Kevin Kwan
In the dark days of Covid-19, any small distraction is so very welcome. Sex and Vanity is a slab of gooey chocolate cake with those fancy chocolate curls all over it. The relatively straight-forward story of “girl meets boy, falls for boy, then fights it like crazy to …
Lisa Birnbach with Chip Kidd
Julia Chaplin
Finding our “tribe” in a melting-pot country like the US can be difficult. With every option available, finding “your” people is often a relief. These tribes, peopled with members drawn to each other by some basic fundamental values, soon spawn off an entire …
This weighty tome, coming in at nearly 700 pages, is not nearly so daunting as it appears. Ninety percent of the book is large, gorgeous pictures with short descriptions of the (arguably) most notable pieces of furniture in the last 150 years. The book runs the gamut from: the mundane …
Tomoko Nakamichi
Unless you are a professional tailor or fashion designer, there’s small chance you will actually make any of the clothing directly as is in these books. As the author says in the introduction, the point of these often wildly bizarre experiments with fabric is not to create everyday …
Clothes We Can’t Believe We Bought
Tom Coleman
Photography by Jerome Jakubiec
Everyone can relate to this book because everyone has had at least one fashion disaster in their life. Maybe it’s the “fashion forward” item you bought because you thought it would be cutting edge, only to discover that …
Michael Galinsky
Had I been shown this photo collection at the time of its taking I would have scoffed, even though I’d barely have been in my teens. Compositionally, these are some pretty lousy photos – blurry, too dark and often oddly cropped. But the content is pure 80s …
Brandon Stanton
Photographer Brandon Stanton’s blog and photo collection are a joy to view. They show humanity in all its oddness, ugliness and beauty. While Stanton often turns his eye to the wildly fashionable, are simply wild, his short cameo-interviews turns his subjects into the real people they are. Like …
Tim Walker
Tim Walker is a fashion photographer in the loose sense that there are people wearing expensive clothing in many of his photos. However, the clothing themselves are probably the last thing your eye will fix on. Walker uses enormous props, decaying mansions and the bizarre, disproportionate bodies of …
Masayuki Yoshinaga and Katsuhiko Ishikawa
Ari Seth Cohen
Like Fruits and Fresh Fruits, Gothic and Lolita and Advanced Style are photo collections of street fashion – people wearing their own style as they go about their day. The gothic and lolita styles, photographed in Japan, follow relatively rigid lines. …
Josh Kilmer-Purcell
This is one of those books that has me vacillating wildly between seething jealousy and abject horror. When Josh and Brent, overworked Manhattanites, find the perfect old mansion for a song it seems like their dreams have come true. The first months of farming and spending weekends at …
thebeautybrains.com
Yes, yes you can. But the the lip balm question is only one of hundreds in this fascinating little book. Full of delightfully refreshing skepticism, various beauty products and myths are put through the rigors of scientific inquiry. Not surprisingly, most claims by the beauty industry are either false …
Steven Blush
This book is worth it just for the cover. Blush gives you an up close and personal look at the biggest, hairiest and most famous metal bands. Each page brings a band with still bigger hair, more makeup, hazier lenses and thickly studded leather outfits – all brand …
Shoichi Aoki
I loved the original book by Aoki, Fruits – a collection of photos of Japanese street fashion. Fresh Fruits is the same format, kids in their truly outlandish fashions with a small chunk of commentary at the bottom. At first, I skipped over the rather hard to read …
