September Song  The Silly Symphony of the Fall Fashion Magazines
Fashion magazine articles are specious and silly all year long,
but the gargantuan heft of the September issues provides an
especially rich goldmine of the hilarious, the incongruous, the
patently offensive, and the just plain idiotic. On the
assumption that you would never read this stuff yourself, we've
combed the editorial pages of W, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Elle,
and The New York Times's "Fashions of the Times," and are ready
to share an almost unbelievable cornucopia of sophistry:  Class
antagonisms: Though every magazine assumes you have thousands of
dollars to lavish on new ensembles every season, they go about
worming the cash out of your pockets in different ways. Vogue
invites you to wallow in a frank, lusty, self-congratulatory
decadence, describing the redux hippie clothes of fall '99 as
"Bohemian style— a very expensive, richly decorated, real fur,
real stones, real crocodile version," and nodding approvingly
over the Fendi bag pre