Considering on any given day I’m wandering around in a Lands’ End cardigan with a plain white t-shirt, black pants/black skirt/grey skirt (depending on the season), maybe a silk scarf and a strand of fake pearls from Macy’s (what Blacklight calls my “librarian look” and my coworkers call “Manager Blank Jr”-I don’t have the money to for trends and splashy patterns and the like), it might come as a surprise I devour every single Simon Doonan book I can get my little undead raccoon hands on. And I mean everything from his memoir Nasty: My Family And Other Glamorous Varmints to Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women to even why does my local library even have this Confessions of a Window Dresser: Tales from the Life of Fashion. Finding The Asylum: A collage of couture reminiscences…and hysteria at the library and shoving it into my bag, looking around like someone was going to snatch it away from me? Perfect understandable right?
You would think between his books and Slate column, Simon Doonan might not have anything more to say or reveal about the fashion industry. But Simon Doonan has more stories than oddly flowered shirts (and the man has oceans of oddly flowered shirts) and The Asylum was read in one great big swoop once I got home from the library. If Blacklight hadn’t figured out he has opposable thumbs and not made himself an English muffin for breakfast and come into the bedroom to rouse me to make an egg sandwich? I would have been standing at the damn stove with The Asylum in one hand and assembling an egg sandwich with the other and wishing I had a free hand to flip him the bird for disturbing me. Reading a Simon Doonan book is almost as good as spa day (and a damn straight cheaper).
The Asylum isn’t the biggest book or the most scholarly (waves to Tim Gunn and his epic Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible) and I certainly don’t find Kate Moss a goddess (ughh, Kate Moss, just ughhhh) but damn if Simon Doonan can’t write in a gossipy way that makes me forget the sight of Kate Moss makes my teeth start grinding madly. Note: if you were looking at the Rimmel display in Target and heard what sounded like Tic-Tacs getting chomped into dust? Sorry…but blame Target for having the NYX and E.L.F displays so close to the Rimmel display. Note 2: I don’t like Rimmel even if Kate Moss isn’t their spokesface, Team NYX/Team E.L.F. forever!
Now to finish this review, “The Asylum is awesome and if you like fashion buy it already, really don’t waste your money on Nina Garcia books because ughhhhhhhhhh”, and watch Beautiful People (the TV series based on Nasty)on YouTube before Blacklight lurches into the living room, a Vicodin zombie demanding his egg sandwich breakfast…
whiskeytangowendymarie.com 