The Essential Fashion Reading List
If you long to become literate in fashion, look no further.
When I interviewed fashion critic Kristen Bateman last year, she said, “I want to encourage dialogue in fashion and encourage people to do their own research. So if [something encourages] people pick up a book and become more interested in the intellectual discourse surrounding fashion then I think it's a good thing.”
This got me thinking about which fashion books I’ve found the most enriching. I have an entire shelf full of books on fashion and some are better than others. The fashion criticism anthology that I couldn’t get in Canada and had to have smuggled over by a friend visiting the US? Surprisingly boring! But for every dud there’s an engrossing, educational read that expands your understanding of the genre. Here is what I’d consider required readings on the ultimate fashion curriculum.
Gods and Kings by Dana Thomas
Dana Thomas is a longtime fashion journalist living in Paris (she writes a Substack!). She’s written books about the globalization of luxury brands and the environmental impact of the clothing industry, but my favourite of her oeuvre is Gods and Kings, her delicious twin biography of the two most celebrated designers of the 90s, Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Both came from working class backgrounds, both studied fashion at Central Saint Martins and both were freakishly incandescent talents. Thomas traces their rise and fall in fascinating detail, with plenty of Kate Moss gossip along the way. The whole time I felt like I was reading an academic version of a tabloid news story. Sheer brilliance. (Shop now)
Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire by Judith Thurman
Judith Thurman is one of the New Yorker’s go-to writers on fashion, and for good reason: the ferocity of her wit and intellect is both terrifying and addictive. Cleopatra’s Nose, published in 2007, collects some of her best works published over the previous two decades, and it is absolutely required reading. Not every essay is on fashion — there’s one on Anne Frank, one on Toni Morrison’s Beloved— but each one is written with a critical perspective so pointed that any budding fashion journalist or critic should take note of the startlingly precise magnifying glass she turns towards each subject. Her stories on Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, Bill Blass and Rei Kowakubo seamlessly combine the personal with the historical. Thurman often has a delightful little personal entryway into a much larger subject. In the intro, she says, “Tofu and Flaubert; a fashion show and an election; pornography and hair; kimonos and bulimia—all have at least one trait in common: they put up a dogged struggle with my presumptions as a stranger trying to do them justice.” Aren’t you hooked? (Shop now)
Fashion Climbing by Bill Cunningham
Bill Cunningham, the late, legendary photographer behind the New York Times ‘On the Street’ column, was a singular character in fashion. He lived in Carnegie Hall and spent each day riding around New York City on a bicycle obsessively taking pictures of strangers to curate for his column. He never took so much as a sip of water at an event he was covering because he never wanted to be beholden to anyone. Before he was a photographer, he made hats. Fashion Climbing is the autobiography he wrote, and intentionally waited to publish after his death in 2016. It’s a fundamentally sad book, narrating much of the shame Cunningham felt over being considered too ‘feminine’ by his family, recorded in his guileless “gee whiz”-style prose. It’s an odd book, much like its author, but the insight it provides into the mind of one of the 20th Century’s most influential people in fashion is peerless. (Shop now)
The Chiffon Trenches by André Leon Talley
André Leon Talley, the sweeping editor-at-large of Vogue during its heyday, needs no introduction. Similar to Cunningham, The Chiffon Trenches is another fundamentally sad book written by an outsider-turned-fashion insider who never quite feels like they fit in. Talley chronicles his upbringing as a young Black man in North Carolina, his entry into the world of high fashion in Paris and subsequent falling out with his Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Talley is a sensitive man, clearly a genius, whose insights into designers are unparallelled. One of the most unique fashion players we’ve ever had, his towering, statuesque presence is clearly missed. Further reading: this story exploring Talley’s florid vernacular by the brilliant Connor Garel. (Shop now)
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser
Worn is an absolute beast of a book, containing 400 pages of pure research and storytelling on the genesis of a different fibre. Thanhauser traces the history of clothing and demonstrates how interwoven it is (ha ha ha) with humanity itself. It’s a book about labour, really, and the work that goes into producing textiles, from the linen weavers of Ancient Egypt to modern day labour camps in Xinjiang. The amount of work that went into this book is staggering; it began as her MFA thesis at the University of Wyoming and took her nearly a decade to write. This book leaves behind the fantasy of fashion to deliver cold, hard facts about clothing manufacturing that will make you think carefully about the origin of each item of clothing you acquire. Once you get to the chapter on rayon, and how its toxic byproduct carbon disulfide causes horrific nerve damage, you’ll never look at a Uniqlo blouse the same way again. (Shop now)
The Battle of Versailles by Robin Givhan
It took me far too long to pick up The Battle of Versailles because I thought it’s subject matter, a fashion show in 1973 that pitted five American designers against five French designers, wouldn’t interest me. Boy, was I wrong. I absolutely devoured it in under two days and closed the book convinced that this show was the most pivotal fashion event of the 20th Century. Givhan really lays out the stakes of the event and I was on the edge of my seat the entire time, as designers like Anne Klein and Oscar de la Renta prepped for the show. As the only fashion journalist to have ever won a Pulitzer, of course everything Givhan writes is gold. (Shop now)
Fashion is Spinach by Elizabeth Hawes
In 1938, Elizabeth Hawes, then a preeminent dress designer, wrote the funniest fashion book that will ever exist. It begins, “I don’t know when the word fashion came into being but it was an evil day” and spends the rest of its 336 pages violently eviscerating every aspect of fashion, calling it “the enemy of chic,” and a “useless waste of time,” and styling a “bastard art.” She traces her career from sketching designer clothes to be copied, to nascent fashion journalism, to a stint “styling” for a department store, to finally designing her own dresses. The fashion world typically has no sense of humour, so it’s quite entertaining to me that what might be the most beloved fashion book of all time is a witty, wholesale repudiation of everything the industry stands for. But I guess that’s kind of what fashion is all about: flighty, bitchy, capricious, and always unexpected. This 1938 review of the book in The Atlantic is also a delight to read. (PDF here)
What Shall I Wear? by Claire McCardell
I’ve written about Claire McCardell before so I won’t go on too long about this, but it’s essentially an advice book on how to find your personal style by one of the greatest mid-century American fashion designers who ever lived. Like Hawes, she suggests that fashion shouldn’t be taken too seriously and you should have fun with your clothes. My kind of gal. (Shop now)
Confessions of a Window Dresser by Simon Doonan
Simon Doonan, the former creative director of Barney’s, is basically the David Sedaris of fashion: a witty, snappy storyteller who is somehow able to transform everyday events into hilarious capers. An incredibly prolific writer, I haven’t read everything he’s ever written, but Confessions of a Window Dresser is the Doonan ur-text, chronicling his career ascent in the fashion world by creating insane window displays for department stores. I’m not sure how educational it is per se, but it’s freaking hilarious and that’s good enough for me. (Shop now)
Honourable Mentions:
Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld by William Middleton