to get their pictures. Such is the insatiable hunger of the monster they feed–the world’s news media–that these photographers will often work late into the night e-mailing their digital images around the globe from laboratories, hotel rooms, and cars, so that Dolce & Gabbana, Dior, Versace, and Calvin Klein can be seen the next morning in color splashes on news pages and dissected in outfit-byoutfit detail on the internet. And so here we have it: take the lid off the fashion shows, and it’s easy to feel that you are staring into a stewing cauldron of commercialism, cynicism, discomfort and complaint. This is all true. In some ways, fashion now has degenerated into a shocking and ugly system–if degenerate is the word of an industry that has been sped up to such an insane pitch by advancing technologies. . And yet, this mad, unpretty view of fashion is only one way of understanding the motives and the energy that drive it on and make it… wonderful. In spite of all the pressures, the ruthless and blatantly bad be havior, there are still ideals, inspirations and individuals in fashion that are, for want of a better way of putting it, pure. For those who are truly obsessed, the driving, sustaining interest in fashion is not the balance of sales figures, the spectator sport of the gladiatorial corporate contest to control brands, and certainly not the thrill of meeting celebrities face-to-face at shows. No: the thing that keeps the committed coming back over and over again to the shows is the eternal hope that, at any time, something miraculous will happen before their very eyes. At their very best, fashion shows–not just the clothes¬, but the whole mis-en-scène dreamed up by a troupe of collaborators–can be as transcendent, profound, disturbing, moving, and as joyful as theater or film. The trouble is that there’s a problem in communicating this fragile vitality to an uncomprehending world. To begin with, fashion shows are also briefer, and more ephemera–and, in general, far more poorly reported, described, or critiqued than plays, opera, or
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