When Mikaela Dery began her reading series Fashion Fiction nearly a year ago, it functioned as a way to blend two of her great loves: fashion and literature. By day, a literary event programmer, Dery was in the middle of a particularly bleak winter when she decided to re-read Plum Sykes’s 2004 novel Bergdorf Blondes. At the end, Sykes recalled her longtime Vogue column “Fashion Fiction,” which Dery loved, and sparks flew.
“I thought literary fashion writing could be such a great series, and I can call it ‘Fashion Fiction,’ even though you don’t have to read fiction,” Dery explains. She reached out to Sykes for her blessing to use the name, which was granted.
At Dery’s series, fashion writing is treated as a true literary art form. “Something I really love about it is decoupling fashion from commerce and [following] it as an intellectual pursuit,” she says. “I think that’s what makes it really exciting to me: fashion can be part of your life of the mind.”
Just shy of its first anniversary, Fashion Fiction has now featured writers like Zoe Dubno, Doreen St. Félix, Rachel Syme, and Katie Roiphe, and partnered with the likes of Warby Parker and Serviette fragrances. The event remains free and, as Dery puts it, “monthly-ish,” rotating through a few venues around town. By now, it’s developed a bit of a cult following, with each reading selling out within hours, if not minutes.
At the most recent iteration, readers and their audience filed into Surrender Dorothy on West 17th Street, where they sipped wine amid the vintage clothing. I spied at least two pairs of vintage Chanel flats, a Marilyn Monroe miniskirt, and a Spice World T-shirt paired with a plaid pencil skirt. Reader Jonathan Woollen’s lauded new translation of Superstars, the cult-classic French novel by Ann Scott, was available for purchase near a tiara and a swath of sparkling rhinestones. Upstairs, in a small theater (the store’s building belongs to an actor), nearly every seat was filled.
Writers can read any work of any genre—whether it’s their own or written by someone they admire—so long as it’s related to fashion. Actress and Surrender Dorothy co-owner Ruby McCollister shared a story about an antique mall in Mansfield, Ohio. Amanda Lee Burkett, of the Substack You Can Talk About It, But Only With Me, read a selection from the novel Nine and a Half Weeks by Ingeborg Day (a.k.a. Elizabeth McNeill), describings the main male character’s closet before “all the psychosexual stuff happens,” as Burkett quipped. Writer David Kobe unpacked his relationship with the aesthetics and attitude of basketball and the great Allen Iverson. Reading from Superstars, Jonathan Woollen set the scene before a queer French rave in the late 1990s, and writer Elisa Gonzalez shared a selection about celebratory dress from a project she was working on. The entire time, the audience was rapt.
Below, Mikaela Dery shares five works of literature that affected the way she thought about aesthetics, from works of fiction to essays. Follow Fashion Fiction on Substack for information about her next event.
Fashion Is Spinach by Elizabeth Hawes
Elizabeth Hawes was, among other things, a fashion designer in the 1930s. She believed that American women were being sold the “French Legend” (this is the titular spinach), and were therefore wearing clothes that were totally incongruous with their actual lives simply because of the label attached to them. Fashion Is Spinach is incredibly funny and smart; basically all of it is still completely true today. The future of American fashion, according to Hawes, are the women who “make no pretensions to chic and no compromise with fashion. They dress as they please.” This, she says, “takes real character and is, in my opinion, the only way worth dressing.” Also, Hawes’s designs are so, so beautiful. You can see them online in the Met archive.
A Left-Handed Woman by Judith Thurman
I think Judith Thurman might be the smartest person I’ve ever met. All of her books are wonderful, but I often find myself coming back to A Left-Handed Woman, which is a collectsion of her many New Yorker pieces over the years. Thurman says that her subject is often “women who are either lost to history or lost in some ways to themselves,” but what I love about these essays is that they never guiltily use clothes as a Trojan horse to talk about something “real” or “smart”; clothes are part of Thurman’s intellectual life.
Daisy Miller by Henry James
Henry James and Edith Wharton both wrote so beautifully about clothes, which are often central to the plot of their novels. I have a particular affection for Daisy Miller, an American girl in Europe who doesn’t know, and eventually finds that she doesn’t wish to know, about the constraints of society. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, even her detractors concede she “has that charming look that they all have… she dresses in perfection—no, you don’t know how well she dresses.”
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
This book is unbelievably thrilling and moving. A stylish and wealthy Palestinian woman lives in Fort Greene and becomes embroiled in a Birkin bag pyramid scheme. Sometimes the fact that clothes are physical objects is a knock against them (most of the time being called materialistic is not a compliment). Zaher twists this idea in the most brilliant way. A home is not an idea, a home is a physical thing.
Yellow Notebook by Helen Garner
Something I think about a lot, doing Fashion Fiction, is that most writing has some element of fashion in it, because clothes are such an inextricable part of life. For that reason, diaries are an especially good place to stumble upon really wonderful writing about clothes. My favorite example of this is Yellow Notebook, which is Helen Garner’s diary from 1978–1987. There’s a part which actually is not directly about clothes, where she decides that her next book, The Children’s Bach, will be “a short one,” and that “its domestic subject and setting were quite proper.” She writes: “I walked home from work and passed a print shop, in the window of which stood a copy of that van Gogh painting of the inside of his bedroom: floorboards, a bed, two cane-bottomed chairs, a window. I thought, That’s a beautiful painting. And it’s only the inside of a room.” I think about that a lot.