As one who has enjoyed a lifetime of exploring style and learning about designers and the history of fashion, I found Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible to be a good resource on the basics of fashion history, classic style, current dos and don’ts, and how to assess your closet in order to put yourself in good fashion order.

If you are new to all things related to the fashion industry, designers, or understanding personal style, this book is a good beginner’s guide. It is filled with illustrations, pictures, interesting history and trivia, as well as details that represent many an era, a designer, a trend, and how, as in life, what goes around comes around. Who knew how many times the platform shoe would be considered the latest style!

Mr. Gunn has organized his table of contents by articles of attire and accessories, in the same manner as retailers once organized their stores’ departments. I was amused to find that Gunn’s table of contents is ordered by the way one might get dressed, beginning with underwear, and so on.

Mr. Gunn highlights a moment in the movie The Devil Wears Prada that relates to something I’ve always marveled at: the fact that every garment worn today has history and that history can run back years, centuries, or even longer! For example, there are stone carvings of a woman exercising in what is believed to be the first evidence of a sports bra, no less. What started out as a new design of its time has moved through the channels of high fashion and low fashion, from couture to retail to consignment and retro.

Mr. Gunn has a diverse and interesting background in the world of fashion, and he shares many of his experiences and opinions about what works and what doesn’t. His expertise is very up to the minute, and while this book is a valuable guide for today, it will also reflect well historically on our current styles in decades to come.

From the start, I wondered about “Bible” being used in the title—feeling it might be a bit over the top—but the book is directed to everyone, whether you prefer to spend a month’s salary on an outfit or you look and feel just wonderful in your nice looking daily uniform. Gunn is speaking to everyone.

In the last chapter, Gunn talks about shopping, and how to prepare for it. And when you choose something from the rack, seeing it on the hanger thinking I can’t wear that, Gunn tells you to just try it on and see. After all, that hanger looks nothing like you!

The book’s appendix contains worksheets to help you explore and understand your closet and wardrobe. It will help you organize, cull, and plan for that next shopping trip, by determining what to love and preserve, and what to leave behind.

Tim Gunn is an American fashion consultant and television personality. He was on the faculty of Parsons The New School for Design from 1982 to 2007 and chair of fashion design at the school from 2000 to 2007, after which he joined Liz Claiborne as its chief creative officer. He is well known on-air for the reality television program Project Runway and his spin-off show, Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style. Mr. Gunn has authored three books in addition to this one—A Guide to Quality, Taste and Style, Abrams, 2007, Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making It Work, Gallery, 2010, and Shaken, Not Stirred, Gunn/ADSI 2011/Kindle.

Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible: The Fascinating History of Everything in Your Closet is available for pre-order on Amazon.

Book Review: Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible The Saturday Evening Post

We were naturally interested to see what Vogue will offer. The Post is in the middle of a multi-year project to digitize our archives so readers can view our 190 years of issues online. It also prompted us to look back over our own fashion reporting, which covered the art and business of haute couture.

In 1953, for example, a Post article reported how Christian Dior was driving up both hemlines and gown prices. The house of Dior had grossed $7 Million in 1952 by selling his creations for $300 to $2400 apiece:

Will the ladies obey M. Dior?

From Dior's 1953 show

Christian Dior, tyrant of the hemlines, decrees short skirts for American women. This foxy French designer grosses $7,000,000 a year selling $300-$2400 gowns [$2400 to $20,000 today], and says, “Aren’t people crazy to spend so much on a dress!”

[His] hand-sewn, petticoated, boned, and padded product takes an average of 110 hours to complete, and three fittings are compulsory.

Who can afford it?…Dior, who sells some 6500 originals a year—nearly half of them to Americans—has reason to believe that there are just about 2500 women in the world who have the time, the money and the inclination to dress regularly at his house, rated among the three most expensive.

The fabulous fashion queen reigned in the ‘Twenties as a daring autocrat of feminine style. Three decades later she has returned to rule again…

Coco's 'understated elegance.'

