Some Like It Haute

On assignment in France, Alex Simons, a fashion writer for a British weekly who organizes her clothes so that she never wears different designers at the same time, ends up front-page news on the tabloids after a couturier runway collision. Then when cornered by paparazzi, she meets Nick Snow. Sparks fly as Alex and Nick make their way in the fashion world. Carrington MacDuffie performs this fluff smoothly. She gives characters solid accents and shifts from one to the other seamlessly. Listeners who love fashion, or who are amused by silliness, will enjoy traveling to France and following the exploits of Nick and Alex. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

November 14, 2005
Dam whisks the reader into a melee of runway drama, intrigue and snarkiness in her breathless, satiric debut, an air kiss to the fashion world. Alex Simons, former big-haired Texan, parlays her acquired fashion aperçu into articles for a respected London weekly, jetting to Paris each year to report on fashion week fabulousness. She's even made an Excel spreadsheet to organize her outfits by day—fantasy ensembles relayed in label-heavy detail. But she gets off on the wrong Louboutin-shod foot in a catwalk collision, landing front-and-center in the fashion media's hall of shame. But then she meets Nick Snow, the laid-back, khaki-clad American who thumbs his nose at the fashion world. Plus, her publicist friend has led her to the week's hottest scoop: a brilliant new designer, so shadowy he's vanished altogether. Will Alex surmount obstacles (some painfully contrived) to get the guy, the story and the shoes? Dam's swipes at the fashion world's myopia and absurdity (hors d'oeuvres laid out on reclining naked men) amuse when they don't feel shopworn. The plot hangs together by a thread, and the coquetry is forced ("I'm smart and
shallow," Alex confides to Nick), but Dam has stitched a gossamer-light read with sumptuous material and gentle ribbing.