From The New Yorker, a paradox stems from the basic dilemma that underpins the economics of fashion: for the industry to keep growing, customers must like this year’s designs, but they must also become dissatisfied with them, so that they’ll buy next year’s. Slow fashion: Fast fashion is about greed. It’s time to slow down and consider the true cost of choosing quantity over quality. The rebirth of haute couture: Sixty years ago Christian Dior unveiled his first collection to an electrified audience. It was dubbed The New Look and it launched a golden age of design. A review of The Golden Age of Couture. Depending on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts, but admit it: You love it—it matters. A look at why fashion's attempts to be taken seriously are treated with ridicule. From Vanity Fair, on the limits of self-improvement: Christopher Hitchens—58, full-figured, and ferocious in his consumption of cigarettes and scotch—gets an unlikely makeover.
