Tarnished glossies need to shine again

In the wake of Sept. 11, will the fashion magazines stop catering to socialite snobs in stilettos?

By Janelle Brown

Nov. 5, 2001 | Months before Sept. 11, the fashion glossies had begun to veer into the territory of dangerous delusion and denial. With the country suffering from a recession -- which had begun to take down the magazines themselves -- and dot-com extravagance an increasingly cruel joke, the surviving fashion bibles could be found still clinging to status as if it were a totem of good luck.

October and November editions, gone to press before the world changed forever, hammered home the disconnect, and only partly because of the misfortune of bad timing. The eye-popping inappropriateness of what landed on the newsstands told the tale of how the fashion industry has become an alien presence in our midst, a slice of our culture where one -- anyone -- is hard pressed to find any relevance whatsoever.

This is not to say that editors, mavens, designers and arbiters did not stop, reflect and even recoil as they looked again at their autumn fare. Some took immediate, and perhaps misguided or mincing, steps to make things better. Last Tuesday, for example, Manolo Blahnik, high priest of high-end footwear, changed his plan to sell a pair of titanium-heeled 3.5 inch stilettos. The shoes' heels, razor-sharp and as thin as the ink tube of a ballpoint pen, were capable of slicing through carpet or human flesh, a fact that led Blahnik, according to news reports, to worry that the shoes would be used as weapons or picked up by airport security machines.

He might also have been concerned with the sensitivity of shoppers whose mental pictures of Sept. 11 include images of streets littered with stilettos and high heels shucked in a panic by women hobbled in their escape from the collapsing towers. It is entirely possible, in fact, that ridiculously painful shoes may no longer be sought after -- even by the most fashion-conscious women with the most fashion-designated cash, a group that Blahnik relies on for fiscal serenity.

The events of the last few months -- not just the trauma of terrorism, but the prospect of a long war -- have forced us to reevaluate who we want to be, to review our fantasies in a whole new context. Fashion glossies, dedicated to a sea of wannabes and a handful of already-are's -- have focussed in recent years on a narrower and narrower ideal, boiling down the icons of fashion and taste to a irritating passel of privileged young socialites in extravagant clothing. Perhaps their marketing intelligence led them to believe that glossy readers wanted nothing more than to be like Paris Hilton.

But -- how many times must we hear this? -- everything changed two months ago. And that was not the beginning at all. The collective ire of seemingly millions of Americans toward P.R. fashion plate Lizzie Grubman this summer reflected the start of something big. The world had also grown tired of the instant billionaires of the Internet decade, wasting their overnight fortunes on mansions and champagne, and jeered them as they fell. The super-rich weren't enviable; they were laughable.

And now the magazines must contend not only with the fall of their It Girl heroines, but with the mighty rise of the common man and woman -- the nurses, the firefighters, the volunteers, as well as those who died and whose lives are celebrated for their achievements as regular people with heartbreaking aspirations -- to be good parents, good friends, hard workers.

Fashion will never disappear, and no one wants it to, certainly not the part of fashion that embodies creativity, imagination and art. Current events can only enrich fashion as an expression of ideas. But what will current events do to change the ideal designed to sell clothes? What will advertisers and their editorial handmaidens hold up as the irresistible fantasy? What will clothes horses have to have?

Next page: There is room in the new world for extravagance and the freedom to enjoy it