Hyperkult

Burberry A/W 2009 campaign, Photographed by Mario Testino

Those who know me best know that I live, breathe, and bleed The New Yorker and make my best attempt to read each issue from cover-to-cover. By week’s end, pages are dogeared, polysyllabic words I don’t know are underlined, and I—probably annoyingly so—often end up starting sentences with, “That reminds me of this article I saw in The New Yorker…” Plus there’s the fact that they’ve made the stylistic choice to use the diæresis diacritic mark, which makes consecutive vowels look badass.

This week’s New Yorker is one of what I believe are two yearly Style issues. That makes sense if their newsstand date coincides with New York’s Ready-to-Wear Fashion Week, which this latest issue does. The last Style installment featured Ariel Levy’s profile of Lanvin designer Alber Elbaz, an article which was so humanizing, so punch-you-in-the-stomach good that I teared up thinking about this sort of hapless, lovable man who’s insecure even in his brilliance.

Anyway, the point of all this verbal fawning is that if you love fashion, you should pick up this week’s issue. I’ve already raced through Dana Goodyear’s story on “The Wearst” (that’s fuschia, metallic, and animal print-happy interior designer Kelly Wearstler to you), a look inside the sunshine and rainbows Zappos.com headquarters, and a profile of Burberry creative director Christopher Bailey, a man who’s heaved the brand out of a ho-hum, deglamourized phase during his tenure there. It’s fascinating to have learned about Burberry’s inception and evolution over the years (literally in the trenches at one point, hence the eponymic coat name), and bear witness to the utilitarian high style it pushes today. To people who say fashion can’t be intelligent, thoughtful, or socially relevant I say “novacheck yourself” and point them toward the writing of Lauren Collins.

And now it’s Fashion Week, which I’ll be following from afar. I expect Alexander and Marc to bring it as usual, but I’m really hoping to see some new designers inject a little life onto the runways. I wouldn’t go so far as to say there’s been a “famine of beauty,” as André Leon Talley so succinctly put it, but some fresh inspiration wouldn’t hurt.