Wacky Chicks: Life Lessons from Fearlessly Inappropriate and Fabulously Eccentric Women - Hardcover

Doonan, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743243412 ISBN 13: 9780743243414

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2003

Synopsis

Celebrates the growing phenomenon of eccentric fashion ideas, careers, attitudes, behaviors, mating rituals, and habitats of wacky women through sixteen life stories.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Doonan was born in 1952 in Reading, England. He began trimming windows on London's Savile Row before emigrating to Southern California in the late seventies. After working with Diana Vreeland at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Doonan joined Barneys New York in 1986, where he is now creative director. He is also a columnist for The New York Observer and a contributor to Harper's Bazaar and several other publications. He lives in New York with his partner, designer Jonathan Adler, and their dog, Liberace.

Reviews

Doonan, New York Observer columnist and author of Confessions of a Window Dresser, loves wacky women, and if he ever opted for a sex change, "you bet your sweet bippy" he'd be one himself. A wacky chick (w.c.) is B.R.U.N.C.H.: "belligerent, resilient, uninhibited, naughty, creative and hilarious." She's got attitude and shows it, whether that means filling her apartment with exotic reptiles, setting up her own slashed latex garment business, collecting Chihuahua skeletons or dressing up as Satan in horns at anti-abortion rallies. True, w.c.'s have a hard time keeping jobs (which is why many turn their eccentricities into self-employment) and some "transition from wacky to wack-job" and start shooting, but there's no denying the tremendous life force these gals have. To Doonan, they epitomize feminism: "If the goal of women's liberation was to create a world where the sisters could do whatever the hell they wanted, then the wacky chick must surely be the screeching apotheosis of feminist achievement." Doonan has a gay time neologizing (e.g., "obnoxiosities," "chickorators," "fashiphanous fromage" ) his way through the life stories of some 16 wacky women in this silly but fun self-help book. His point? Support your local w.c. all you can: take her to lunch, treat her like a queen and "validate" her wackiness. "Becoming a wacky-chick hag" may even speed up "your own transformation from Nora Normal to B.R.U.N.C.H.
y broad."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Just in time for warm-weather reading comes Doonan's breezy, in-your-face book, in which the uppercase letters spill over from the title to be liberally sprinkled throughout, along with a splatter of exclamation marks every paragraph or so. Thus Doonan's breathless style (complete, somehow, with long, elliptical, though germane, sentences) becomes a character to equal any of the wacky chicks he has interviewed. Assembled from his weekly New York Observer column, his fashion-and-style-focused romp through Wacky Chick-dom (look out, Magic Kingdom!) will vastly entertain readers open to the wacky wisdom of a flea market fashion maven; a kick-ass, lemon-haired gossip columnist; a lizard enthusiast who hand-feeds a monster over five feet long; and a bride who emerges from an egg--and to Doonan's demonstration that these women are B.R.U.N.C.H--that is, Belligerent, Resilient, Uninhibited, Naughty, Creative, and Hilarious. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743243412
• ISBN 13: 9780743243414
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 243