I Actually Wore This: Clothes We Can’t Believe We Bought

A gloriously ridiculous celebration of the fashion missteps of otherwise stylish individuals—from celebrities and fashion and media insiders to regular joes.

In everyone’s closet, there is one article of clothing that truly demonstrates a momentary lapse in fashion judgment. I Actually Wore This is the first book to celebrate these fashion blunders and lets us in on how and why they happened: the purple velour jumpsuit that was supposed to make you look dangerous, the Baron von Trapp–ish Tyrolean jacket that seemed like a good idea after six beers in Munich, the off-the-shoulder Goo Goo Dolls concert T-shirt bought to impress a roadie named Spyder. Each of these cringe-inducing items somehow managed to find its way into the wardrobe of a typically fashionable person, and the authors are here to tell you how that happened.

In I Actually Wore This, otherwise stylish individuals, from Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion director to actress and SNL alum Molly Shannon, choose the one item from their closet that best illustrates when taste took a holiday, allow themselves to be photographed in it, and tell the story of how they came to acquire it—where and when they were when they bought it, and what they were thinking, however absurd, at the time.

Tom Coleman is an Emmy-nominated writer and filmmaker who has worked with MTV, Esquire, and McSweeney’s, among other firms.

Jerome Jakubiec is a fashion, portrait, and celebrity photographer whose work has been published in magazines worldwide.