From Hell's heart I strike at thee

[mme_hardy]

 I am going to be doing a full review later.  For Christmas, I asked for Linda Przybyszewski's The Lost Art of Dress.  I am reading it with interest.  It is the kind of  history where you'd much rather read the author's research sources than her book.   For one thing, she constantly refers to her sources as "A Dress Doctor" or "Two Dress Doctors", and then you have to look in the back for the name of the woman who said X or Y or Z.

Anyway, full rant later.  Here's a representative bit.

 

 The Dress Doctors took their ideas, reworked them into the Five Art Principles—harmony, rhythm, balance, proportion, and emphasis—and applied them to dress. As a glance around any college campus will prove, studying the principles of art changes how a person dresses. While the law faculty members in their neat, dark suits appear ready to testify before Congress, and the Romance language professors dress with a certain je ne sais quoi , it is the art historians whose subtle color schemes, unusual accessories, and artfully groomed heads draw admiration. There is one exception to this rule: art historians who study ugly things. If a professor’s specialty is the life and work of an old man from Alabama who made murals out of carburetors and teaspoons, no one looks to her for fashion tips. For the rest of us, there are the Five Art Principles.

(For the record, Dr. Przybyszewski is a professor of history, not of art history.)