From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
War Is Cool?
The Afghan conflict gets fashionable. Maybe that's not so bad.
Gucci, once a marque that traded on the patronage of such conventional beauties as Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly and Jacqueline Kennedy, has a new style icon so counterintuitive, so apparently bizarre, that one is unsure whether to congratulate the fashion house for its chutzpah or to laugh at it for its loopiness.
Tom Ford, Gucci's top designer, rather knocked the wind from the press and buyers' corps assembled to gawk at his latest men's collection in Milan on Tuesday when he declared that Hamid Karzai--yes, that Hamid Karzai--embodied the look of his new Gucci line. "The chicest man on the planet today," Mr. Ford said, "is the new president of Afghanistan, whose look is very elegant and very proud."
What is one to make of this fashion-world musing? One's first instinct, perhaps a touch killjoy, is that Mr. Ford is just too, too flip. Another interpretation, however, might well be this: that four months after Sept. 11, we couldn't possibly be facing a threat to our way of life if we are wallowing in wire copy about what the dressmakers think of the new Afghan president's astrakhan hat. It's all very reassuring. We're still yuppies, still receptive to cutesy sound bites and still prone to conflate the trivialization of a person, or concept, with its exaltation.
An example of that last, blithe tendency can be found in the latest issue of Vanity Fair magazine, which features, immodestly, a series of "historic portraits of the White House in wartime." These consist of a dozen photographs--some in color, others in black-and-white--of President Bush and his war-room staff. Why are they "historic"? Is it because they're in Vanity Fair? Or because of the time at which they were taken--to wit, wartime?
Or is it because the photographs were taken by the over-hyped Annie Leibovitz--who, in her trademark way, gives us very-up-close portraits of Condoleezza Rice (you can look into the pores on her face), President Bush (you can see his nose hair, distinctly un-Gucci) and Donald Rumsfeld (ditto)? Just putting the president & Co. in a photo spread like this is a trivialization of our hard-edged times: It's a packaging of these serious men and women as if for a fanzine.
The real question is What were they thinking when they agreed to pose for Vanity Fair? Were they trying to prove that Republicans can be cool too? Or was it an instance of collective vanity trumping personal judgment? In any case, it is par for the modern course, where everyone's personal motto seems to be "Look at me."
Which brings us back to Mr. Karzai, and Gucci. What was Mr. Ford thinking when he paid the Afghan leader his astonishing accolade? Was this an instance of unchecked frivolity, of a "fashionista" letting the air out of his head? Or is there a more pleasing explanation?
This war, to be sure, has been a good one for those who would find glamour wherever they can. The people of Afghanistan are handsome and rugged, their hair and eyes improbably lustrous for denizens of a dusty war zone. The coverage on television (Geraldo Rivera excepted) has been daring and windblown, as if reporters were infected by the panache of their Afghan subjects. And we have watched it all agog, swept up as much by the exoticism of the place as by the intensity of battle.
To give you a concrete example of this Afghan effect: Lucianne Goldberg, the talk show host and publisher of the Lucianne.com news forum, has embarked on a fashion project called "American Burkas," velvet hoods with silk linings that cover the hair and, as she puts it, "make women slightly less visible on a bad hair day." Seamstresses in China are currently engaged in getting these items ready for sale in America.
As for Mr. Ford, there was something pointedly nonconformist about his observations. But need we be dismissive of them? I spoke to Valerie Steele, the acting director of the museum of New York's Fashion Institute of Technology, and a renowned historian of fashion. She sought to reassure me that "very often it seems to people in the real world that comments by fashion-world people have a surreal quality, but 'chic' is precisely what Tom Ford sees in him [i.e., the Afghan president]. It's his business to think in terms of style." Military strategy and geopolitics, by deduction, are not his business.
Lost in all this is a sense of what Mr. Karzai truly represents, beyond being a template for a dignified, manly, if slightly fusty aesthetic. But there is virtue, sometimes, in the trivial. If Afghanistan inspires the folks at Gucci, and if Mr. Ford celebrates the grace of Hamid Karzai, we're not as shell-shocked as we were four months ago, and not as bereft of humor.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His "Citizen of the World" column appears Tuesdays.
