Received from Netgalley.

In 1971, I departed for Austria for a year of study at the university of Vienna, full of expectations, dreams, and a profound ignorance. I'd just turned twenty.

Ten years later, Kate Betts departed for France at roughly the same age (21) and for the same reasons, though she was not expecting to stay a year, but indefinitely. And though she came from a family of privilege (which I did not), she was determined to find work to support herself as she pursued her dream of shedding her Americanism and becoming a Parisienne.

Those early chapters evoked old memories again and again as she remorselessly details her reaction to culture shock, her mistakes, people's attitudes, how she faced the gritty details of trying to find a place in a city indifferent to your presence. How you can lie awake in a lumpy bed, listening to sirens, wondering what you're doing there--no one seems to want you around, and your attempts at their language are met with laughter, contempt, condescension as often as, sometimes more often, than friendliness and patience.

And once you do grit yourself into a rudimentary fluency, you can sort of get along in simple conversations, and you make acquaintances who invite you along, you'll think I've made it, I'm here, just to find them unconsciously closing ranks with you on the outside because cultural differences are so inbred you will never belong. You will always be a mongrel American.

Here's where our experiences diverge: I took my courses, did my best, and went home after a year a little wiser, to a blue collar family puzzled by my choice to go over there when no one on either side had ever gone to Europe. (Actually except for two older relatives on Dad's side, no one had ever been to college.) Kate Bett stays, and through connections offered by those at home, flits from grunge job to slightly better grunge job, always working on her language skills via her slowly growing friendships, and listening to their advice about how to act, to dress, to mimic Parisians.

Finally her connections led to job interviews that brought her to the fashion industry, which is an enormous part of Paris's culture. Here she happily threw herself into the challenge until she gradually found herself reshaping into a real Parisienne, one pair of shoes, one bit of furniture, one trip into the country at a time.

I expected to lose interest in the book at that point, as I've never had much interest in modern fashion, except at a distance when looking at cultural ebb-tides. And out of modern fashion changes, my strongest antipathy has been reserved for the Ugly Eighties. I hated the eighties from the first day that the new Vanity Fair came out, full of ads for Calvin Klein with the models contorted into ugly postures, wearing clothes that I thought gaspingly clunky; for a decade I grimly wore my seventies long dresses, and when those clothes started falling apart and I had to buy something, I ripped out shoulder pads and stuck to sandals rather than deal with clodding, uncomfortable shoes.

Betts manages to evoke all the wild color, fabrics, boomerang changes, and attitudes in such a sympathetic way that at last I got a look inside the people who shaped eighties fashion, and why they did it--where their enthusiasm lay--and how utterly involving that life can be.

Saint Laurent . . . understood better than anyone that style was not simply about appearance. Style was about gestures, experiences, and taste. Style was about context. Style told a story: it began with a time and a place.

She understands the passionate work ethic, and its cost: when you're doing what you love most, always aiming a little higher, you are willing to work a hundred hours a week by blinkering the rest of your life.

One thing I learned reading about styles of previous centuries is that the wealthy are always looking for the pique and surprise of the new. They aren't doing anything but consuming and entertaining, so they crave change to lift them out of ennui, and of course also for competition among themselves: who has the latest, who looks the hottest, who carries off a daring party, a trend. Betts writes about that and gives details of how the fashion industry both leads and scrambles to follow the trend makers, and then details with an exacting eye what happens to the top style makers when they start getting old. Their styles are no longer the new, hot thing.

Welcome to the nineties.

But the next generation of women needed something commanding as they fought their way into the proverbial boardroom. They needed armor--sharp shoulders, sleek silhouettes, bold colors. And now another cultural shift was emerging, coming from the streets. . . .

Meanwhile, the twenty-something has found herself turning thirty, and at home in America, her friends are settling down, achieving whatever it was they wanted. She had a lovely relationship with a very dear sounding Frenchman, who was not ambitious: he loved to enjoy life as it was. She begins to realize that they have little in common, that at least half of her romance with him was based on his country, his friends, his language, his family, his Frenchness.

I was young, and when you're young, you don't look around, you look ahead.

When she hits the wall, she writes well about that, too. She'd achieved success . . . or had she? Tthere was the inexorable glass ceiling: a woman was not going to get farther. She would always be taking orders. She was a writer, and she wanted to be writing what she wanted to write about, not what she was told to write about. It was time to go home to New York.

She stayed with the fashion world for a while, stepping back and discussing it in relation to world events in a way that I found fascinating both in how it paralleled my own observations at the time--and how different things look from the top.

Of course sooner or later, anyone who loves fashion will have to defend a passion that to many people seems silly and self-indulgent.

And she does, with wit, hard-won, rueful insight, and sympathy, as she brings her personal journey to a close. I found this book thoroughly enjoyable and insightful, full of quotable bits and stylish, witty prose.