Each season on Project Runway, "Fashion Director for Elle Magazine" Nina Garcia gets bitcher and bitchier as she gets more famous. That eternal tan! That perfectly highlighted hair! That little smirk every time they mention that she is "Fashion Director for Elle Magazine"! The way she plays favorites! It's all enough to remind us why we never worked for a fashion magazine. That, and we're not a size 2. Anyway, Nina has a new book coming out after Labor Day called The Little Black Book of Style, where she imparts her wisdom about the world of fashion unto others for the low, low price of $17.95, or just $3.95 more than a year's subscription to Elle. Money well spent, undoubtedly. In Chapter One—"Be Your Own Muse"—we learn that it's about confidence, not style! Except that confidence influences style? And style is part of confidence? And that Nina Garcia might not have passed logic. And if you have a fat ass, wear tight clothes. Especially if you want to be her assistant!

Confidence is captivating, it is powerful, and it does not fade—and that is endlessly more interesting than beauty. The first and most important step to developing style is to project this kind of confidence. The kind of confidence that tells others that you respect yourself, love yourself, and dress up for yourself and nobody else. You are your own muse. Style comes from knowing who you are and who you want to be in the world; it does not come from wanting to be somebody else, or wanting to be thinner, shorter, taller, prettier. Many of the most stylish women in the world have not been great beauties, but they have all drawn from an enormous amount of self-confidence. They made us think they were beautiful simply by believing it themselves. They did not let anyone else define them; they defined themselves.

I truly admire women who love themselves, even if they are not the standard beauty norm. I am fascinated by the "imperfect icons," the girls who are by far not the most beautiful girls in the room, but they are confident and think they're beautiful, so others think they are. I marvel at a six-foot-tall woman in stilettos, a big-bottomed woman in a curve-hugging skirt, a flat-chested woman in a tight, low cut T-shirt. When a woman embraces her "imperfections," they can become her greatest strengths, definers of her character and spirit. When she plays up her weaknesses and draws you to her flaws, she makes them special, attractive, and even enviable.

Oh, that must be why we saw that "big-bottomed woman" in the latest issue of Elle, right? Mmm.