When My Wonderful World of Fashion arrived on our doorstep with a knock from the deliveryman on a weekday morning, it was a bit like Christmas day. There was the ceremonious ripping of packaging and then bliss. Like a child with that one dreamy gift, we were wholly lost in our own world.
What followed was uncharacteristic: There was no coffee drinking, no web searching, no email reading and replying. Just us, still in our jammies, completely smitten with a book that held our imaginations from cover to cover. Nina Chakrabarti’s My Wonderful World of Fashion: A Book for Drawing, Creating and Dreaming, published by Laurence King Publishing, has the power to take your hand and lead you away from the doldrums of adult responsibility.
In this book, Chakrabarti has created page upon page of fashion illustrations. We’re talking 272 pages dedicated to clothing design, haute couture, fashion history and patterns for snipping, coloring, creating and more. Chakrabarti presents her fun, whimsical and oh-so-inspiring illustrations as a coloring and activity book hybrid—one that is sophisticated enough to catch the eyes of adults.
While many of the illustrations are gorgeous enough to frame, each page begs fashionistas of all ages to whip out their art supplies—crayons, markers, scissors and all—and just create. In a time when runway fashion can feel quite inaccessible to those of us without haute couture budgets, Chakrabarti has created a book that puts the fun back in fashion.
My Wonderful World of Fashion begs its readers to design “an eye-boggling pattern” for a pair of leggings and fill pages with “phenomenal footwear designs” of their own. Even though the aforementioned framing of pages is tempting, the lure to make each illustration your own is far greater. And isn’t that was fashion is (or should be!) about—loving and inventing style with a flair that is all your own?
We think it would make the perfect holiday gift for your impeccably dressed fashion maven of a friend. Or even a grammar school girl who loves to twirl in pretty dresses. (We know we’ll be buying a copy for a certain third grader who is receiving her first sewing machine this Christmas.)
The all-ages appeal of this book speaks to Chakrabarti’s heartfelt love of the decorative arts. Each pages breathes with this sweet sincerity, one that promises that, even if you don’t have talent worthy of Vogue magazine or Project Runway, you can still create something beautiful.
