Killer Style: How Fashion Has Injured, Maimed, & Murdered through History by Serah-Marie McMahon (review)

If cover art featuring photos that hybridize skeletons with mannequin fashionistas leaves any doubt to the scope of this engrossing volume, the subtitle ably dispels it. McMahon and David offer a tantalizing range of brief entries on the many ways clothing producers, customer, and even retailers have been affected on the inside by what they sport on the outside. Working their way down from top to toes, sections dubbed "Horrified Heads," "Miserable Middles," and "Unlucky Legs" cover fatal and near-fatal wardrobe malfunctions around the globe. Some of the material has already been, um, done to death: poisonous cloth and cosmetics, radium-infused wrist watches, restrictive corsets, etc. The authors steer readers in new directions, too, though, from combustibility (celluloid combs and tulle ballet tutus), to strangulation (Isadora Duncan's demise plays on tragic unfortunate repeat), to toxic color (green was not a wise choice in the late eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries). Although many examples are from the United States and Europe, they are joined in a global hall of shame by lead-laced Egyptian kohl and Hindu bindi, silicosis in Turkey (sanding denim in sweatshops is as risky as mining), and alarming instances of Japanese death by platform shoe. The occasional fact calls for a bit more information: would it, for example, have been too hard to name the English department store that went up in flames fueled by cotton "snow" and a comb display? Nonetheless, the book has loads of color photographs, an index, and a serviceable bibliography to back up its enticing topic, and most readers and report writers will not be disappointed. EB