Fashion 86: The Must-Have Book for Fashion Insiders edited by Iain Webb and Lorraine Johnston (St. Martin’s: $14.95, paperback).

This “book” more closely resembles a magazine and a very loosely edited one at that. Pictures and type are juxtaposed in nonsensical, assaulting ways, as if the editors were sentenced to designing the book while MTV was blaring on a thousand television sets.

There are some interesting punk and New Wave images to be found here, but the volume’s tone is so brash and bleak that it might best be summed up in a quote from Diana Vreeland, who was interviewed briefly for the book:

“I’ve never heard of such questions. Awfully gloomy, awfully gloomy . . . ‘What do you hate the most?’ . . . ‘What’s the worst thing you have ever heard of?’ ” Vreeland said to an apparently British interviewer by telephone. “Don’t you ever think UP (positively) over there. I was born British. I know what it is to be English and we were never that pessimistic.”