RaveThe London Review of BooksThe book...is a precise, unrancorous (mostly) record of his nascent sensibility, ‘self-education in fashion,’ unfettered excitements, hard work, mistakes and triumphs as he learned to trust his own vision ... Fashion Climbing sometimes reads as a picaresque tale, but it is a drama of creative survival and its strategies, vividly felt ... his language is one of the great, idiosyncratic pleasures of Fashion Climbing ... The mixture of descriptive verve, incongruity, slang of another time, seeming coinages, simplicity and weirdness was as alive in his millinery as in his sentences ... his lavish descriptions produce, in my brain at least, a simultaneous transport away from and intensification of the present ... Fashion Climbing, like its author, is deeply emotional—a rather uninhibited number as well as reticent; at once full of whimsy and emphatic in expertise; dedicated above all to an expansive love.
