The Asylum

After nearly a lifetime spent in the Industry, author and fashion insider Simon Doonan is ready to let you in on a little secret: his peers in this multibillion-dollar industry are just as nutty as the denizens of your local loony bin. In The Asylum, an unabashedly hilarious memoir-in-essays, Doonan, the creative ambassador for Barneys New York, tells the real-life stories of glamorous madness and stylish insanity. Doonan has seen it all: from dealing with models unable to work for fear of ghosts, to deep-sea fishing with a couturier pal and his jailbird companion, to watching Anna Wintour remain perfectly calm while the ceiling fell-literally-in the middle of Fashion Week. The outlandish family Doonan knew as a child has given way to alarmingly similar lunatic peers in the fashion world: style insiders see patterns and trends in everything; they suffer from outsize personality disorders and delusions of grandeur; and, of course, they have a predilection for theatrical makeup and artfully destroyed clothing. No one is more suited to the asylum than the truly die-hard fashionista-after all, eccentricity and extremism are the foundations of great style. Hailed as a must-read for fashionistas and non-fashionistas alike, (Michael Kors) and raucous and revelatory (Booklist), Doonan's critically acclaimed collection gives us the scoop on the kooky, cutthroat-but always fabulous-fashion world, and proves the author to be one of the sharpest humorists writing today.