Modern anxiety is expressed in the longing for what most people fear, even as modern grief is expressed in the unconsummated mourning for what they never really had.

Perhaps part of the uncanny allure of fashionable clothing resides in the paradoxical impact of its expressiveness: the act of covering up with mere dead matter--cloth, fur, leather, or even metal when it is ingeniously shaped to the purpose--appears to reveal something magical about the life inside.