, the more pointed and longer they are, the more arresting they are.”

Reading an entire book of statements/research findings on the order of “men are inherently attracted to the implicit ‘danger’ of a yellow-based red” and “one who wears a long, full skirt is usually very open and easygoing (in part because of the freedom of movement of the skirt), but is not as sophisticated as the woman in a slimmer skirt” leaves one with an overwhelming sense of being at the mercy of certain broad cultural assumptions about sex roles, age-appropriate dressing and how personality traits are expressed.

But even if you buy into this line of thinking, and if even if there are, to be sure, a good number of conclusions that seem valid, “Dress Code” is no fun to read. It often rambles, making points that aren’t parallel or that are painfully obvious. In addition, Fischer-Mirkin misspells an alarming number of designers’ names. Ironic for someone who insists that impressions lie in the details.