New York Look Book – A Gallery of Street Fashion BY Amy LaRocca and Jake Chessom (editors) Reviewed by Susan Brooks    The Look Book photo-centerfold has been a feature of New York Magazine since 2004, with street corner interviews and fashion shoots showcasing the endless variety of New York City’s public face of fashion. As Adam Moss, the magazine’s editor, says in this book’s introduction, “Style in New York is a language all its own.” New York Look Book is an attempt to catalogue that dialect by giving an overview of what you would actually see people wearing on the street in NYC. There are some real gems here, documentation of true New York eccentrics. Bartender Troy Arcand says about the look he employs professionally, “One day I might dress like a robot, but the next day I might be a cowboy.” We aren’t all lucky enough to have such license in our work attire, but his playful attitude sums up the best reward that clothes have to offer: they’re supposed to be fun. Other rare butterflies include a female director who sports a shaved head and vintage jewelry, an NYU French Lit major whose hooded green coat is to die for, and the Fli-High Fli Guys, a group of friends who say their collective style is, “like we got stuffed in a locker because we’re real smart.” Glenn Staley and Kyle Mingo, a pair of young party promoters, rock between them a fro-hawk, t-shirts proclaiming their love of Islam and ice cream, a Yankees hat and two pairs of pastel kicks. We learn that real-estate broker Miriam Sinota dresses like a modern Jewish grandma, Maximilian Meyer is the best-dressed baby in New York City, and shopclerk Kim Mahnke has apparently found the world’s best pair of pink sandals. Robert McKnight, a retiree, looks absolutely smashing in eighties shades, a black turtleneck, a plaid sportscoat and an awesome red hat. Showroom sales manager Kim Johnson has the best take on clothing priorities; in response to the interview question, “What’s the best fashion advice you’ve ever gotten?” she replied, “Not to wear what’s cool but to wear what you actually like.” She’s a woman of her word, impeccably turned out in a black peacoat, a seventies-inspired print blouse and a gold robot necklace (which actually is totally cool.) The book is entertaining, but it does have one weakness in that there’s just a little too much self-congratulatory elitism here, which is certainly not unexpected in a New York fashion bible, but it is grating. I love clothes, I always have, for their pure aesthetic possibilities, and I love to see what other people do with theirs as a means of self-expression, but I have tired of some of the overload, nay, obscene glut, of fashion consciousness we’ve experienced in recent years (even Madonna’s child has a stylist, an apocalyptic sign of Roman excess). What’s strongest about this book and about the feature in the magazine is that when it’s about real people and their strongly individual style choices, it shines. When the book and its subjects veer away from style, the beauty of personal expression, into fashion, the over-indulgent worshipping of a price tag or a label for its own sake, it loses me. That’s not what the Look Book feature is supposed to be about, but it is sometimes guilty of falling into that, perhaps merely through the conduit of attitude expressed by some of its subjects. To be fair, if the editors are trying to give a comprehensive spectrum of the NYC fashion world, that’s certainly part of it, so maybe it does belong, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying: everyone wants to look good but no one wants to hear someone brag. To their credit, the editors seem at least somewhat aware of this tendency and included one quote that’s worth a million pictures: a “fur-coat lady” told editor Amy LaRocca upon being approached, “Oh, you want to take my picture? I thought you were a little beggar girl.” The book concludes with more than thirty pages of listings and maps, neighborhood-by-neighborhood throughout the boroughs, so the reader, if so inspired, can put together his own New York look. |  |
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