Review: Janice Breen Burns
Book: Impressive: How To Have A Stylish Career, by Kirstie Clements (pictured, author, The Vogue Factor and Tongue in Chic)
Melbourne University Publishing, $45
Voxguide: Five Voxstars; gift for a modern young woman.
Photo: www.supperclub.org.au
Former Vogue editor Kirstie Clements’ third book is a precise, intuitive life manual for Modern Young Women. Sadly, most of the Modern Young Women I know already knew everything there is to know about Life, The Universe and Everything by age 18, so Ms. Clements’ book appears to have the potential of a lead balloon.
However. If a Modern Young Woman Who Already Knows Everything did happen to flip through the 233 gratifyingly easy-to-read pages of Ms. Clements’ Impressive – How to Have a Stylish Career, she might stumble on the odd trick of wisdom – the odd swag of them, actually – that would otherwise take her 30 years to learn by trial, error and social osmosis. Practical tricks, for example, like how to dress, pick your words, when to rein in your ego, when to let it rip. Intuitive tricks; how not to be selfish, self-destructive, what to say, when to say it, what to write, bring, avoid. What to DO. How to BE.
Ms. Clements mustered her pearls – the book is dense with them – from three decades of her own experience and laced them into almost as many gems from her most reflective professional friends. (About two dozen of them including designers Akira Isogawa and Toni Maticevski.) Her mate Laura Brown, for example, executive editor of Harper’s Bazaar in the US, makes a typically pithy comment in one chapter on hiring, firing, and how to be (no, dear, you don’t know already) a good employee. “If I’m lucky enough to have a position to fill,” she writes, “It’s not going to be with a brat..” Ms. Clements and her friends helpfully provide dozens of anecdotal definitions of modern brats but, sadly, I suspect that most actual modern brats are blissfully unaware of the teeth-gritting their behaviour causes until their job description is politely dissolved or their application bluntly declined. (Are you getting a sense of how useful this book might be now?)
Of course, I was never a brat – au contraire! – but Impressive took me back to my not-so-confident teens when I might have killed for clues to the “right” way to behave around grownups I hungered to impress, for an embarrasment of reasons. (Love, envy, job, revenge…).
When my review copy of Impressive arrived a couple of weeks ago, I cracked its spine, as is my habit, at a random middle page to get a quickstix first impression. And, this is what I struck: “When contacting someone for the first time, do not sign off with kisses…” Well. Ms. Clements, I instantly realised, is deeply, delicately, deliciously cognisant of her target market; all the girly minutia of their impatient, social-media-centric, clean-eating, hot-yoga-ing, occasionally brattish, accidentally careless and largely oblivious, kissy-kiss lives. And, in her book, she and her friends unpack all these gorgeous, girly, potentially infuriating elements, and instruct how they might be applied more carefully, thoughtfully and tactfully to Real Life, a process that – yes! – can lead if you believe, to a most Stylish Career.
Janice Breen Burns, jbb@voxfrock.com.au
