Books for fashion and perfume lovers

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If you’re style-inclined, sometimes it’s not enough to read blogs and fashion magazines. Sometimes you may want to do more than browse in stores and plow through catalogs.

Sometimes you’ve got to embrace the canon of fashion and beauty literature. Fashion critic Booth Moore and staff writer Adam Tschorn explore a handful of current offerings. Among them:

‘City of Style,’ by Melissa Magsaysay, a former Times style writer, who has created a field guide to L.A. style in all its incarnations; ‘By Invitation Only: How We Built Gilt and Changed the Way Millions Shop,’ the story of the launching of Gilt Group; ‘Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,’ a catalog for an exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and ‘The Gentry Man: A Guide for the Civilized Male,’ a series of articles culled from the 1950s Gentry magazine.

If you’re scent-inclined, this spring the publishing world has released a series of books that should fill many hours of reading time. Denise Hamilton surveys a clutch of offerings that range from Denyse Beaulieu’s new memoir, ‘The Perfume Lover,’ to Alyssa Harad’s ‘Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure and an Unlikely Bride.’

There’s a three-day weekend coming up, the perfect time, perhaps, to indulge a style and beauty habit.

-- Alice Short