When Mikaela Dery began her reading series Fashion Fiction nearly a year ago, it functioned as a way to blend two of her great loves: fashion and literature. By day, a literary event programmer, Dery was in the middle of a particularly bleak winter when she decided to re-read Plum Sykes’s 2004 novel Bergdorf Blondes. At the end, Sykes recalled her longtime Vogue column “Fashion Fiction,” which Dery loved, and sparks flew.
“I thought literary fashion writing could be such a great series, and I can call it ‘Fashion Fiction,’ even though you don’t have to read fiction,” Dery explains. She reached out to Sykes for her blessing to use the name, which was granted.
At Dery’s series, fashion writing is treated as a true literary art form. “Something I really love about it is decoupling fashion from commerce and [following] it as an intellectual pursuit,” she says. “I think that’s what makes it really exciting to me: fashion can be part of your life of the mind.”
Just shy of its first anniversary, Fashion Fiction has now featured writers like Zoe Dubno, Doreen St. Félix, Rachel Syme, and Katie Roiphe, and partnered with the likes of Warby Parker and Serviette fragrances. The event remains free and, as Dery puts it, “monthly-ish,” rotating through a few venues around town. By now, it’s developed a bit of a cult following, with each reading selling out within hours, if not minutes.
At the most recent iteration, readers and their audience filed into Surrender Dorothy on West 17th Street, where they sipped wine amid the vintage clothing. I spied at least two pairs of vintage Chanel flats, a Marilyn Monroe miniskirt, and a Spice World T-shirt paired with a plaid pencil skirt. Reader Jonathan Woollen’s lauded new translation of Superstars, the cult-classic French novel by Ann Scott, was available for purchase near a tiara and a swath of sparkling rhinestones. Upstairs, in a small theater (the store’s building belongs to an actor), nearly every seat was filled.
Writers can read any work of any genre—whether it’s their own or written by someone they admire—so long as it’s related to fashion. Actress and Surrender Dorothy co-owner Ruby McCollister shared a story about an antique mall in Mansfield, Ohio. Amanda Lee Burkett, of the Substack You Can Talk About It, But Only With Me, read a selection from the novel Nine and a Half Weeks by Ingeborg Day (a.k.a. Elizabeth McNeill), describing the main male character’s closet before “all the psychosexual stuff happens,” as Burkett quipped. Writer David Kobe unpacked his relationship with the aesthetics and attitude of basketball and the great Allen Iverson. Reading from Superstars, Jonathan Woollen set the scene before a queer French rave in the late 1990s, and writer Elisa Gonzalez shared a selection about celebratory dress from a project she was working on. The entire time, the audience was rapt.
