- Jane Mount c/o The Ideal Bookshelf
- This is where to draw fashion inspiration, from bookshelves.
Like almost every other girl I know who grew up reading the Babysitters Club series, I can still rattle off many of the more daring sartorial choices that Stacey McGill and Claudia Kishi made. There were scrunched socks and belts looped loosely around teenage-girl-hips and fringed white leather ankle boots and feathered earrings and barrettes shaped like birds and all of these things were put together in ways that were visually dissonant, sure, but also exciting. At least, those outfits seemed exciting at the time, although maybe that was a function of me being a 10-year-old girl who didn’t really care that much about good literature, but did care very much about convincing my parents to let me get a second piercing in each ear and giant palm tree earrings to wear in said piercings. No matter! Much in the same way that meals in literature make an indelible impression on the reader, there are some outfits in literature that beg to be recreated. And so that’s exactly what we’re going to do. The following are ten of the most memorable moments in literary fashion, proving the notion that clothes make the man. Or, in this case, proving the notion that clothes make the character (and, for our purposes, the female character, male characters will have to take a back seat.) Luckily, recreating these outfits is an easy enough task when you’ve got access to the kinds of clothes carried by many of Brooklyn’s best boutiques. So now you have no excuse not to dress like Nicole Diver or Lux Lisbon. Which, dressing like a character doesn’t mean you have to act like her. Because while you might have no desire to meet the fate of the Lisbon sisters, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to dress like them.
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