Ready-to-Read Fashion

Time’s up. Give up on scouring the stores for some piece of finery. For fashion fans, it’s books that are guaranteed to fit and never go out of style. And giving the gift of an intelligent book is a lot more meaningful than a present of leopard-print pajamas (though one could argue about the varying degrees of “cool factor” behind each selection).

A handful of fashion books has surfaced at the top of this year’s heap. Some to consider: “Judith Leiber: The Artful Handbag,” by Enid Nemy (Harry N. Abrams Inc. Publishers 2000), which includes nearly 200 color photos of her iconic bags; “The Vogue Book of Blondes,” by Kathy Phillips (Viking Studio 2000), which is a heavily illustrated examination of what it means to be blond; and finally, “Kustom,” by Dewey Nicks (Greybull Press), which explores the Los Angeles photographer’s fascination with personal expression and customization. But the best of the bunch are below.

“Hillbilly Hollywood: The Origins of Country & Western Style,” (Rizzoli Publications 2000) by former Rolling Stone magazine writer Debby Bull presents Los Angeles as the birthplace of the sound and style now known as country and western. The smartly illustrated book is a fresh look at the seminal contributions to country and western music’s enduring style by Los Angeles tailors Nathan Turk, Nudie Cohen and his embroiderer, Rose Clements. Bull calls the elegant and gaudy Hillbilly Hollywood style “equal parts cowboy and show business, Western and honky-tonk, down-home and larger than life.”

Bull makes this fashion history stand apart through her careful research and insightful writing, which is supplemented by strong interviews with several of the tailors and performers who created and popularized the clothes. The book is as much a history of fashion as it is of music, but deftly intertwines the two.

“China Chic” (ReganBooks 2000) is New York fashion designer Vivienne Tam’s visual memoir of her upbringing in both communist China and later the then-British colony of Hong Kong. Tam’s interviews with various artists and experts, combined with dozens of rich, historic photos and illustrations of Chinese clothing, artwork and street scenes, help readers understand not only her pioneering fashion work, but also the wider impact of Asian design themes beyond clothing.

The book is also a personal examination of how she, a Chinese-born fashion designer, was able to fuse her Westernized upbringing onto a successful designer clothing line years later. With Tam serving as a commentator on the creative tension between Eastern and Western cultures, “China Chic” outgrows the narrow confines of most fashion books to become a narration on the political and historical pressures of her generation.

“Dressing Up Vintage” (Rizzoli Publications 2000) by Tracy Tolkien, and Tiffany Dubin and Ann E. Berman’s collaboration “Vintage Style: Buying and Wearing Classic Vintage Clothes” (HarperCollins 2000) respond to the booming popularity in vintage clothing, particularly high-priced designer labels.

Tolkien, owner of London’s vintage couture shop Steinberg and Tolkien, offers an authoritative examination of the best of vintage style.

Dubin and Berman concentrate on the wearing of the clothes, though Berman’s informative history of each look helps place the clothes in time.

Both of the books are useful as buying guides and short lessons in fashion history, but they also unintentionally point out just how much of recent fashion has been ripped off from the not-so-distant past.