Pre-Owned The Asylum: A collage of couture reminiscences...and hysteria (Hardcover) 0399161899 9780399161896

After nearly a lifetime spent in the Industry, author and fashion insider Simon Doonan is ready to let you in on a little secret: his peers in this multibillion-dollar industry are just as nutty as the denizens of your local loony bin. In The Asylum , an unabashedly hilarious collection of autobiographical essays, Doonan, the creative ambassador for Barneys New York, tells the real-life stories of glamorous madness and stylish insanity. ? Doonan has witnessed models unable to work for fear of ghosts, gone deep-sea fishing with a couturier pal and his jailbird companion, and watched Anna Wintour remain perfectly calm while the ceiling fell-literally-in the middle of Fashion Week. Once you start looking, he says, you'll notice telltale signs of lunacy everywhere. Style insiders see patterns and trends in everything; they suffer from outsize personality disorders and delusions of grandeur; and of course, they have a predilection for theatrical makeup and artfully destroyed clothing. No one is more suited to the asylum than the truly die-hard fashionista-after all, eccentricity and extremism are the foundations of great style. With his gimlet eye for the absurd and a love for eccentricity, Doonan's personal and professional stories never fail to entertain. "The David Sedaris of the style universe" ( The Boston Globe ) gives us the scoop on the kooky, cutthroat-but always fabulous-fashion world, and proves himself one of the sharpest humorists writing today.