A couple of style advice books from the library

Recently I've been looking at this kind of book, mainly since the local library has a big selection on the subject. Two I've read recently:

Closet Confidential: Style Secrets Learned the Hard Way. It's written by a Portland blogger. To me, the influence of the author's age group and geographical location seems pretty obvious — there's at least a whole page on how to decide whether a T-shirt is sufficiently ironic, for example. Not that that means none of the advice will work outside hipster enclaves. I think this book is most helpful for suggesting what can successfully be worn together and which items might be particularly useful to have (or not).

Oh No She Didn't: The Top 100 Style Mistakes Women Make and How to Avoid Them, by one of the hosts of TLC's What Not to Wear. This one's pretty heavy on the how-not-to-look-like-part-of-an-outgroup aspect of fashion; that's almost its whole point, and it can be snarky to the point of offensiveness. If you don't want to see that, skip it. Aside from that, you can glean some useful general advice on fit and on what tends to make an outfit either extreme or boring.

On the one hand, I'm glad I was able to get these from the library, without expanding my already-excessive book collection. This particular type of book will inevitably become dated after a while, and I felt that some of the information in each of them was pretty obvious. What I did like about both, though, is that they don't necessarily lead to the sort of all-or-nothing thinking you can get into with fashion magazines: they aren't pushing trends that clearly won't work on anyone but supermodels, or luxury products that almost nobody can reasonably consider buying. The authors are each witty in their own way; I think this is suited to the genre, since it isn't generally a life-or-death subject. Both gave me some ideas to consider as I replace parts of my wardrobe.