The Coveteur: Private Spaces, Personal Style

The two founders of the Coveteur seem to be all about the closet, its owner, its contents, and the homes that house all of that. The premise of the book is a wonderful way to exhibit the personal style of the featured subjects. Maybe this is a sort of millennial way to show off one’s voracious consumerism or to prove that if you can possess all this you are therefore considered to be greatly tasteful and stylish.

The cast of characters is diverse and thought provoking as so many are unknown and will be to many readers unless they happen to be habitués of the Coveteur website. What is oddly striking is the overlapping of the brands that so many of these people have purchased or were gifted with, in some instances, which leads one to have reoccurring thoughts about possible product endorsements and cross pollination for the website.

One glaringly obvious aspect of the book is that so many of the photos are staged still lifes rather than the wardrobes in their natural habitats, which would be closets and dressing rooms or on their owners and not on book shelves or artfully arranged on tabletops.

Each subject is barely shown wearing their “style.” When it comes to fashion, fame and style are very far removed from the author and maybe this perspective offers a more generational one. After all there was that trip inside Nan Kempner’s closet in New York magazine oh so many years ago, not to mention decades of documentation of various clothes horses and style icons.

The general timbre of the book is very conversational, and yet Mark comes off as a bit of a gushing valley girl mixed with a fawning impressionable millennial rather than an authoritative voice when it comes to fashion and style. This seems to be a book directed at 20 somethings with a “passion for fashion” rather than the seasoned or experienced fashion audience who generally read and purchase fashion reading materials.