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Despite the pervasiveness of fashion, there is a void of truly great writers who consistently tackle the topic. Fashion is one of those subjects that -- like pets and hobbies -- is rarely taken seriously by the writing community; it connotes frivolous stories in Vogue and W that gush over the new pony-skin boot, Manolo Blahnik heel or transparent shift as if they were world-shaking epiphanies. It's not, many sniff, a "serious" subject.

A Dedicated Follower of Fashion By Holly Brubach Phaidon Press Inc., 224 pages Nonfiction Buy A Dedicated Follower of Fashion by Holly Brubach

Holly Brubach is one of the only writers to recognize that the fashion industry, with its idyllic visions of a perfect world, is merely a manifestation of our common fantasies -- despite how cruel and unrealistic those fantasies may sometimes be. "Fashion is one of the means by which we dream collectively," she writes in her new collection of essays, "A Dedicated Follower of Fashion." "It has a tacit logic that makes sense deep down to us all."

Brubach's writing is an antidote to fashion snobbery -- although she admires the perfect lines of a classic Chanel suit, or the whimsical heels of a Vivier shoe, her main interest is in dissecting what fashion says about people. Fashion is life -- more than any other topic, she writes, it reflects the quirks and idiosyncrasies of human identity and character: the "vanity, love, greed, snobbery, sex and other fun subjects." Contrary to popular opinion, it is a subject as loaded as art itself: "Fashion is in fact architecture's feminine counterpart," she muses in her book. "Buildings and clothes are the primary components of our everyday landscape, and they embody the ideas and the attitudes of the time in which we live. It is, I believe, incumbent on every generation to remake the world in its image."

Over the last 20 years, Brubach has covered nearly every aspect of fashion for numerous publications, as well as authoring two books -- "Choura: The Memoirs of Alexandra Danilova," a profile of the famous Russian ballerina, and "Girlfriend: Men, Women, and Drag," an examination of cross-dressing.

"A Dedicated Follower of Fashion," is a collection of her writings from the 1980s and 1990s, taking on subjects like feminism and fashion, the human relationship with the body (both fat and muscle), and the loaded meanings of the frilly white bridal gown. Brubach has also included profiles of fashion icons like Ralph Lauren, Yves Saint Laurent and model Kristen McMenamy.

With marvelously crafted prose and occasionally breathtaking insights, the book is a fascinating survey of both the fashion industry and the human psyche: "What is this atavistic Cinderella streak lurking deep in the heart of career girls?" Brubach asks as she ponders the pervasive white frou-frou wedding dress. "A bride, to my mind, should be dressed not as someone she has never been before and will never be again but in keeping with the woman she has been and is and will continue to be, and, as it turns out, this requires a lot more imagination."

Brubach grew up in the 1960s outside unfashionable Pittsburgh, Pa., and can track her obsession with fashion back to her junior high school years. Her prom dress, she relates, was a sophisticated silver-and-gray ballgown, in vivid contrast to the frilly chiffon pastels of her classmates; she copied her clothes from Vogue patterns whenever she could afford them. "I had my enormous pretensions; unfortunately in my case they were exacerbated by the fact that I could sew," she laughs. "In this way I indulged my delusions about who I was and how I looked and what was appropriate for me to wear."

Brubach began her career as a dancer, switching to writing after she was sidelined by an injury. Her first job was at Vogue, writing fashion blurbs and, eventually, profiles of opera singers and artists; becoming, as she puts it "the resident intellectual in the features department." From there, she moved on to be a staff writer at the Atlantic Monthly and then the New Yorker, where she faced the challenge of writing about a "soft" topic for one of the most respected high-brow magazines in America. "The funny things is that I went from being an intellectual at a fashion magazine to being a fashion person at an intellectual magazine," she notes. "It's not that [the New Yorker] regarded my work as frivolous, but I was clearly somebody who was championing certain subjects that had probably never made their way into the magazine before. That was an odd position to be in, and sometimes enormously gratifying."

Stints at those publications eventually led to a job as the style editor of the New York Times, where Brubach spent nearly five years before jumping the fence and going to work for Italian fashion house Prada. Today, she lives in Milan and spends weekends in Paris, while she directs Prada's home and sport collections -- what she describes as her "third career."

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