'Tomboy Style' Author Lizzie Garrett Mettler Shares Her Style Icons
Tomboy style is everywhere these days—on the Rag & Bone runway, on Kate Lanphear in a street style shot, and on so many of the chic women we see walking around every day.
Lizzie Garrett Mettler's blog-turned-book, Tomboy Style, examines menswear chic from all angles. “I grew up as a tomboy—as a kid, and I never really shook that inner tomboy, even as an adult.” the author explains. “And then I noticed a sort of shift in the word. I’d see it on fashion blogs and street fashion [sites]. People would say, she’s [such a] tomboy, and it just kind of clicked…I just used the blog as a sort of inspiration to flesh that out.”
For the book, Garrett Mettler began with seven different tomboy archetypes—the jock, the prep, the rebel, the naturalist, the adventuress, and the girl next door—and chose corresponding icons to incarnate them. (For example, Chris Evert is a classic jock, while Debbie Harry fits squarely in the "rebel" category.) Old Hollywood aficonados will pore over the shots of Katharine Hepburn, who Garrett Mettler calls “one of the godmothers of tomboy style, and Marlene Dietrich: “She was sort of the sophisticate, sauntering around Paris in tuxedos.” Newer entrants to the borrowed-from-the-boys game, like Dree Hemingway, Janelle Monae and Alexa Chung, are also showcased in the volume, out now.
Here, Garrett Mettler helps us break down some of the classic tomboy types.
