The Woman in the Movie Star Dress

The Woman in the Movie Star Dress by Praveen Asthana    300 pages

This is one of those books that I picked up based on its title and dust jacket. It reeks of film noir and Old Hollywood.  It does…in a way. The story’s premise is that clothes carry a ghostly fragment of whoever wears them, and when another wears them, those remaining fragments transfer to the new wearer.

Genevieve works in a vintage clothing story in Hollywood. They have clothing worn by Elizabeth Taylor, Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe, Mae West and a host of others. One day the store receives a box of clothing that was found in an abandoned storage unit. The best item in the box is a scarlet dress.

Soon a man comes looking for the box, in particular the scarlet dress. But, alas, the dress has already been sold. The man is a throwback to the ‘40s men’s style. He intrigues Genevieve.

Needing something to wear to a party, Genevieve borrows an outfit from the store. Knowing who wore it, gave her the courage to be more outgoing, even flirty. And so begins Genevieve’s interest in how the transference of personality can travel through a person’s old clothing.

The prologue is pretty good. A woman wearing a scarlet dress heads out in a 1954 convertible to kill someone. That’s all the reader gets. The story then switches to Genevieve’s point of view.

For me, this was a weird story. Each chapter title was the name of an old movie star, like Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, and others, but the chapters themselves had little or nothing to do with the actor.

There are tidbits of gossip about the stars but given that there many inaccuracies in the story, I wasn’t sure if they were real or if the author had invented them

I expected a lot more from this novel and was terribly disappoint that it is such a dull read. I didn’t understand how Genevieve came to “discover” the personality transference, But I did get how she came to believe that if she was wearing another’s clothing, how she could become begin to act like them. 

The Woman in the Movie Star Dress gets two stars in Julie’s world.