An Education in Style, Slang, and Seduction in the Great City on the Seine
March 1, 2015
One woman's passionate pursuit of fashion in the City of Light. When Time contributing editor Betts (Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style, 2011) went to Paris as a high school graduate in 1982, she dreamed of returning to the city to live. After graduating from Princeton four years later, she fulfilled her dream. She wanted to be a foreign correspondent, writing articles and news stories on the important events happening around her, but she quickly became immersed in Paris' dynamic world of fashion. In this lighthearted, appealing memoir, Betts takes readers back in time to when she was a young woman, still searching for her identity, a tribe, or family of her own choosing, and a place to call home. She intermingles memories of life in her little flat in Paris, her French girlfriends, and long weekends with her lover with the rapid-paced world of writing about French haute couture. After landing a job at Fairchild Publications writing for Women's Wear Daily and W magazines, Betts' life escalated into the whirlwind that constitutes the fashion scene in one of the most fashion-conscious cities in the world. She learned to interview well-known designers and models and those whose work had yet to hit the big time, and she includes enjoyable anecdotes about many of these people. However, with impossibly long work hours and a highly demanding boss, the author's world telescoped inward until every waking moment revolved around the gossip and anticipation of each new fashion season. Suddenly, she discovered she had lost her Paris dream. For those who are interested in the men and women involved in haute couture, Betts' reminiscences will be a delight. For those who know nothing about fashion, the name-dropping may be tiresome, but the book is diverting nonetheless. A colorfully descriptive memoir of life as a writer working the Paris fashion beat.
April 15, 2015
A move to Paris after her graduation from Princeton University provided journalist Betts (Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style) with a real-life postgraduate education in both French life and fashion. Betts, who eventually rose through the well-dressed ranks at various publications before becoming a senior editor at Vogue and editor of Harper's Bazaar, concentrates her attentions here on the several years in the 1980s she spent in Paris. This was a time of absorbing the mysteries of French chic from friends and lovers as well as the realities of the fashion publishing world from her associates at W and WWD, where she toiled while trying to figure out whether her future was in France or the United States. The breakneck pace of magazine publishing was often at odds with the more leisurely milieu of friends, food, and fun the author's Parisian acquaintances inhabited, and required a fair amount of juggling of travel, dates, and wardrobe. Betts's account of those tumultuous years is replete with industry gossip but also conveys the importance of the business in economic and historic terms. VERDICT Francophiles and fashonistas alike will enjoy this look back at the practical, not sentimental, education of an American in Paris. [See Prepub Alert, 11/10/14.]--Therese Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 1, 2015
Just go. That's what Kate Betts' mother told her when bombings in Paris threatened to derail her plans to move there after her graduation from Princeton in 1986. Kate had become enamored with the city on a visit years earlier, and in following her mother's advice, she entered a world of surprise and sophistication. Her planned one-year stay stretched into several, during which she made friends and had some flings. Betts, who would later hold editorial positions at Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, brings a fashion expert's practiced eye to how people present themselves and what it says about them. Her general pronouncements about the habits and character of the French people are mixed with enough gritty insider detail to make this perfect reading for armchair travelers. Fashion fans will be drawn in as well by learning how Betts broke into the business writing for men's and society magazines after a series of entry-level jobs. Although Betts would never fully belong in Paris, she learned, during her stay, some of what it means to be French, which is all that travel-memoir readers seek.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)