What Not to Wear - Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine

A nice explanation of what clothing looks good on different female body types. On the plus side, pictures of every outfit, pictures on women with fairly normal bodies, and an upbeat, "you can look good if you just learn a few things" attitude. On the minus side, only two models (the authors), though they have very different shapes and manage to cover a surprising number of good and bad examples. If you read the Amazon reviews, many people complain that the ideas in this book are too basic. And I would agree: if you are at all fashion-advanced, this is not the book for you. But for beginners (like me), it is a great place to start.

Once you’ve mastered these ideas, I suggest the Lucky Shopping Manual by Andrea Linett and Kim France, which discusses how to create outfits. It also gives explanation of the function of different items of clothing (e.g., demi-bras are for wearing under button-down shirts) and suggestions for building a wardrobe. I would avoid Secrets of Style by the Editors of InStyle. Not enough pictures, and those that they have are either line-drawings (too hard to interpret) or photographs of actresses (honestly, how useful are photographs of Charlize Theron and Halle Berry in learning how to dress your normal body with your normal amount of money and total lack of stylists?).

What Not to Wear
Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine
2003
Available from Amazon