When she retired, in 1938, Chanel already was a legend. And then, in 1954, she suddenly emerges from fifteen years’ oblivion, acting as if she had merely been out to lunch, and presently reoccupies the throne of fashion!

If such a comeback would be something to write home about in any business, it is unique in the rough little world of dress designing, where lives and memories are short.

Custom-made to the client’s measurements, the average Chanel costs roughly $500* —a price slightly below the Paris top.

What with virtually all the stitching done by hand and with each garment representing about 150 working hours, the output of “originals” is limited—no more than about 1800 a year. *[$3,700 today]

For reasons no one can explain logically, styles come and go in cycles that last seven to ten years. Skeptics regard the process as a racket to stimulate sales but a strong motivation is behind it.

Oleg Cassini and clients

That’s great for me as a designer and a manufacturer, but I can’t help deploring the aesthetic damage to fashion.

Women seem to need the emotional lift a new fashion outlook gives them. Sure, overhauling wardrobes periodically runs into money, but I submit it is more desirable than the drab uniformity of clothes in countries where individuality is suppressed.

Women who adhere to the old maxim that elegance is the art of omission, seem to be vanishing. The great majority have a tendency to overload themselves with gewgaws and to fuss over superficialities. Proportionately more money is spent on clothes than ever before, and it is thrown around with an abandon that suggests women are latching onto new styles as an escape from reality.

Fashion layouts… began to appear last fall illustrating new styles variously known as “the Plunge, “the V,” “the U,” “the Split,” “the Slash” and “the Scoop” which women would start wearing in February.

"Cleavage crisis extends into the office"

Well, February is here, and obviously we are all in for a nervous winter and spring. Any way you look at it—and almost any way is possible right now—the bosom is back on the national landscape.

Obviously, the new dresses have been plunged, slashed and scooped for [men’s] benefit…it follows that [men] are supposed to gaze at the semiexposed bosom with some sort of favorable attitude: admiration or reverence or plain old friendly respect. Anyhow, we are supposed to notice. In so doing, we are playing our proper role of cavalier.

But we cannot notice too much, or too long. If we do, we play our other traditional role of boor or lecher. Unluckily, the line separating the two is so thin as to be invisible.

Swimsuits with vinyl boots and visors

The clothes [at Rudi Gernreich’s new show] satisfied everybody’s longing for the weird, the dramatic, the uncompromising. There were leather suits and loudly striped stockings, reversible jumpers, aviator suits, helmet-hats and ostrich feathers. The colors, equally bizarre, as vivid as barber poles or billboard advertisements, modulate from purple to lavender to hot pink to murky eggplant.

The violence of the colors and the design bludgeoned the onlooker into sudden attention. Some of the costumers, causing the same kind of confusion as certain abstract paintings, looked as if they could be work backwards with the same effect. “My dear,” said a lady in ruffles, “it’s pop art.”

“Twenty years ago,” he said, “a young girl was supposed to look sweet and innocent. But that ideal no longer applies. Before they’re seventeen they cultivate a wild, conscious, sexy look, which is very unnerving…The generation feels defeated; nothing seems to make any difference. The look in clothes expresses an anti-attitude, the result of being bored…If you’re bored, you go for the outrageous gesture. Everything else seems to have lost any meaning.”

Articles of Fashion The Saturday Evening Post

Any self-respecting publication would regularly critique the latest dress styles with heavy-handed ridicule and indignation about the decadent new styles. (“What, we ask, is this country coming to?”)

What brought this topic to mind was the anniversary of the Women’s Rights Convention, which opened in Seneca Falls, New York, on July 19th, 1848. The conference might have been completely ignored by the press had it not been for Elizabeth Smith Miller, who appeared in public wearing the first Bloomer skirt. (The name was only attached later, when they were championed by Amelia Bloomer, editor of a suffragist newspaper.)

Borrowing from Middle Eastern clothing, the outfit featured long, loose trousers that gathered at the ankle, which were worn beneath a knee-length skirt.

Naturally they provoked a storm of criticism. The press had endless fun ridiculing the fashion, which they saw as new, unattractive, and faintly masculine. Trousers had been an exclusively masculine trait in western fashion as long as anyone could remember. Any woman who wanted to cover her legs separately was obviously trying to encroach on male privilege.

