Freedom to read and be inspired

Freedom to Read Week is happening right now, it's a celebration of exercising your intellectual rights, a week planned to promote the idea that banning books and magazines in a free country like Canada is wrong.

I love the fact that in my house I can have my Harry Potter next to my Catcher in the Rye. These books inspired and comforted me in my formative years. Recently, I’ve been finding inspiration in fashion biographies, and coffee table books.

Photographer and stylist, Justyna Baraniecki has just finished reading Stylists by Katie Baron.

“If someone wants to get into styling, it’s a really great book to get,” she says. “It takes 100 to 150 of the top stylists working today and interviews them and takes a look into their aesthetic and what inspires them, I look at that one often.”

Local fashion designer Amy Scarlett Donovan is currently reading Grace, the biography of Vogue’s “unsung hero”, Grace Coddington.

“It's wonderful,” Donovan says. “I'm falling more and more in love with her every page. She's very honest and candid and shares so many amazing little secrets about her encounters with people within the industry.”

“It's really special and I encourage anyone who loves fashion, Vogue, or the September Issue to absolutely read it.”

Donovan says that as a visual person, she gains inspiration from fashion books such as the official Alexander McQueen and Vivienne Westwood books.

The premise of Freedom to Read Week seems to go hand in hand with Freedom to Find Inspiration. And isn’t that what books are all about?