When you think about it, the marriage of fashion and feminism, presided over
by the ever more sacerdotal New Yorker, has a certain inevitability to it.
Even the depiction of a female counterpart to the magazine’s trademark Regency
dandy, Eustace Tilley, on the cover of its special issue for February 26–March
4 looks far more convincing as an emblem of elegance than poor old Eustace
ever did. The naturalness of the union is presumably why it occurs to none of
the authors represented in this number, not even the self-proclaimed “crone,”
Mary Daly, that the sisters might be slightly compromised in their claim to
intellectual seriousness when their effusions, their complaints, their
confessions, their manifestos, are all sponsored by slick photos
of emaciated
model-girls promising sexual power over men with the help of Versace
or Estée
Lauder or Calvin Klein or Donna Karan.

“What is it that makes a woman alluring?” asks the sniffer-ad for
Chanel’s Allure. “What is that intangible that turns heads and touches
hearts, catches your eye and holds you with its power?” Whether or not
Allure is the answer to these questions, it is pretty clear that political
correctness and a preternatural alertness to slights from unreconstructed
patriarchs is not the answer. Yet the bundling of sex appeal with sex
antagonism in this way is oddly conformable to the feminine stereotype. The
message of the whole ensemble is the rather reassuring one that les femmes
want to continue being to men what they