Whither the Age of Innocence? : Magazines: The New Yorker takes a hard look at the increasingly youth-oriented world of fashion advertising and doesn’t like what it sees.
Aparticularly odoriferous advertisement of the day features a blond toddler in a white linen suit and espadrilles, leaning up against a miniature Mercedes convertible with a city skyline in the distance.
The accompanying slogan, for a children’s cologne, reads: “Because fragrance is ageless. . . .”
It’s ripe old news that America likes things new and young. But in the Nov. 5 issue of the New Yorker, fashion writer Holly Brubach takes a fresh look at America’s tastes and is disturbed by designers’ renewed fixation on youth--on childhood even.
“When youth is seen as a form of physical perfection, it becomes a punishing standard, which most women--even young women--can’t measure up to,” she writes. “Anyone who believes that feminism has gained some ground in the past 10 years or so--that our society has finally made some progress in appreciating the beauty of so-called older women--is bound to see this return to youthful fashion as recidivism.”
Brubach knows that fashion is an “unspoken language” that says a lot about a culture’s values and concerns. Today’s emphasis on youth, she believes, probably speaks to women in their 30s and 40s who were so focused on their careers that they now look back nostalgically for their lost younger years.
At the same time, mothers and fathers are turning to their children as means of expressing their own insecurities about aging, Brubach asserts. There are, she believes, two basic styles of children’s clothing designed today.
One is the “Victorian” style that symbolizes parents’ hopes of shielding their children from contemporary reality. The other is the style in which parents “dress their children as miniature versions of themselves as they look today, when their clothes testify to the kinds of people they’ve become.”
Brubach doesn’t much care for the first look and is repulsed by the second, which would include rock star clothes for kids and such tangential trends as the new lines of children’s perfumes and cosmetics.
All of this--from the cocktail dresses for kindergartners to the rabbit-skin coats dyed to look like mink to the toddler negligees--strike her “as pretty sad for what they say about the narcissistic ways adults use their children: as a means of healing their own past, as a mirror for themselves.”
REQUIRED READING
The crisis in the Middle East has managed to make some conservatives sound like peaceniks and some doves sound like war mongers. In the November Tikkun magazine, editor Michael Lerner, a former anti-war activist who has never supported a U.S. military action, makes a two-sided case for and against war in the Middle East--and comes out in favor of force.
Lerner’s reasons for nonintervention embrace the usual leftist litany: Long ravaged by colonialism and imperialism, the world is an unfair playing field and the regimes we are defending in the Middle East are lousy ones. The Bush Administration, in paying more attention to geopolitical oil needs than people, has no legitimate stake in the Middle East and thus remains uninterested in the essential issues of redistributing wealth and creating a true internationalist climate in the area.
His argument in favor of intervention, which wins out, is more complex. “The war Bush is leading us into is the wrong war for the wrong reasons,” he writes. But, as Lerner sees things, the United States should still intervene, not to restore the emir in Kuwait and protect the world’s oil, but to wipe out Iraq’s ominous offensive military capability, which, he speculates, would eventually be used against Israel even if Saddam Hussein were to withdraw from Kuwait.
Lerner tempers his bellicosity with progressive ideas. For instance, he urges the United States to demand that Arabs make peace with Israel, in exchange for which the Palestinians would receive a demilitarized Palestinian state. And before he blew up the first Iraqi chemical weapons plant, he would attempt to pull off an international Middle East peace conference along the lines Gorbachev suggested.
If that fails, though, kaboom!
Even more interesting than Lerner’s views is the impassioned response from commentators on all sides of the issue.
One Tikkun editor urges, for instance, that all traditional thinking is bound to fail here, and that the conflict be solved through a sort of New Agesque “peace consciousness.”
Radical-turned-conservative David Horowitz, on the other hand, writes, “My old friend and ex-comrade Michael Lerner has taken a modest but important step out of the utopian fog bank of the ideological Left, and onto the terra firma of the flawed world in which--unfortunately--actual humanity lives and dies. . . .”
The cross-fire of arguments from both sides of the political spectrum against Lerner is passionate and enlightening. Even Tikkun devotees, however, are likely to be annoyed by the tone of Lerner’s 10 pages of tortured soul-searching. Is he the only man alive who realizes that men and women actually die during warfare?
Finally, Lerner’s giving himself the last word is such an ill-conceived editorial indulgence that readers may be tempted to revoke his credentials as an arm-chair strategist.
Contrary to everyone’s perception, Americans have more leisure time on their hands than ever before, an average of 40.1 hours a week as of 1985 compared to 38.3 in 1975 and 34.5 in 1965. So how do they spend this wealth of new found freedom? By watching television, of course. According to the Nov. issue of American Demographics, the average American between the ages of 18 and 64 spends five more hours a week watching television than he did in 1965. As is its custom with any issue, the magazine also features a breakdown of leisure activities that is far more complete than anyone has time to consider.
SHREDDER FODDER
Looking for a scapegoat to blame for Tuesday’s election turnout? Why not pin it on Nicholas Von Hoffman?
“Real elections have become infrequent events in the United States, which may have something to do with why so few people take the trouble to vote in them,” Von Hoffman writes in the November Self magazine.
Since most elections are mere “social ritual,” Von Hoffman concludes that it’s silly for citizens to feel guilty if they decide they have better things to do than vote in anything other than a “spotlight” race--and voters can count on the media to tip them off when one of these important contests are brewing. Besides, he says, polls take the real pulse of the country these days.
It would seem that Von Hoffman has too much faith in the media and too little respect for social ritual.
NEW ON NEWSSTANDS
Psychology Today, which stopped publication last December after 23 years, will be reborn in January, with Marilyn Webb as editor-in-chief. Webb studied psychology at the University of Chicago; studied and taught Eastern psychology at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., and has worked as an editor and free-lance writer for magazines, including New York and Woman’s Day.
