A breezy, authoritative report on the formidable culture of “[c]elebrities as billboards for fashion.”
Splashy critique of the celebrity sway over fashion.
After scrutinizing the encroachment of casual wear into the house of haute couture in her debut (The End of Fashion, 1999), seasoned Wall Street Journal fashion journalist Agins chronicles another seminal change: the onslaught of megastar-inspired product lines diluting the industry’s reputation for sartorial glitz and glamour. The author reaches back to past decades when luminaries like Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor and others cashed in on fame and “the allure of celebrity,” plugging their self-branded clothing lines, perfumes and jewelry. Fully utilizing her fashion week backstage-pass privileges, Agins provides a laundry list of saleable, self-possessed celebrity-wear, from such stars as Sean Combs, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga—all best-sellers with their star power leveraged to showboat the products as must-have indulgence items. In just one of the numerous interviews from which Agins cleverly draws opinion and material, Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour surprisingly voices the benefits of this celebrity influence. While the author doesn’t challenge the reality of someone famous increasing the revenue of a product or service just by affixing his or her name to it, she zeroes in on the ramifications of that type of affiliation. Not one to kowtow to the mesmerizing zeal of the celebrity brand, Agins’ assessments are razor-sharp and brutally honest when it comes to their blunders. She is hilariously critical of the vacuous Kardashian family and their groupies’ “souvenir shop” Dash; she then cringes at a heavily marked-down “klearance” rack of their untouched, whisper-thin duds at Sears. Though the narrative is padded with pages of floridly detailed, biographical filler, Agins is masterful at fashion speculation and engagingly weighs both the positives and negatives of an industry in which “the lines between celebrity and fashion designer have become blurred.”
A breezy, authoritative report on the formidable culture of “[c]elebrities as billboards for fashion.”Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59240-814-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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