Every so often I read a book where I start off thinking it’s clever and fabulous, but by the end I hate it and thank god it’s over. This is one such book.

Hadley Freeman’s style, at first glance, is delightfully witty and clever, but the book’s total lack of structure and overarching point (it’s basically 234 pages of short, snarky essays on fashion topics), made the aforementioned wit feel tedious and repetitive by page 80. At this point the author’s opinions also started to feel wildly schizophrenic, with the author decrying the denizens of the fashion industry as shallow, elitist, coke-snorting megalomaniacs with one breath and then defending them as artists and feminist heroes in the next. We see this same sort of flip-floppery in the way the author expresses her fashion opinions: If she dislikes something, she lambasts it as the worst kind of torturous, sexist stupidity which could only be embraced by people without brains, self-esteem or taste…but if she favors something it becomes an expression of choice and self-expression, which, if anyone criticizes it, makes them a sexist monster or a snotty killjoy. The author seemed to have an ongoing internal battle between wanting to be a pious, above-it-all feminist and a bitchy fashion writer. Apparently she opted for both.

The thing I started finding the most grating as the book DRAGGED ON, was the outrageous hyperbole the author employed to make the things she disliked seemed blatantly stupid and illogical (Apparently high heels make you walk like a knock-kneed hunchback and kitten heels make your calves “swell up like waterlogged balloons” who knew?) Her section on stiletto heels was actually so over-the-top in it’s frothing vitriol that one would be inclined to presume that perhaps a stiletto heel killed her parents.

Less than halfway through the book, I pretty much got what I presume the author’s point was (what I like=good, what I don’t like=evil, and aren’t I clever for saying so?) and started thinking the only way I could possibly drag through the rest of the book were if made it into some sort of drinking game where I took a shot every time I saw the word “sartorial.”

And so I think over this book and wonder if, had it been 80 pages long (maybe padded out with some illustrations or large print?) would it have seemed like the breezy, witty little book it was trying to be and not have become so tedious that when I reached the end I threw it to side saying “sweet Jesus! Thank god I’m done with THAT!”

Maybe.

Hadley Freeman certainly thinks she is amusing. This book is comprised of a number of mini-essays on (almost) all things fashionable, and is sorted alphabetically (A: Accessories, V: Vintage, etc), which can be annoying, i.e. its at least four essays on various types of footwear, and confusing, as it frequently refers to both previous and future entries.
Snarky is one thing. Haughty is something else entirely.
The book is at most, mildly amusing every now and again.
I am happy to hear someone in fashion with an opinion similiar to my own lambaste the masses for their sheep-like approach many women take to Vogue, the so-called bible of fashion, and the blinders they wear preventing the realization that all those articles, tips and suggestions are little more than advertising-driven shout-outs to vendors. It is nice to hear this, especially, from someone in the fashion field.
Reading a first-person narrative of someone clearly amusing herself with overweening wit, though, gets awfully old by letter…B.
I finished it, and agreed with the guist of many entries, but found her self-congratulatory I’m-smarter-than-you style painful to get through.