Fashion inspiration can be found anywhere, and books are incredible sources for style innovation. Book-Inspired Fashion explores these treasure troves, and brings them them to you in looks inspired by vibrant characters, far away lands, brilliantly woven plotlines, and more.

Book Cover via Amazon

I’ve actually wanted to cover this book for a long time, but I’ve shied away from it simply because I don’t want the movie adaptation to be the first thing to come to mind. Regardless, this book is chock-full of inspiration, fashion or otherwise, and it’s going to be a treat to explore a world so different from most of ours.

Table of Contents

Reading Between The Lines

As always, I’m starting with a bit of background so you guys can get to know the story behind the movie. Memoirs of a Geisha was published in 1997 by author Arthur Golden, after years of crafting, editing, and re-editing his drafts for the book. Despite having studied Japanese history and art for years, the “cultural divide” that he had to cross in order to write Memoirs of a Geisha in first-person was a challenge that was laboriously difficult to realize.

An unexpected but assuredly welcome source of help came from a retired geisha named Mineko Iwasaki, who provided a lot of insight and knowledge that would enable Golden to eventually complete his manuscript. This caused some controversy, however, because Mineko had asked to be a confidential source– an agreement that Golden failed to uphold, due to his mentioning of her name is his acknowledgments of the published novel. This ruined many of Mineko’s close relationships and ties to the Japanese geisha community, but she fought back and eventually published her own nonfiction memoir, called Geisha, a Life.