It has not escaped my attention that Joan Juliet Buck has moved to Santa Fe. For those too sensible to know, Buck is the former editor of French Vogue, and therefore, also, the title going with the job, The Most Fashionable Person in the World. You may be unaware of this too, and I hope you are, but Paris Vogue is the Vogue. I mean British Vogue is generally the most fantastic, Italian Vogue most anally brilliant at production, American Vogue sells clothes like nothing else on Earth, but French Vogue decides. That's because no matter what anyone says or does, Paris is the centre of Fashion. Always has been, always will be. It's why the Japanese show there, most of the Italians, and why every Brit genius with nerve decamps to the big French houses. Paris is it.

I was set upon like I was some kind of sacrificial beast and they needed to tear me apart before Canadian Thanksgiving. If there is anything more feral than a group of 13-year-old girls away from home for the first time, it would have to live in the wilderness, and be starving. Ask Reena Virk. Or, as a new friend said recently about her fellow students at Havergal, "they ate my liver." These girls ate my liver every day, and were sharpening up for the rest of me when Christmas came, and I insisted that my mother take me to Kenneth at Holt Renfrew, get my hair cut in exactly the shape my evil classmates admired, Jacqui or Ali McGraw or someone. I lost the glasses, and bought the shoes that they admired, which at the time were Capezios with exactly the right toe shape, and with a few millimeters of toe showing, and another shoe called Papagallo. Also, my poor mother, I can't imagine how she explained the cost, the dresses they admired, for Saturday Night movies. I practised an Elvis sneer in the mirror every day until I went back.

(Copyright National Post 2002)

It has not escaped my attention that Joan Juliet Buck has moved to Santa Fe. For those too sensible to know, Buck is the former editor of French Vogue, and therefore, also, the title going with the job, The Most Fashionable Person in the World. You may be unaware of this too, and I hope you are, but Paris Vogue is the Vogue. I mean British Vogue is generally the most fantastic, Italian Vogue most anally brilliant at production, American Vogue sells clothes like nothing else on Earth, but French Vogue decides. That's because no matter what anyone says or does, Paris is the centre of Fashion. Always has been, always will be. It's why the Japanese show there, most of the Italians, and why every Brit genius with nerve decamps to the big French houses. Paris is it.

So Buck moving to the American West tipped me into a week-long decline.

I hate fashion.

And I particularly do not want living in the country to become fashionable. These people move in packs, and since there is no actual cognition happening in these brains, if one, especially someone like Joan Juliet Buck, does something, then all of a sudden, there is a flood. I do not want Manolo and Andre Leon Tally hooting to each other in the local food co-op, I do not want Jeanne Beker caroling on about the Slow Life. I do not want to see Gwyneth Paltrow, who should know better, posing on a yacht in the harbour. I do not want to see this nanosecond's shoe shape on the Fulford Ganges Road, and I do not want to see those haunted, gaunt, miserable people scrounging through the elements of my life for something to see to pay for their latest obsession with vases, or plastic jewelry or Airstream trailers.

This is because Fashion is evil. I know, I'm an expert. For far too long, for instance, I was married to someone Esquire magazine deemed one of the 25 most fashionable men dead or alive. Let me hasten to inform you that being that fashionable, or rather living with someone that fashionable, is like living in a Nazi boot camp. Enough to put me off marriage for several millennia. And when I left him, all I could write about was fashion. For years. Despite seven years of university. Tramp tramp tramp. New York, Paris, London, Munich. The fashion world had wiped my brain clean. I'm sure it had something to do with evil drugs they gave me. Let me assure you, from first-hand experience, that the deepest blackest pit of boredom and meaninglessness sits right under Anna Wintour's desk. The void is most clearly described by the Conde Nast building in any city.

It took me years to figure out how I had become so enmeshed. Then I realized that it was when I was 13, and sent from the country to boarding school. Now please don't write me letters about my disgustingly privileged life, it was hell, and I'm thinking of getting up a class-action suit, as soon as I can figure out who to sue: the teachers or my fellow students. And if they were that mean to us at the top of the food chain, I have no reason to disbelieve the cruelty practised on native children. Picture it. I was 13, stick thin, 4'9", 80 pounds, big horn-rimmed glasses, my hair scraped over to the side and fastened (tight) with a barrette. They were all rich kids from Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, D.C., South America and so on. They had houses in the Caribbean, they'd known each other since childhood, they knew what to boast about and they did. And when I did not chime in, well ...

I was set upon like I was some kind of sacrificial beast and they needed to tear me apart before Thanksgiving. If there is anything more feral than a group of 13-year-old girls away from home for the first time, it would have to live in the wilderness, and be starving. Ask Reena Virk. Or, as a new friend said recently about her fellow students at Havergal, "they ate my liver." These girls ate my liver every day, and were sharpening up for the rest of me when Christmas came, and I insisted that my mother take me to Kenneth at Holt Renfrew, get my hair cut in exactly the shape my evil classmates admired, Jacqui or Ali McGraw or someone. I lost the glasses, and bought the shoes that they admired, which at the time were Capezios with exactly the right toe shape, and with a few millimeters of toe showing, and another shoe called Papagallo. I also forced my poor mother to buy - I can't imagine how she explained the cost - the dresses they admired, for Saturday Night movies. I practised an Elvis sneer in the mirror every day until I went back.

Whereupon I became one of the popular girls within the week. That, my friends, is the awful power of fashion. Avoid it.

There's another, more positive way to look at Buck's departure from the delirious life. Maybe the smart ones, and Buck has actually written novels with no pictures, are decamping because they realize it's so stupid. Maybe the thrall is finally fading, its outlines blurring to insignificance. As any observer would admit, we've been disproportionately absorbed by this silliness since the '80s, and since everything goes in cycles, it's cycled back to just being about silliness, which is to say an uber-emphasis on frocks means you're a fool, which would release a whole lot of people to something approaching humanity.

That I'd approve of. But if you're one of them looking for a real life, don't come here. Practise someplace else first. I suggest Saudi Arabia -- wear a veil and get kicked around by a Prince of Saud. It's where most of your clothes end up anyway. Seems a good metaphor for what you've been doing to the rest of us.