Every once in a while I read VOGUE magazine, in order to take the moral temperature of the couture community.
Here's the latest issue.
Here come the weirdest harbingers in it; the stuff that,
for whatever reason, is tres 2006. VOGUE is great for
this trendspotting. because it's been around basically forever.
You can read VOGUEs from the 1930s and they have
a very similar canonical tone. Unhurried. Gracious.
Poised. Glossy. Ruthlessly judgmental. As a futurist,
I've learned a lot about vogues from VOGUE.
Especially the issues written by people long dead.
Four-armed robot surgery with the model patient
etherized upon a table. And this is a couture-shot,
too; it's about the clothes. One would feel the urge
to quote T. S. Eliot here, if Cecil Day-Lewis wasn't being
eulogized in this very issue.
This is a real-estate ad for a giant, World Trade Center-dwarfing, new superskyscraper in Dubai. You're supposed to be
a reader of the American VOGUE, and you're supposed
to go live there. Or maybe... I dunno... maintain a
Hamptons-style getaway in a liberal Persian Gulf
oil state. I'd love to hear the table-talk between
a husband and wife who are seriously considering
this option.
In 2006, cellphones have stopped attempting stylishness
and have actually achieved style.
Leave it to a hairspray outfit to clumsily essay the
retro-futuristic. Really, a silver jumpsuit with anything in '06
is just so... hopeless. Lucky for them that a chrome
can of hair spray is a cheap mass-market commodity for the
Le Target shopping set. Compare this cheese to
the impossibly top-end consumers of that
towering chrome spike condo in Dubai.
Eating a videocam in a pill. And that's gotta be smudgeproof
lipstick, given the tech application. The cadres at VOGUE
would never miss a detail that obvious.
All in all, I've seen the mag look a lot happier.
It's glum work to be stylish in a Red State era. They
won't really be back on their spike heels till
the Terror Bubble blows.
