Books Are Always in Fashion
When that small trim-sized book we now call “mass market” was first created, it was called a pocket book, and it was meant to literally fit in one’s pocket. Pocket Books publishers published the first books of this size in America in 1939. The company was acquired by Simon & Schuster, who owns it still, in 1966.
There was a fashion designer in the second half of the 20th century who designed dresses with specific pockets for books (Darn, I can’t remember or find her name! Does anyone know? …[Two minutes later…] I just remembered! It was Pauline Trigère. I am so impressed with myself. My confidence in my memory is restored!) Anyway…
Pauline Trigère thought books important enough to make a place for them in haute couture. Once, when I led a book class for a group of lower income women, women with very challenging lives, many of them single moms, I remember one mother telling me how she kept a book in her pocket while she cooked dinner. When things were simmering on the stove, she’d slip the book out and slip in a few moments of reading time. That really stayed with me, that image of someone to whom books mattered so much that she went to some effort to create reading time. Take that, you many folks who tell me you’re too busy to read!
But I digress… my point is, books are in fashion, literally. And just last week, at London Fashion Week, it happened again. Designer Christopher Kane has taken a page from the book of fashion and integrated it into his lovely Bookleaf dress. It probably costs a bit more than a paperback, but that’s the cost of culture!
