Rhonda Lieberman
Balenciaga’s 1950s baby-doll dress. Courtesy Balenciaga Archives Balenciaga head designer Nicolas Ghesquière just ended his fifteen-year stint to be replaced by Alexander Wang, who could, says The Guardian, take the brand into a more “mass market” and less “elitist” direction. One wonders if Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972)—the master craftsman who didn’t even know from “brands,” and […] 
“Taylor has had many biographers. Yet their books often reveal more about their authors than her,” observes M. G. Lord, author of Forever Barbie and this new meditation, The Accidental Feminist. “Some [biographers] dish,” she writes, “some fawn.” And some turn their targets into feminist teaching tools. An icon known for beauty, bling, and bridegrooms makes an unlikely women’s libber. Yet Lord interweaves readings of Taylor and her roles to serve up a cultural history of femininity—its abuses and uses—that is at once amusing, wrenching, and inspiring. 
Helen DeWitt’s second novel explores Oscar Wilde’s advice: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Lightning Rods is a modest proposal for dealing with the sexual urges of “high-testosterone performance-oriented individuals” in the workplace. And a hilarious mirror of our culture’s ability to rationalize any kind of behavior, as long as it boosts the bottom line. In days of yore, before the first JAP communed with a pair of Blahniks in the sanctum sanctorum of Bergdorf’s, Jews appreciated the metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of footwear. In Jews and Shoes (Berg, $35), an odd collection of essays by Jewologists, folklorists, and an interdisciplinary mélange of cultural historians, editor Edna Nahshon cobbles together a surprisingly rich account of the Tribe’s journey via their footwear. Who knew? Elizabeth Taylor is as fabulous and as undead as ever. Just this month on Page Six the megastar yielded two fresh items of vintage gossip. On Turner Classic Movies, she sizzled away as Maggie the Cat. And in “Becoming Jewish: Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn,” the Jewish Museum in New York kvells: Between wedding Mike Todd in 1957 and Eddie Fisher in 1959, Elizabeth converted and remained a lifelong Jew. It seems that every tribe is making a landgrab to claim Elizabeth (she hated being called “Liz”) as one of their own, and who wouldn’t want to identify with the legendary 
Take it from hedge funder Florian Homm, now a witty fugitive who appears in Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth (Phaidon, $75) hanging out with his bounty hunter pal and his bodyguard: “What you’re sold in this world is a bag of rotten goods. The striving for more and bigger will never, ever lead you to the right place. All of us are following a dream, a toxic dream.”