OK, I have a beef with the luxury apparel industry that grows ever more urgent with each passing birthday: why are designer brands and retailers so focused on clothes for skinny people? What hope is there for the standard-sized and zaftig among us?
It may be the ultimate in old-school publishing and fashion, and the last gasp of the media business as we have known it, but for me the arrival of the September issues of the big fashion magazines is still a thrilling moment. I still feel a jolt of excitement when I see them on the newsstand, as if a bell has just been rung and something wonderful is about to commence. Arriving long before the kids are actually back in school, and well before leather jacket weather, the September issues are one of my favorite harbingers of autumn.
Prognosis: negative. I have been mourning the loss of one of the great luxury brands in my closet: Michael Kors. It used to be one of my go-to ready-to-wear brands: I loved the mash-up of classic Americana and jet-set European sensibilities, the use of color and texture, and those shrugs! I loved those cute little fine-gauge knit shrugs. I still have approximately fifteen of them in multiple colors, and they have saved me many times from the horror of exposing my upper arms. We adore you, Michelle Obama, but you have raised the upper-arm bar so high that when we consider going to the gym to pump iron, it seems futile, so we just shrug and put on a shrug instead.
Ah, the art of the tease. The first glimpse, just a flash of something amazing, with the promise of more to come. But not just yet. Wonders to be imagined and dreamed of, perhaps someday to become real. Anticipation can be delicious, in luxury purchasing as well as in love.
