Thursday, June 20, 2024

Five of the best fashion memoirs

Chloe Mac Donnell is the Guardian's deputy fashion and lifestyle editor.

She tagged five of the most memorable memoirs from the world of fashion, including:
The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983-1992 by Tina Brown

Fashion loves to gossip and Tina Brown’s memoir of her dazzling career is packed full of sizzling muckraking, spanning everyone from Clint Eastwood (“hard work: long, taciturn silences”) to Boris Johnson (“an epic shit”). Based on the diaries she kept as the editor of Vanity Fair, the book covers an era of excess, and Brown, fresh to New York City from the UK, takes it all in with a sharp eye for detail. Stories of power plays at black-tie dinners are interspersed with office politics as Brown turns around the flagging magazine with her “high-low journalism” approach. She convinced Ronald and Nancy Reagan to kiss for one cover, and a naked seven months pregnant Demi Moore for another – leading to the publication being banned by Walmart in the US.
Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue