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A review by alannajane
You Are What You Wear: What Your Clothes Reveal about You by Jennifer Baumgartner
2.0
2 stars.
Interesting concept - the idea of discovering how people feel about themselves by how they dress, and what is lurking inside overflowing closets. I liked the use of case-studies to introduce each concept, as well as the interweaving of psychology and wardrobe choices. Many topics made me introspective of how I present myself to the world.
What I couldn’t abide - and why I knocked 3 stars off - is because of the continuing “need” to always buy more and the blatant disregard of both the environment and devastating global effects of fast fashion. In the logos chapter, the author could have talked about how most celebrities can’t afford the brands they are being paid to wear either. She could have talked about the vast waste of only wearing things once and how we all don’t need more than a few great pairs of shoes.
Ultimately, buying more and simply trashing what you no longer want could have been replaced with a chapter on the myriad ways that we can all strive to create a much smaller environmental footprint via our wardrobe. In so doing, this could have been an important book. And yes, I realize that this wasn’t the focus of this book. But, by turning a blind eye to these important current issues, the author was basically negligent in presenting the whole picture. Fashion is the second biggest polluter of Earth and continuing to make wardrobe-building decisions without this knowledge is incredibly ignorant.
Interesting concept - the idea of discovering how people feel about themselves by how they dress, and what is lurking inside overflowing closets. I liked the use of case-studies to introduce each concept, as well as the interweaving of psychology and wardrobe choices. Many topics made me introspective of how I present myself to the world.
What I couldn’t abide - and why I knocked 3 stars off - is because of the continuing “need” to always buy more and the blatant disregard of both the environment and devastating global effects of fast fashion. In the logos chapter, the author could have talked about how most celebrities can’t afford the brands they are being paid to wear either. She could have talked about the vast waste of only wearing things once and how we all don’t need more than a few great pairs of shoes.
Ultimately, buying more and simply trashing what you no longer want could have been replaced with a chapter on the myriad ways that we can all strive to create a much smaller environmental footprint via our wardrobe. In so doing, this could have been an important book. And yes, I realize that this wasn’t the focus of this book. But, by turning a blind eye to these important current issues, the author was basically negligent in presenting the whole picture. Fashion is the second biggest polluter of Earth and continuing to make wardrobe-building decisions without this knowledge is incredibly ignorant.