A Picture Holds us Captive

In Vogue, August, this year:

An old woman missing her upper front teeth holds a child in rumpled clothes — who is wearing a Fendi bib (retail price, about $100).

A family of three squeezes onto a motorbike for their daily commute, the mother riding without a helmet and sidesaddle in the traditional Indian way — except that she has a Hermès Birkin bag (usually more than $10,000, if you can find one) prominently displayed on her wrist.

A toothless barefoot man holds a Burberry umbrella (about $200).

To all of you who are about to pick up pens and write the manager (Sorry--Editor), here she is, Vogue India editor Priya Tanna, with a message to critics of the August shoot:

"Lighten up," she said in a telephone interview. Vogue is about realizing the "power of fashion" she said, and the shoot was saying that "fashion is no longer a rich man's privilege. Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful," she said.

She said, she said.

Got that? That is the Vogue India editor. Priya. And she is, in her own way, a visionary. "Anyone can carry it off and look beautiful." Anyone. That is why the persons photographed do not have names. They are 'old man', 'a woman', 'the urchin' (oh why didn't they have the guts to say it?).

Actually, Oracular Priya says: "Anyone can carry it off and make it look beautiful."

"It"???

'This is a question of conceptual grammar," says Alex Kimbel, a local Wittgenstein impersonator who cuts a profile eerily reminiscent of the popular philosopher; he does a good bit of business attending Wittgenstein workshops on the philosopher's birthday at Tier One U. S. Universities. We caught up with him by a coffee shop in Hyde Park under the tracks, and asked for his comments. He turned his chair around, sat side-straddle and intoned, with his back to us:

"Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever withfresh life."

The oracle added, on hearing Priya's comments: 'One wants to say: 'Have you no Decency, at long last, you Silly Cow, Have you no Decency?' But here, our menchlichkeit leads us astray. And we must reach for the flypaper thin enough to fit the fly-bottle, and help put the proverbially refreshing metaphor out of its cynicism."

"A picture has held us captive...," he said, before asking us to buy him a second espresso.

Thank you Priya, and A. Kimbel (also Tagore, in a guest role), on behalf of all the farmers who committed suicide earlier this decade. If only they had known you were thinking of them. That, if not the good life ala Martha Nussbaum, then at least high fashion is not a rich man's privilege. And see, we could have shown them, the urchins and old women without teeth and old man laughing. A picture. Farmers in India do not laugh enough, experts say.