Cooking and Fashion

I just finished reading an article on cookbooks from the New Yorker magazine. As I've stated before, food and cooking are right up there with clothing when it comes to my interests. What struck me about this article is the comparison the author, Adam Gotnik, makes between reading cookbooks and fashion magazines for pleasure.

After describing the joy one can get from reading cookbooks since they can take us to other lands and times, he talks about magazines. "The woman who reads the fashion magazines isn’t passively imagining the act of having; she’s actively imagining the act of shopping. (And distantly imagining the act of wearing.) She turns down pages not because she wants to look again but because, for that moment, she really intends to buy that—for a decisive imagined moment she did buy it, even if she knows she never will. Reading recipe books is an active practice, too, even if all the action takes place in your mind. We reanimate our passions by imagining the possibilities."

Read that last line again. Isn't that what looking at fashion magazines, catalogs, and shopping are? They are exercises that help us to imagine the possibilities. . . of looking chic, edgy, happy, bold, creative, etc. We are given images that excite and interest us, and may push us to expand our horizons. Naturally, noticing what people wear on the street, and thinking about fashions you can try is also possible, in the same way that going to a restaurant and later trying to replicate what you ate and loved can be an pleasurable endeavor. I like to think about what I will wear when I am going out to eat, thus marrying two of my favorite past times.