Writing Style Gives Us Knowledge!!

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Rishika Rishi
Mar 25, 2019   •  4 views

AS THE world's top designers prepare for the catwalks of New York, Milan and Paris for another round of autumn/winter fashion shows, so too do the world's top fashion writers. When lumped together at a show, pen and laptop at the ready, these eagle-eyed observers may look much the same. But their results vary widely.

Among fashion writers today there are almost as many different styles as there are of fashion itself. Two of them, however, predominate: the populist (“hey, let's go and consume together”); and the contextual (“what does this garment say about our particular moment in time?”). These are the styles favoured by magazines, which is where most fashion writing is done, and the merits and drawbacks of each can be seen in two recent collections from two very different ways

Ms Brubach, whose pieces have been published in theAtlantic, theNew Yorker, and theNew York Times, is firmly in the contextual camp, while Ms Kazanjian, whose work has appeared inVogue, is a dyed-in-the-mohair populist. Together, the two provide a case study on the yin and yang of fashion writing.

Ms Kazanjian's book is a slim volume of a dozen stories, none more than a few pages long. All are devoted to the search for the perfect purchase—the thing that will complete and/or transform you, whether it be a fur coat, the best red lipstick, or a face-lift. The author writes with a conversational ease, and the attraction of her writing is a vicarious one: she's doing all the shopping and the experiencing for you. She's the one, for example, who's getting told by a plastic surgeon that her eyes are “crashing down into your nose”; she's the one who has to endure the piercing stares of snooty saleswomen; and she's the one who's saying: “By Jove, I don't care: I want it.”

Her celebratory consumption acts as a kind of benediction on the reader's own guilty acquisitive urges. There's a forbidden pleasure and complicity in the reading; it's a bit like playing hooky from work just to go window shopping.

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