A new book called Women In Clothes is in bookstores. Edited by Sheila Heti, Leanne Shapton, and Heidi Julavits, the book comes with a good literary pedigree and is, by all reports, gorgeously designed. Today, however, a review appeared in The Guardian by Rebecca Carroll which deemed the book, well...

Read the headline yourself:

Okay then!

Carroll adds to these marquee complaints about the book that it lacks a sufficient diversity of perspectives to earn its title:

If you look very hard you will find that there are some women from different nationalities spread throughout the book's 515 pages, though it is clear that the primary goal of this project is not to highlight the ways in which women from different nationalities, races or ethnicities have arrived at their personal style choices, but rather to indulge a clique-membership mentality in which irony and quirk equals highest regard.

For example, there is an entire section about what women say when they get their hair braided, featuring nine photographs of white women in various stages of hair-braided repose. This might have been a good place to include a woman from a different race – say, a black woman, for whom a relationship with braided hair is deeply intrinsic, and actually interesting. Alas, what we get are carefully curated outtakes presumably from a one-on-one hair-braiding session: "I noticed Y was following me on Twitter, so I followed her back … Then she tweeted about animal rape, and I had been doing this research on duck rape – one third of all duck sex is rape."

The editors of the book have, apparently, taken umbrage to this description. In the comments to the Guardian piece, they respond:

It is the prerogative of a reviewer to like or not like a book, but it does a disservice to The Guardian readers to so completely misrepresent a book. Why does this reviewer neglect to mention—in her highlighting of our lack of diversity—our interview with transgender writer Juliet Jacques; with Reba Sikder, a worker who survived the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh; with Ly Ky Tran, a Vietmanese immigrant to New York who was a child sweatshop labourer in America; with Monika Chhy, a Cambodian tailor; with four Malaysian garment factory workers; with Thando Lobese, a Xhosa costume designer in South Africa; also pieces by Rose Waldman on the ritual of dressing as a Hasidic woman; by Shani Boianji on being an Israeli soldier in uniform; by Margo Jefferson on contending with African American standards of beauty; by Vedrana Rudan, a Croatian woman who writes about weight issues; by Umm Adam, a Muslim woman on why she wears hijab, and by Mansoura Ez Eldin, writing from Cairo, on why she does not; and many more examples of diversity. She also incorrectly assumes editor Leanne Shapton (whose name she misspells) is a "white woman" when she is not. By overlooking the many diverse voices so integral to the identity of Women in Clothes, Rebecca Carroll crafts a partial and prejudicial review of a book that exists more in her imagination than on the page.

- Leanne Shapton, Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits

(Carroll and the editors go on a bit longer, and you can read by clicking here.)

Most other reviews of the book have been positive.

I haven't read the book beyond some excerpts (I like many of the writers involved and know some of them). That said, the book's concept gave me pause from the moment I first heard about it.

Clothing is a fraught subject among women in a way I wondered if a book like this could possibly acknowledge. I read this interview the editors did with Vogue about the book—"We totally choose whose gaze we court"—and thought to myself: Their experience of fashion is so much more positive, so different, than mine, it's like they exist on another planet. Which from afar looks like a pretty nice place to live! But we're not all there with them.