The Asylum: A collage of couture reminiscences...and hysteria

by Simon Doonan

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399161896
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/03/2013
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.94(w) x 8.53(h) x 0.97(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Simon Doonan is the creative ambassador for Barneys New York and the author of several books, including Gay Men Don’t Get Fat, Wacky Chicks, and Beautiful People (published in the U.S. as Nasty), which became a BBC TV series. Originally from England, he worked on Savile Row, at Maxfield in Los Angeles, and with Diana Vreeland at The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art before becoming the creative director of Barneys New York, where he designed legendary window displays for more than twenty years. In 2009, he designed the holiday decorations for the Obama’s first White House Christmas. Formerly a columnist for The New York Observer, he is now a contributor to Slate.com, and has appeared on Gossip Girl, Iron Chef America, America’s Next Top Model, and elsewhere. Doonan lives in New York with his husband, Jonathan Adler.

Read an Excerpt

Author's Note

Ah! Fashion.

A nuthouse? A refuge? Or maybe both. Yes, an asylum in both senses of the word. A place where unemployable crazy people are always welcome.

Every seasoned fashion personage has his or her favorite stories of folly, aberration, derangement, kookiness and excess.

These are mine.

In most instances real names are used. I have tweaked the identities of certain individuals to protect their innocence and cherish their fabulosity.

Have I embroidered or embellished? Let me answer that question by quoting Diana Vreeland: “Exaggeration is my only reality.”

—S. D.

Table of Contents

Author's note xiii

Lipstick on your kneecaps 1

From couture to parole 11

When bossy bitches roamed the earth 27

Tears for frocks 39

Suzy menkes's saucisson 49

Rei kawakubo's pasties 55

Balenciaga could sew with either hand 69

The devil and miguel adrover 87

The nude wall phone 95

Thierry mugler's flying shoulder pads 109

The unkindness of chic 117

America's next top shaman 127

Anna's wondering why we haven't started yet 135

The dream crusher 151

Tom ford's moist lip 167

Toxins are the new cargo pants 175

Thom browne's hairy ankles 185

The olsens vs the phoenix suns 191

Coco was a jersey girl 199

The cellulite closet 207

Manischewitz? j'adore! 221

Plato ripped my blouse 227

Willi smith was a right-on sista 241

Alexander will need a room 247

Zips up the back with no bones 257

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Simon Doonan's hysterical first row, firsthand observations are a must-read for fashionistas and non-fashionsitas alike.”
—Michael Kors  
 
“The fashion world is—in a word—hysterical! Simon Doonan is the one man who sees it and tells it like it (absurdly) is.”
—Marc Jacobs
 
“Simon Doonan is the Bon Qui Qui of Fashion—stirring things up and reminding us to keep a sense of humor.”
—Alexander Wang 
 
“In The Asylum, Simon Doonan's comedic genius explodes out of highbrow shoe boxes.”
—Leandra Medine, author, and blogger of The Man Repeller

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Asylum:

“Simon Doonan's hysterical first row, firsthand observations are a must-read for fashionistas and non-fashionsitas alike.”
—Michael Kors  
 
“The fashion world is—in a word—hysterical! Simon Doonan is the one man who sees it and tells it like it (absurdly) is.”
—Marc Jacobs
 
“Simon Doonan is the Bon Qui Qui of Fashion—stirring things up and reminding us to keep a sense of humor.”
—Alexander Wang 
 
“In The Asylum, Simon Doonan's comedic genius explodes out of highbrow shoe boxes.”
—Leandra Medine, author, and blogger of The Man Repeller

“[A] raucous and revelatory essay collection....[Doonan] knows the fashion world inside out....Even readers whose fashion sense is more Gap than GQ will find keen insight and humor in Doonan’s cheeky take on what it means to be chic.”
—Booklist

“Hilarious, irresistible essays about the sheer lunacy of the fashion world, from a sharp-eyed (and even sharper-tongued) industry insider.”—People

“The funniest fashion book of all time.”—Lucky Magazine

“These snappy essays find Doonan surprisingly more sincere and charming than ever… A gossipy, voyeuristic and reliably campy romp down the catwalks of the fashion asylum.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Simon Doonan, the creative ambassador for Barney's and Slate columnist, is one of culture writing's funniest voices.”—The New Republic

“Simon Doonan is a legend in the fashion world. Wickedly funny, wildly creative...has an insider's view of global style and its peculiar inhabitants....Indeed, those loony, creative types are what have kept Doonan interested for the decades he's been in the fashion business. And what makes his book so entertaining for the rest of us.”—Suzanne S. Brown, The Denver Post

From the Publisher

2013-08-15
High-fashion hijinks from the outspoken "Creative Ambassador" for Barneys New York. After spending much of his life working with reed-thin models and quick-tempered designers, raconteur Doonan's (Gay Men Don't Get Fat, 2012) skewering of the couture world comes from a place both of witnessing the industry's stylistic evolution and playing a key part within it. If readers are to believe the author's melodramatic musings, fashion designers date hustlers and porn stars, and models are "legendarily cheap," yet each plays an integral part of the fabulous "flock." Spliced between cleverly narrated bits about his window dressing days, "fashion superdeity" Anna Wintour, urine drinking, and his best friend, a psychologist (whose work "in a nuthouse" resembles life in the fashion industry), are colorfully realized profiles of iconic designers like visionary couture doyenne Diana Vreeland, Coco Chanel, Tom Ford and Doonan's Fire Island "beach neighbor" Michael Kors. Some of his earlier recollections nod fondly at Manhattan's pre–Rudy Giuliani halcyon days in the 1980s when he rubbed elbows with "illustrious fashionrati" like Madonna, Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs at the Gaiety, a Times Square gay male burlesque theater. Collectively, Doonan's writing here is less biting than previous forays and, to his credit, more concerned with sharing an engaging memory than being snarky. The author often pauses midstream in a digressive retreat from critical (but no less hilarious) commentary on particular people (style show host Elsa Klensch) or places (Japan) to remark on a genuine fondness for them. Though he quips, "you have to admit, my sweeping generalizations are always so much more exciting than facts," these snappy essays find Doonan surprisingly more sincere and charming than ever. A gossipy, voyeuristic and reliably campy romp down the catwalks of the fashion asylum.

Kirkus Reviews