Read IN BED: Tales From The Back Row

Words & Images by Hannah-Rose Yee

"People in the front row dress spectacularly in clothes that cost more than most mortgages. They text regularly with celebrities, whether or not they are one. Front-row people have photographers orbiting them like their own moons. No-one orbits me, but I was almost run over in the middle of Fifth avenue this one time because someone wanted to take a picture of me holding a borrowed Chanel bag. The rest of the time I slip amid the crowd unseen. But that's just what life is like when your seat is somewhere near Canada, in the back row. You're allowed in, you're just not on the inside." -__Tales From The Back Row, Amy Odell Ok, I'm going to give it to you straight. This book is hilarious, and you need to read it. Now. Amy Odell was one of the founding bloggers on The Cut, New York Magazine's (fantastic) online channel for fashion, before moving to Buzzfeed and then Cosmopolitan, where she is the online editor. She's a huge figure on the New York fashion scene, and this is her first book, a hilarious series of essays about the role that fashion plays in the life of a woman who chose it, rather than was born with it. She's not that fashion girl, with the innate ability to mix high and low, and who never wears the wrong skirt. She's a normal woman, just like the rest of us, who fell in love with fashion when the lights went down at her first show ("Oh, what is this light that holds us fast?") My favourite essay in the collection is one where she falls hard and fast for a pair of Alexander Wang trackpants, and while all her colleagues and friends tell her how amazing she looks, slowly the rest of her life starts to fall apart (including her relationship, when she wears those pants to a fancy dinner with his parents). We are all Amy Odell in that moment. We all have our own pair of Alexander Wang trackpants (mine are, actually, bassike trackpants, which I keep wearing to work even though I know I probably shouldn't). Go read this book. Now.