<div><div><P>As Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Fashion is a form of ugliness so absolutely unbearable that we have to alter it every six months.” And yet it serves to make us beautiful, or at least make us feel beautiful. In this book Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can we be both enthralled by the fashion world, but at the same time appalled by the politics and practices of the garment industry? Why do we have such a love–hate relationship with fashion? <p></P><p></P><p><p>Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of today’s fashion system, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She focuses on everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands as well as the luxury market, to show how both ends of the fashion industry exert a powerful force in our lives. As she argues, the world of fashion is both a dictatorship and a democracy that directs our shopping habits as well as our appearance. In this book she peels off the layers of the world’s fifth largest industry, garment by garment, to reveal fashion as a phenomenon, a business, and an art. What is fashion, what role does it play in a global system of adornment, and why do we beautify ourselves to death? She also looks at questions of body- and self-image, and celebrity- and self-obsession. Grinde Arntzen, a journalist who writes about fashion and visual culture, is both disturbed by its influence yet sympathetic to our desire—however ambivalent—to be stylish, smart, or trendy.</P><p></div></div>