Simon’s Doonans and Don’ts. Photo: Getty Images
We came across a copy of Simon Doonan’s upcoming book, Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You, and even though it’s not coming out until April, we are going to tell you a little bit about it now, because it is kind of awesome. In it, Doonan interviews the insanely fabulous and the fabulously insane — everyone from Dita Von Teese to Malcolm Gladwell — about their unique personal styles. The book is “intended as a wake-up call to the women of America to eschew the contemporary porno-chic trend and inject a little classy eccentricity into their fashion choices,” Doonan wrote in the Observer last summer, and it’s more a rumination on what glamour is than the style manual the title implies, but if you use it as such, you might be lucky enough to end up like Amy Fine Collins, who says her fashion choices cause her to get lots of attention from “homeless, gay, black street people.” How fun is that? Just don’t try and take them with you to the Waverly Inn.
Mickey Boardman on Isabella Blow: “I think she really wanted to get laid, which was kind of problematic considering how she dressed. It takes a special kind of man to want to stick it in the girl in the Philip Treacy lobster hat.”
Lucy Liu on her fabulously plans for the future: “I wish to be cryogenically frozen in Nan Kempner’s closet, and when I wake up, I can choose from her incredible collection.”
Hamish Bowles on his fabulous near-death experience: “I was listening to a Gertrude Lawrence 78 on a windup gramophone I had compelled my parents to buy me. Lost in the evocative magic of La Lawrence’s crackling trills, I failed to notice that the trailing end of a blue chiffon scarf I had knotted insouciantly at my neck had caught in the turntable, and the next thing I knew my face was smack against the spinning disc and I was gasping for air.”
Lynn Yaeger on her own fabulously insane look: “Once when I was on fashion TV and a friend of my mother’s commented to her that they had made me up funny for the broadcast and my mom replied ‘Oh, no! That’s my Lynnie!’”
Malcolm Gladwell on his fabulously insane hair: “I hate to break it to you, but I don’t consider myself either eccentric or glamorous. I am, in point of fact, a dork.”
—Amy Preiser
