Fashionistas has a great cover: slick and stylish, featuring a cartoon of a trendily-dressed woman silhouetted against a cityscape. It perfectly captures the book’s polished, light-hearted fashion-consciousness.

The novel is narrated by Vig Morgan (and if the handsome face of Viggo Mortensen just flashed before your mind’s eye, banish it – Vig is female). She is an assistant editor at a New York fashion magazine called Fashionistas. Vig wants to be a real fashion journalist, and is embarrassed by Fashionistas, which worships fame, name-drops shamelessly, and is completely devoid of meaningful content. Her editor-in-chief is an ambitious, cruel celebrity-whore named Jane MacNeill, who enjoys deliberately humiliating her staff and who is ruining the magazine. When the publisher hires Marguerite, who has been Jane’s hated rival throughout their careers, the magazine’s staff sees an opportunity. They put into action a plot that, they hope, will get Jane fired. Vig doesn’t believe that the plan will work, but she’s just about fed up with her job and is willing to take a risk.

Fashionistas is funny. Like so many Chick-Lit books, it isn’t really about anything. Everything that happens, from Vig’s involvement in the plot against Jane to her best friend’s breakup, is simply an opportunity for Vig to indulge in witty observation and commentary. Most of the novel is taken up with Vig’s descriptions of her workplace and her eccentric and spiteful bosses and co-workers. These descriptions are usually funny and literate, and expose the superficiality of the fashion magazine world. Interestingly, while Vig is very aware of the meaningless triviality that surrounds her, she does not find it unbearable. On the contrary, she seems to enjoy it, as it gives her so much material for critical humor. Her highest, fondest ambition is not to find a different job for less hateful people, but to change the magazine so that focuses on up-and-coming designers as well as established ones. That this is only slightly less shallow is something that does not bother her.

As the plot to overthrow Jane gathers momentum, Vig finds that she’s expected to engage in a degree of backstabbing, spying, and lying. She has several pangs of conscience, but she doesn’t actually let them influence her behavior. She also gets involved with a man whose identity could be a spoiler. The man is involved in an even more selfishly immoral scheme than Vig. This, like everything else, is played for laughs. Vig doesn’t mind his deception, so why should we? I mention it only to illustrate the difference between this and a typical romance novel, in which the hero and heroine generally, by the end of the book, repent of their sins and try to do the right thing. In this book, the idea of trying to do the right thing is kitschy. The only thing that Vig really takes seriously are her own insecurities.

I liked Fashionistas, although it has its flaws. I think it has some boring sections that could have been edited out – I really did not care at all about Vig’s friend Maya and her career crisis, for instance. There are moments when Vig strains to make a joke that really isn’t worth the effort. However, there are enough genuinely funny moments that I giggled aloud several times reading it. It’s very amusing in a snarky, gossipy sort of way. If you check your sense of moral indignation at the door, it’s a very good way of passing a few hours.