The most fetishistic gear bears an ambivalent relationship to power and so o s tensibly does the

The most fetishistic gear bears an ambivalent relationship to power; and so, o s tensibly, does the wearer High heels hobble, but they also stab. While casual clothes keep sex under wraps, “fashion” emphasises the sexual differences between a powerfully curvaceous woman and an ultra- masculine man. It sculpts as deliberately as a corset or a cod-piece.A more recent feminist contention is that women can “own” their sexuality through flaunting their attributes, not unlike politicised gays who proudly appropriate the epithet “queer”. Being a BABE, a bosomy Boadicea, corset on, heels staggering, is the w a y to self-possession.This kind of streetwalker chic has seized the fashion imagination. The red light district of 42nd Street, near which the New York shows are held, seems to have provided the inspiration, with models imitating strippers from the Midnight Cowboy era.

Pasties (the little tassels strippers have on their nipples), G-strings and skin-tight snakeskin underscored the sleaze factor, in itself a nostalgia for a 42nd Street which is being stripped of some of its old sleaze by urban renewal.Younger New York designers, such as Kitty Boots, advertise women’s wears with the subtlety of a porn shop. The words “pussy” and “fetish” are sewn in spangly “lights” across the chest of T-shirts. Sofia Coppola, the director’s daughter, designs T-shirts that announce “I Love Booze” or “Wasted”.Valerie Steele reckons that branding – filed on the Internet as “Body Art” – is going to be the new big thing. Simulated branding has already arrived in the form of haircuts which have words buzz-cut into them, close to the scalp.

Young ghetto kids have recently sold their heads as “billboards” to advertising agencies which pay them a nominal fee for having commercial slogans cut into their scalps. After that, according to New York-based trend spotter, Irma Zandel, consultant to mega-sneaker m anufacturers and other youth-dependent businesses, “Ritual self-mutilation,” like cutting a nick in your earlobe or off the tip of your finger, is next.”What could be shocking now?” asks Harold Koda of the Costume Institute of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, talking about the impotence of stylistic symbolism and the Seventies revival “The things that are really shocking are now all too real. Every time you walk by a homeless person you feel it.”If you listen to America’s new right, you will hear a lament that the Sixties, with all their attendant humanism, ever happened; that we ever started on this slippery slope, that we ever took to wearing jeans in the first place and making everyone feel entitled. Bring back orphanages instead of writing unwed mothers a public assistance cheque. Make the hierarchy of have and have-not more visible, they seem to say, like it was before the Gap.According to the American historian Robert Reich, secretary of Clinton’s labour department: “There is little doubt that we are headed toward a two-tiered society, composed of a smaller group at the top, and a much larger group continuing to lose ground.

I’m very fearful of the next century,” he told Newsweek recently. “There is more economic and geographic segregation by wealth. We depend on upward mobility and the work ethic as the moral centres of the economy. If we lose our middle class, we invite the worst forms of demagoguery.”A century on, Wharton would be pleased to know that what we wear still speaks a kind of truth. If casual clothes still promote the myth of the American dream, high fashion does not It has become a neurotic examination of personal potential. Which side of the socio-economic chasm will we end up on: in a sleazy underworld, or a lofty seat of privilege? Upstairs or downstairs? Underneath, or on top?.

DINNINGTON in South Yorkshire is a tough, windswept mining village Or it was, until the pit closed in 1991. It has a population of 10,000 and unemployment is 17 per cent. Now, like so many similar communities, it must find its identity in new in itiatives such as the local Yorkshire pudding factory, set up after the colliery closed It is still a real community, though. People are brusque but friendly, greeting each other across the High Street, queueing at the Post Office for pensions and benef its. Harassed young mothers, high-heeled and bare-legged even in the bitterest weather, manoeuvre buggies round the market, while determined old ladies on shopping scooters weave in and out of the morning traffic.