Book Review

Feeding the Eye: Essays

by Anne Hollander

352 pp., $27

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Nothing annoys independent critic Anne Hollander more than people who don't take fashion seriously. Fashion, she rather self-righteously laments, "bears a heavy weight of ancient discredit that still burdens many of those who work in it and write about it," such as herself.

Are fashion critics really so oppressed? After all, that splendid shrine, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, does include the Costume Institute, albeit tucked away in the basement. According to Hollander, such efforts miss the point: "Like stage costumes, couturiers' work is often embalmed in exhibitions that can be ghastly essays in necrophilia." She scorns equally "efforts to chain [fashion] up in Cultural Studies." In Feeding the Eye, a new collection of previously published essays, Hollander furthers her project of making the world safe for fashion criticism.

Hollander writes about clothing and its reflections in literature, dance, painting, film and photography in an exceptionally clear and modest prose style. She keeps herself as distant from fashion journalism chattiness and cattiness as from university-press obfuscation. Her miscellaneous subjects are bound together by the particular and consistent kind of attention she pays them. When discussing, for example, Kafka, she talks of his clothes and confidently and convincingly takes her argument from the well-cut suits he preferred to the bodily architecture of Gregor, the cockroach protagonist of The Metamorphosis.