cover image The Way She Looks Tonight: Five Women of Style

The Way She Looks Tonight: Five Women of Style

Marian Fowler. St. Martin's Press, $24.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-312-14757-0

Reading this curious and frustrating book is like playing a game of Trivial Pursuit based on the history of fashion. There are lots of anecdotes, well told, many familiar, about the five disparate women spotlighted here: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Marlene Dietrich, the Duchess of Windsor, Elinor Glyn and Eugenie Bonaparte. We learn that Eugenie's famous Parisian designer, Worth, was originally from a British village and was the first male to design clothes for women. Elinor Glyn was famous for her draped tiger skins and ""it,"" whatever ""it"" was. (Douglas Fairbanks Jr., she opined, didn't have ""it"" because his ears stuck out too much.) There's little new about Wallis Simpson, and Jacqueline Kennedy is portrayed as a fanatic, extravagant shopper who wore 400 outfits in 16 months in the White House. The telling of tales is competent, but Fowler (In a Gilded Cage) tries to force the book to carry a sociological weight far beyond its strength. A heavy-handed introduction that quotes, among others, Thomas Carlyle and Thorstein Veblen, is followed by an absurd afterword in which Fowler insists: ""There's another lesson here, and it's a moral one. Outer beauty can produce inner."" Illustrations. (Nov.)