Feeding the Eye: Essays

An essayist in the most balanced, dignified and old-fashioned sense, Hollander (Sex and Suits) presents 31 essays on film, fashion and art. The subtitle of the collection is more than a little deceiving, as most of the pieces included here are extended reviews or analytical sketches reprinted from such venues as the London Review of Books, the New Republic and the New Yorker. Organized around the notion that ""artists make art by absorbing the effects of other artists' productions, transmuting them through a personal creative effort influenced by circumstances and then rendering a newly shaped thing back into the continuing stream,"" these pieces offer superb evidence of Hollander's intellectual confidence with subjects as diverse as Yves St. Laurent, Greta Garbo, and Caspar David Friedrich (among many, many others). Hollander never seems to meet an object of fashion that doesn't merit extensive critical treatment, but she brings generous, original insight to such topics as corsets, kimonos and body-decorating rituals. A review of a Chaplin biography leads her to one of the collection's most provocative connections, that between the expatriate English silent-film tramp and George Balanchine, the Russian emigr ballet choreographer (there is also a separate Balanchine essay). Hollander's style can be a touch too precise, too effortlessly learned, but she has a genius for zippy phrasemaking, as when she writes in ""Accounting for Fashion,"" a book review that ran in Raritan in 1993, that a dress ""requires opposable thumbs and some kind of cosmology."" That might not be Diana Vreeland talking, but it is her slightly more book-learned, and exquisitely well-spoken sister. (Oct.)