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dear esteemed editors of the esteemed philosophers on holiday:

i would like to apply for the position of fashion editor for your magazine. well, maybe fashion editor is a little too vogueish.

i would like to apply for the position of phashion philosopher.

i have so much to give. i understand so much about fashion. for instance, you know the combination of orange and chartreuse that you see in the gap this year? that’s me. it’s me because in graduate school in 1986 i did a monoprint that combined those two very colors in one piece. it’s obviously influenced a whole generation of young, talented clothing designers.

and the fact that i don’t use capitalization in my email correspondence? soon everyone will be doing it, because it expresses the immediacy of the medium. and i know all my references. e. e. cummings did it first. and he was brilliant.

my knowledge about all things fashionable is amazing. for instance, i know that it was christian dior in 1947 who started using lots of fabric (up to 50 yards per dress, they say) in his collection and changed the world of fashion away from the austere lines of world war two era fashion.

and this is what i have to say today, if i can say it without stepping on your esteemed movie critic’s toes, which i think i can because this isn’t really a review:

go see "moulin rouge"

that is, if you’re at all interested in fashion. because it’s too late to know the source of the trend toward horizontal glasses (except that it was probably somewhere in germany, from where all good glasses designs seem to flow). but if you want to see the aesthetic expression of a generation on the move, you should see this movie.

just when you were getting comfortable with minimalism, this will prove that minimalism is on its way out. this production is lush and baroque and over-the-top. some of us who want to think that minimalism is really about discipline rather than trendsetting will argue that every age has its minimalists and every age its maximalists. but there is definitely a pendulum swinging here.

if you want to study this crucial aesthetic dichotomy further, buy an issue of the magazine nest and one of wallpaper*. it’s all there. social anthropologists are going to be really confused in 7 million years when they find out these two magazines were being published simultaneously.

i hope this sheds a bit of light on a time that, for many of us, is most aesthetically tumultuous.