Book Review - Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible

I love books.  I love fashion.  I think Tim Gunn is wonderful.  If you add those 3 things up, you can probably guess that I enjoyed Tim Gunn's Fashion Bible ! 

Each chapter covers a category of clothing and talks about the history of each item.  It was really fascinating.  He goes into enough detail to keep it interesting, but keeps it short and sweet (so that the book is 320 pages instead of 8,000).  Some of my favorite moments:

• The whole chapter on jeans - how they went from being worn only by factory workers, to being seen as a symbol of rebellion, and then pretty quickly became so mainstream that everyone and their mother wears jeans. 
• Tim's hilarious rant about capri pants - he basically says that no one should be wearing capri pants. I mostly agree, especially about the wide leg options. It seems that women who don't like their legs wear loose-fit cropped pants. Tim says (and I agree) that this just makes you look shorter and stouter.  Probably not what you are going for!  I would like him to clarify a bit, because I can think of a few bloggers who regularly wear very flattering cropped dress pants, but they are usually more fitted, so don't have the same widening effect. I would be interested in his opinion about boyfriend jeans and skinny/cropped jeans.        
• Button-down shirts - I always thought these were referring to the buttons that make a line down the front of the shirt (so basically all dress shirts).  Not the case!  It actually refers to the collar of the shirt having buttons on the corners. Apparently shirts with button-down collars should not be worn with a tie. I think engineers in Nebraska are allowed to break that rule.  
• The whole chapter on dresses - he traces everything back to Cleopatra (tailored) and Helen (draped). It's interesting to look through my dresses and see where they fall on the spectrum.  I think most of mine are hybrids!  

What else to say?  I've always enjoyed Tim Gunn on Project Runway, and I felt like this book was very "him", for lack of a better way of saying it.  Sometimes, celebrity books are very obviously written by someone else, but as I was reading this book, it felt more like an actual conversation you might have if you ran into Tim at the mall.

If you like fashion, or history, or Project Runway, you should read this book!