Fashion journalist Maggie Bullock has been hugely influenced by Holly Brubach’s 1999 book A Dedicated Follower of Fashion, considering it a form of fashion writing that goes beyond clothes. The book, regarded as essential for fashion insiders, is a collection of 28 of the critic’s essays published in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker and the Atlantic during the 1980s and 1990s. Bullock has recommended Brubach’s book to her students and even co-workers. She cites it as “an example of good fashion writing,” and as inspiration for her own book, The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J. Crew.
More: Writer Maggie Bullock on the layers of J. Crew
This segment has been edited for length and clarity.
Brubach was the style editor of the New York Times Magazine from 1994 to 1998. And maybe these essays resonate with me so much because that's exactly at the point in my life when I'm starting to come online and realize that you could talk about fashion in a smart way, and in an intellectual way, and that fashion reflected so much about our culture and who we want to be and how we think.
Whenever I have taught classes on fashion writing, and with every assistant I hired in my former career as a magazine editor, I mentioned this book. I have photocopied this book. It's just that her essays, which are pieces taken from the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the New York Times Magazine in the ‘90s, are so well executed. They're sort of my example of how good fashion writing can be.
“Her mission, in gathering between hard covers a selection of essays she wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, is to signify the ins and outs of fashion as essential guideposts to human behavior…. As a series of spot-checks on the ‘vanity, love, greed, snobbery, sex and other fun subjects that mirror our collective obsessions, it’s pure theater, as entertaining as it is distressing and as cutthroat as it is consoling.” – Linda Yablonsky, the New York Observer
I think you could make a book like this using some of the great fashion writers that we have today. But these aren't the books that are getting published anymore, so I feel like this is a time capsule that is still worth revisiting just as a great example of witty, insightful, cultural musings on the world of clothes.
I did get to speak with Holly Brubach for my book. She's very front of mind for me now. But I think the way that she looks at clothes as an expression of the time and both a product of the time, but also like an expression of our psychology in the moment that we're in, and the forces that are shaping us, is exactly how I want to look at them. And indeed how I tried to look at them in my book about J. Crew.
I go back to A Dedicated Follower of Fashion every time I need a sort of reminder of how to make a story about clothes deeper, more thoughtful, with more threads, if you will, woven in and also how to make it a really great read.
