Book Review: My Mom, Style Icon
Do you remember when you first started to think of your own mom as a real person with dreams, hopes, and fears? For Piper Weiss, the author of My Mom, Style Icon, discovering her mother’s old suede fringe vest and crochet belt was a turning point for her.
“Who is this woman, and what did she do with my mother?” Weiss asks. “And more to the point, can I borrow those bell-bottoms?”
My Mom
From that velvet-laced discovery, Weiss embarked on a quest to collect moms’ fashion photos from daughters around the world, eventually creating this wonderful book packed with 200 colour photos of stylish moms from decades past.
“It’s not that I didn’t know my mother had a past,” says Weiss. “I just didn’t realize there was so much of it. And that it was so good looking.”
Part coffee table book, part nostalgic memoir, My Mom explores the art of rocking a groovy pair of bell-bottoms, completing an outfit with the perfect white gloves, or perfecting the perfect sky-high (or stick-straight) hairdo of the day.
“It’s hard to imagine your mom as a person, even less a teenager, unless you see photo evidence,” says Weiss. “It’s like meeting a different person—one you might have been friends with.”
Style icon
Weiss peppers the book with thoughtful observations of her mom, Lillian’s, trendy fashions over the years, along with comments on photos of other moms by their adult children. With a few celebrity moms thrown in for good measure, the book examines moms from across the globe, and from backgrounds as varied as the clothing choices.
The result is a sentimental appreciation for the sometimes-thought-out, sometimes-happenstance style that our moms pulled off wonderfully while we were too busy being daughters to notice. It’s a heart-warming collection of snapshots from decades past that pays tribute to the women who helped shape our own fashion tastes (whether we admit or not).
Above all, the book explores the idea that, whether we strive to be just like them, or jut off in a different direction altogether, our moms are women with their own lives, too—before and beyond the wonderful adventure of motherhood.
My Mom Style Icon is from Chronicle Books.
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