Bloomer skirt.

The Bloomer skirt never caught on (in fact, pants for women remained an oddity until the 1940s), but they didn’t fail to gain acceptance because of the ridicule of male editors and pundits.

One of the biggest reasons that the Bloomer skirt went bust was its great dissimilarity with the height of high fashion at the time, the voluminous crinoline hoop-skirt. This contraption of whalebone or cane held a dome of crinoline over a network of hoops that often reached 6 feet in diameter. The skirt was tricky to maneuver; women had to learn how to pass through doorways or simply sit down without tipping up the skirt on its side.

What made the hoop skirt so impractical wasn’t its unpredictable movement but the tight bodice that was part of the outfit. While the legs enjoyed greater freedom within the skirt, the required corset crushed the wearer’s lungs in a vice of heavy cotton reinforced by bone or steel. “Why do people wear such things?” a Post writer wondered in 1856.

Is it because they think them beautiful, elegant, tasteful, or because they find them comfortable, useful, convenient? Not at all. Because they are in the fashion. A common custom makes cowards of us all. If the Parisian arbiter of fashions should decree a garb of plate-mail, we would hasten to put it on.

Although the author has no appreciation of the Bloomer skirt, he at least concedes a few points in its favor.

The advantages of a hoop skirt.

Well, it certainly is ugly. But if it had come from Paris, it would never have been laughed off the forms of our venturous ladies. The subtle French would have persuaded us it was the most beautiful thing ever invented. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it came from the mind of an American woman, benevolently moved to lighten the weight of skirts which afflict so many females with incurable diseases, and impede and discomfort so many; and as she had no spell of foppery to weave over the common-sense of the country, of course she failed ignominiously. Ugly?—so it is; but did it fail for that reason? Is it any uglier than these frightful hooped skirts, which transform the graceful figures of our belles in to the semblance of diving-bells? ["The Philosophy of Dress," October 25, 1856]

An English writer offered two more reasons the Bloomer skirt never caught on.

It was doomed to failure, even without a fair trial, for two reasons. In the first place, it only met the difficulty halfway. It was a compromise between the dress we now wear and that of the ladies of the East. The large trousers were adopted, but the tight-fitting body and corset were allowed to remain, and thus the most important point in the necessary change neglected.

Another reason, and which, perhaps, operated more powerfully in causing the rejection of the Bloomer costume, lies in the perception that most of the actions of the American ladies are unfeminine.

English women have a natural horror of being thought masculine, or strong-minded, in the extreme sense of the word. Had the reform commenced in any other quarter, there is little doubt it would have been carried out with success.  As it was, no one could disconnect [the Bloomer skirt from] the idea of the “Female Rights Association,” or some such movement, and hence the utter hopelessness of it being adopted. ["Suggestions on Female Dress," December 12, 1863]

Lastly, there was the marketing problem of placement. Put simply, the wrong people were wearing Bloomer skirts.

Policeman (to Boy) -"Now then, off with that hoop! or I'll precious soon help you!" Lady (who imagines the observation is addressed to her.) - "What a monster!"

When women proposed to wear a truly sensible and beautiful dress, men opposed it, not only by argument, but by brute force. The Bloomer is the costume to which I refer. Of course, when I mention it, men will have in their minds a picture of the Bloomer as they have seen her. They must try to remember, if the superiority of their minds will allow them, that the Bloomer has been worn only by old and ugly women, who exhibited the most hideous taste in its combinations. Let the young and lovely have a chance at it for a month or so, and I would like to see where male logic would be at the end of it. ["A Lady’s Ideas on Crinoline and Bloomers," April 19, 1862.]

The shapes, fabrics, and colors of women’s wear have changed enormously since the Civil War era. And although it can be debated whether modern style is more attractive or sensible than it was 150 years ago, no one would argue with this one fact: Women’s clothing has become a lot more comfortable—with the exception of high heels.

Hoops, Bloomers, and Common Sense The Saturday Evening Post