Beauty Find - Beautiful Reads I

A Fantasy Memoir, by Cynthia Rowley

When you happen to be one of the best-known American fashion designers around, who says it's necessary to stick completely to fact when telling your life story? Cynthia Rowley has taken a few fanciful liberties in her charming latest book, Slim: A Fantasy Memoir. In this volume (which follows her successful Swell series and spinoff line of products for mega retailer Target), incidents in Rowley's life are presented fable-like, each chapter accompanied by her dreamy illustrations. With magical-realist touches, a young Rowley wrangles all the helium balloons at a party, stuffs them into the big net sleeves of her dress and floats away. More true-to-fact, we suspect, is the account of the young designer making her first sale on Chicago's El train, to a woman who admired the jacket Rowley was wearing - and who just happened to be a buyer at a major department store. Sounds like a charmed life, and it's rendered even more so by this whimsical read.

Slim: A Fantasy Memoir, by Cynthia Rowley, $29.95 at www.rizzoliusa.com

(editorial by Jenny Miller)

beauty finds
posted - beth / 10:19 AM / 08.28.07