I Want to Be Her!: How Friends & Strangers Helped Shape My Style

“. . . nothing more than a series of fleeting fashion crushes thinly disguised as ‘fashion icons’ stacked one after the other.”

I Want to Be Her should have a subtitle that reads: Here is the story of a middle class suburban Generation Xer who expounds on her idea of style and fashion based on people she encounters while living within the bridge and tunnel environs of New York City during the 70s and 80s.

This reviewer’s takeaway is that Ms. Linnett—who by the way defies scientific research by having “style and fashion” memories at age five—is not half as special as she would like the readership to think.

The book reads like an impressionable teenager’s diary or dream board of who was “cool” and how “cool” they were based on what they wore, and how she, Ms. Linnett, wanted to emulate her style crush of the moment.

Sadly, what might have resulted in a somewhat amusing tale is nothing more than a series of fleeting fashion crushes thinly disguised as ‘fashion icons’ stacked one after the other. There are very few salient details offered, the illustrations are lackluster, and each vignette would have been far better served and made a far stronger point with more representative photographs of many more teenage girls embodying the style of the era, not just those randomly specified.

It is hard to believe that anyone who was born before 1965 or after 1975 would have the slightest bit of interest in I Want to Be Her! let alone learn anything from it. What is of great interest is what is omitted.

The bottom line is that Ms. Linnett would like to have us believe that these featured personalities helped shape her own personal style while the skilled and adept reader will merely see a young woman who wanted to assume a new personality with every new look and who hadn’t one ounce of her own personal style—and certainly not the confidence to carry off any of it.