An exciting addition to fashion history.
An exposé of the underrated designer who helped shape 20th-century European aesthetics.
In his debut work of nonfiction, Australian journalist Richardson explores the life of Tommy Nutter (1943-1992), the British designer who contributed greatly to the unique fashion sense of 1960s England. Mapping out Nutter’s life from beginning to end, the author capitalizes on the moments in his subject’s life that caused significant ripples in society. “His life vividly personalized forty years of critical gay history,” writes Richardson. “From the underground queer clubs of Soho to the unbridled freedom of New York bathhouses to the terrifying nightmare of AIDS—Tommy was there, both witness and participant.” It’s as if Nutter had his pulse on nearly every significant moment of the era. After enrolling at a technical college, Nutter quickly started identifying aesthetic deficiencies in culture; three years later he began working his first tailoring job. What followed was a series of interactions with some of the biggest names of the time: John Lennon and the rest of the Beatles, Yoko Ono, Elton John, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, and many others. His cuts were intricately detailed, progressively modern, and inclusive. Refreshingly, Richardson has created a work that is surprisingly unpretentious; the author looks at Nutter’s life with impressive objectivity, zeroing in on significant episodes and leaving the rest on the cutting-room floor. The author also gives close attention to Tommy’s relationship with his brother, David, providing plenty of room for the telling of both brothers’ lives and experiences. “David adored all this flagrant insolence,” writes Richardson. “While hardly a hippie himself, he appreciated anything that agitated for a more open-minded conversation by treating alternative lifestyles as legitimate sources of joy.” Such were the Nutter brothers: insatiably open to the world and its opportunities and able to systematically make a splash along their way.
An exciting addition to fashion history.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-49646-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
PROFILES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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