Saturday, March 17, 2007

What the well-dressed corpse is wearing

I've just finished reading the New Yorker Style issue, and the one thing I've learned from the Style issue is that I don't know anything about style. Not sure I want to know either. Let's look, for instance, at an ad on page 75: the model wears a loose yellow something, maybe a lab coat that got dumped in the wrong load of laundry, and she clutches a silver bag that looks like a half-deflated mylar balloon. Her hands and face are dead white, and her eye-shadow--well, imagine if a small child decided to make up her face with a yellow highlighter pen. Overall, the model appears prepared to play the role of the corpse in an episode of CSI. She'd be a stylish corpse, but who wants to be a corpse?

Awful bags are everywhere. Here on page 45 is a Bally ad featuring a sleek dark-haired model tenderly caressing a bag resembling Grandma's sensible pocketbook on steroids. This is the bag for the stylish, sophisticated Woman About Town who simply cannot set foot out the door without the Oxford English Dictionary, a chainsaw, and a side of beef. Three similarly awful bags appear on page 35, where the model is stylishly posed like an accident victim awaiting triage, her belongings scattered on the pavement around her. What is the message of this ad? "Carry our bags so you'll look stylish when you get hit by a crosstown bus!"

Let us turn the page: here we see a single Cole Haan shoe, strappy and sexy with heels up to here, a "state of the art high heel created in collaboration with Nike Lab." The perfect shoe for the athlete who doesn't intend to use her feet much longer. And here on page 31 is a Jil Sander ad featuring a model wearing a shapeless green shower curtain that perfectly matches her green high heels. She's all set for the St. Patrick's Day Parade, but I don't know where else one would wear such an ensemble.

A Max Mara ad on page 41 presents us with a woman ready to argue her case before the Supreme Court in her dark pin-striped suit, except her eyebrows look like they're about to take flight and her hair sticks straight up in the air and then flares out like the plumage on a creature designed by Dr. Seuss. Thankfully, she's not carrying a ridiculous bag. Instead, her chief accessory is a pair of hands attached to another woman who appears to be wrapped in mylar.

My favorite ensemble, though, is featured in a Fendi ad on page 29. The bag looks like a computer component and the shoes look like skyscrapers, but it took me a long time to figure out what the dress resembles. Where have I seen that shape before? It's white and folded like an envelope, and the model is certainly thin enough to slide into an envelope, but there's something else, some other common item suggested by that unusual combination of crisp folds and angles--and suddenly I'm remembering all those years I spent folding and changing and laundering cloth diapers. Yes: Fendi is showing a model swathed in a high-end embroidered diaper! With a bag to match!

It's not big enough to be a diaper bag, but she could always borrow the immense Gucci sack on the previous page.

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