Michelle Lee: Fashion Victim: Our Love-Hate Relationship With Dressing, Shopping, And The Cost Of Style

Michelle Lee's Fashion Victim explores America's contradictory, paradoxical relationship with fashion by investigating both its seductive allure and its dark side. A veteran of Cosmo Girl! and Glamour, Lee devotes early chapters to documenting the malevolent implications of "speed chic," fashion's obsession with pumping out new, instantly disposable trends at an alarming rate. Lee largely attributes speed chic's rise to the ever-growing fashion media, but heads into murky waters when she starts pining nostalgically for a time when fashion was ostensibly all about the clothes. That past, which may exist only in the author's mind, is contrasted with a hopelessly corrupt present in which fashion is more concerned with celebrity, flash, money, marketing, and hype. The author rails at the intersection of fashion and commerce as if it's somehow new and shocking. It's doubtful, however, that even the most naïve reader will be surprised or disturbed to find out that MTV's House Of Style and Fashionably Loud have motives above and beyond objectively chronicling fashion, or that celebrities are often lent or given free clothes in return for becoming walking billboards for a designer's products. When not telling readers what they already know, Lee offers watered-down retreads of vastly superior, far more pointed sociological texts. When discussing globalization and sweatshops, Fashion Victim suggests No Logo minus the politics and outrage; when chronicling the thinness-obsessed fashion industry's effect on women's self-images, it suggests The Beauty Myth minus the feminism. Fashion Victim is muddled and frustrating throughout, but turns downright spurious when discussing the controversies surrounding fur. Lee and her surplus of fur-industry sources ridicule animal-rights activists as crazed, violent, self-defeating, and potentially Communist without investigating the legitimacy of their arguments. At one point, she uncritically references a text slandering animal activists as "watermelons" who are "green on the outside, red on the inside," a simplistic remark that typifies this superficial look at a superficial subject.