I've never understood why T, the New York Times' fashion magazine, doesn't run somewhat longer articles. I know, I know, text gets in the way of the pretty pictures of the pretty people wearing pretty things. But this Cathy Horyn profile of Vivienne Westwood is wonderful, and it strikes me that there could have been more of it. Particularly because Horyn does a nice job of placing Westwood in the larger context of British popular culture:
Young journalists encountering Westwood for the first time invariably make a beeline for her appearance. Well, look at her: the Tang-colored hair, now worn fetchingly long; the face as pale as a cameo. Westwood isn’t a great beauty, yet her attempts to look flamboyant or regal or sexually wrecked — all moods she has struck in photographs, including her Tatler cover as Margaret Thatcher, the likeness shocking — embody elements of British humor. I remember someone telling me years ago that the best way to understand Westwood’s fashion — and the same goes for her public identity — was to watch the ‘‘Carry On’’ films of the late ’50s and ’60s, which were sendups of British institutions. She is all about performance.I would have liked to see more of this kind of thing, and more discussion of the interaction between British clothiers and British culture, and how they act on each other in both directions. It's always struck me that fashion plays a peculiar role in our cultural life. It's vastly influential in the terms outlined by The Devil Wears Prada, but the consideration of it is somehow...separate from the rest of our discussions about books, and music, and movies. That's in part by virtue of fashions' status as an industry profitable enough to stand entirely on its own, but I also thinks it stems from a...hesitation, perhaps, by people who are entirely comfortable leafing through the Star Wars Encyclopedia or cataloguing underground hip-hop mixtapes, to treat clothes, which can be simultaneously frivolous and intimidating, as a serious pursuit. But clothes are definitive of our popular culture in any era: they're the quickest way to identify a movie or an album, or to identify the ideas about a particular era artists have at any given point. They're a background that often defines or identifies a whole.