BOOK REVIEW: MILES OF STYLE: EUNICE W. JOHNSON & THE EBONY FASHION SHOW from Lisa D. Brathwaite

Miles of Style from Lisa D. Brathwaite
Miles of Style February 6, 2024
Title: Miles of Style
by Lisa D. Brathwaite & illustrated by Lynn Gaines

from @Lee and Low Books
REFERRAL IN AALBC
https://aalbc.com/tc/topic/10640-lee-low-spring-2024-titles-for-review-consideration/

MY REVIEW

Martin Luther King jr. once said "... to tell a bootless man to pick himself up by his bootstraps is

a cruel jest." While the murdered leader referred to whites, once the enslavers, speaking to

blacks, once the enslaved, in the U.S.A., the basis from which any succeed is extremely plus

rarely bootless. While "Miles Of Style" functionally plus intentionally doesn't provide the most

detailed biography of Eunice Johnson, founder of the Ebony Fashion Fair. Said book, written by

Lisa D. Braithwaite, shows in brief how having boots is not irrelevant, unimportant, or

inexcusable in the ability to strive in life, in the U.S.A. or anywhere else, at any time. The boots

Eunice Johnson had, made by her parents plus community, led to Johnson creating, shepherding,

or growing the Ebony Fashion Fair, the main subject of “Miles Of Style”, to a mandatory

element of human history.

Braithwaite's literature, accompanied by illustrations from Lynn Gaines, is truly chic; they

provide a financially sparing while efficient biography of the Ebony Fashion Fair, centered on an

incomplete while mandatory biography of a Black woman, born surrounded by elegance or

contemporary fashion from inside a blockaded Black populace in the U.S.A. The boots she was

born in supported her life path, a branch of which led to her showcasing the fashion she was born

surrounded by to all outside her blockaded community, in the U.S.A. or beyond, in the style of a

modern-day influencer.

The book is full of positive, in color tone or composition, pastel illustrations of Black people in

the USA mostly plus overwhelmingly, not totally, consistent in illustrative style or storytelling

flow.

The book delivers on all the promises in its summary concerning Eunice Johnson: rearing,

education, marriage, Ebony Magazine, Ebony Fashion Fair. A rough approximation is half of the

book concern Eunice Johnson before the Ebony Fashion Fair, and four fifths concern her life

during and after the Ebony Fashion Fair.

The Black populace in humanity, the tribes native to each continent plus immigrant communities

through enslavement or free will, has many, not all or most, who adore stories about Black

people who lived in no less glamour or peace than non-Blacks in times before the modern

internet age. This book with its illustrations plus history delivers such a story.

I am not six or eleven years old; I cannot say how a child will react while or after reading this

book. But as an adult who has read to children, I think adult readers to children, in homes as well

as the secondary educational institutions called schools, will have a chance to share Eunice

Johnson's depicted story, and along the way may learn from the book while the book never stops

trying to uplift the viewer or reader with positive, creative, energy.

The book can inspire any child, any phenotype or age or location, to color more or design more

or imagine more beyond any perceived or real limitations. Said creativity is the road to the

destination of being truly chic. This book, if owned, will be part of the boots one needs to walk

said road.