Style Dissected

The Power of Style, by Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins, published in 1994, is a book that I checked out of the Toronto public library system more times than I care to count in the ten or so years after I first saw a copy on display at my local branch. When, circa 2007, I came across a $5 copy of it at Value Village, I snapped it up at once. I was quite sure that I'd paid out more than $5 in overdue library fines for this particular book.

The Power of Style contains well-written essays on, and wonderful photographs of, fourteen different uber-stylish women. Who are, for the record: Rita Lydig, Pauline de Rothschild, Daisy Fellowes, the Duchess of Windsor, Millicent Rogers, Mona Bismarck, Coco Chanel, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elsie de Wolfe, Diana Vreeland, Slim Keith, Babe Paley, C.Z. Guest, and Gloria Guinness. With all its beautiful photos and fascinating biographical details, The Power of Style is a pleasure to read and peruse, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in style, but I find myself tempted to schluff over any actual review of the book and get down to musing about my fascination with it. I am deeply interested in style and have a treasured collection of 30-odd books on style and fashion history. Style does fascinate many people, probably because it is so elusive. We know it when we see it, but it can never be quite defined, and as motion attracts the eye so does the ever-shifting, chameleon quality of style attract the gaze. The act of making the messy business of living look effortless and elegant awes and inspires. Being stylish is an accomplishment; perhaps not the most worthwhile accomplishment, but an achievement nonetheless. And though being conventionally attractive and wealthy can help one be stylish, it's not something one is born with nor can it be bought. 

There is a companion book to this volume by the same authors called The Power of Glamour, but while I enjoyed reading that one too, it never captivated me the way The Power of Style has. Being glamourous never seemed like an attainable or even worthwhile pursuit to me -- glamour is an illusory, ephemeral quality, dependent mostly on youth and beauty, and no one's life is glamourous up close. Style, on the other hand, is somewhat more concrete, and is the fruit of concerted originality, discipline, verve, confidence, wit, and resourcefulness. Several of the women profiled in The Power of Style weren't beautiful in any conventional sense. The Duchess of Windsor, Elsie de Wolfe, and Diana Vreeland were all undeniably plain, but they all learned early in life that while beauty is a gift of nature, nearly anyone who is willing to put in the effort to become well-groomed and well-dressed can be attractive, and such were their learned skills of self-presentation that their very names are bywords of style. 

I used to read this book again and again, as though it held the key to becoming a woman of style if I could only find it. How could I be more like these women? I suppose I did eventually unlock their secret, when it dawned on me that these fourteen women were icons of style because they weren't imitating anyone else. These women created unique look for themselves and their homes and entertained in a way that suited their unique physical looks, their tastes and interests, their era, their particular milieu, and their means, and while they drew inspiration from others and the world around them just as I do from them, they always transmuted whatever ideas they got from elsewhere into something truly their own. 

This principle of evolving my own style, of making an educated choice as to what I really wanted and what suited me and disregarding the rest (as Diana Vreeland said, "Elegance is refusal,"), has imbued all my own efforts at dressing and decorating since, and has not only made me much better at both but has also been incredibly freeing. Though I loved fashion magazines in my teens and twenties, I almost never read them anymore, as I find they are mostly about conspicuous consumption and passing trends and a very prescriptive idea of attractiveness, when what I'm interested in is choosing and often making beautiful, good quality clothes that I can enjoy for years until they're worn out. Often some timeless fashion photo from the past can be of more real use to me than pictures of some ridiculous of-the-moment $1200 purse. What little real information fashion magazines offer (i.e., tips on makeup application, organizing or exercise) can be found for free and in greater detail elsewhere. Pinterest especially has become a replacement for magazines for me (despite my issues with its search engine), as it is both an amazing research tool and a way to create a visual file of ideas and plans for any design project. The concept of self-directed style has also been an essential part of my editorial slant on my knitting blog, The Knitting Needle and the Damage Done, where I try to encourage knitters to take a critical approach towards the process of selecting knitting patterns for their projects, and to be their own designer when it comes to wardrobe planning.  

Even though my study of this book did teach me how to be a woman of style in theory, I have relinquished whatever hope I may have had of ever actually becoming one, as it takes resources and a level of energy I will never have. This book makes it plain that being a woman of style requires not only originality and verve and self-discipline, but also resources. Being a style icon is incompatible with holding down a full-time job and doing all one's own housekeeping, not to mention caring for small children. Very few of these women had a job with regular office hours, and none did all their own housekeeping. Diana Vreeland did work 18-hour days as editor-in-chief of Vogue, but she also had a household staff, including a maid who polished the soles of her shoes and ironed her dollar bills. Most of the fourteen women either had no children or were lacklustre mothers. Daisy Fellowes met her four young daughters in the park one day and didn't know them. 

Then too, the pictures in this book and the anecdotes related in the essays are highlight reels, not the backstage view. There are no pictures of any of these women taken just after they had woken up in the morning, or in the act of grooming, or weathering a bad case of the flu, or while they were in an advanced or even middle stage of pregnancy, and there are no pictures of Slim Keith after she had ceased to embody her nickname.

That isn't to say their lives were all exquisitely arranged floral bouquets. These women experienced financial difficulties, married men who mistreated them, struggled with poor health, or sometimes were so consumed with appearances that they didn't accomplish much else, as in the Duchess of Windsor's case. But throughout their lives, whatever happened, their style was a tool and a mainspring that they used to earn a living, to attract partners, for social entrée, to inform or even become their life's work, and to define and sustain themselves. Their lives are worth study and a continued source of inspiration, because one needn't be an icon of style to use style in one's own life in much the same way.