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Amy Spindler

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Posted Tuesday, Feb. 8, 2000, at 9:30 PM ET

Overabundance of fashion shows necessitates keeping today's "Diary" to a minimum.

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Despite the great hostility toward fashion among disgruntled Slate readers—what, do people who are angry about fashion walk around naked? Doesn't everyone have to get dressed? Isn't a little variety in the street, an allowance for personal expression, a good thing?—I'll continue to make the world a worse place by aggrandizing dress.

Actually, I always feel very proud of the fact that fashion, and the advertising it brings into the New York Times, helps support bureaus around the world for a publication that, because of its existence, makes the world a better place.

My day started with a designer who uses Ivana Trump for a muse and ended with one who uses Sofia Coppola as a muse. Ten in the morning till 10 at night.

In between, we're closing the issue of Men's Fashions of the Times, which comes free with the paper next month. The somewhat controversial theme devised by the editors, Robert Bryan and David Blum, is "Vanity is good"; the issue is devoted to the importance of loving yourself. I think Whitney Houston sang a song about it.

One of the shoots is a series of self-portraits by cool young photographers like Terry Richardson and Baron Claiborne. We also asked a Sears portrait photographer to shoot himself. And we shot men with the objects of their obsessions—things they're most proud of in their lives. For one man, it was his horse. For another, artifacts from trips to Africa. We were supposed to shoot a rapper with his 40 pit bulls, but certain legal obligations intervened. That would have been a very cool shot. It's not often you can get 40 pit bulls in a room together and have the photographer emerge with the film. It's been tried before.

Advance copies of our Women's Fashions of the Times came out this week. It's in the paper on Feb. 20. Free! The best thing in the magazine is a series of portraits in which film directors recast actresses in the roles they were born to play. Courtney Love, for instance, was Eliza Doolittle (cast by Milos Forman). Christina Ricci was cast as Bette Davis in Jezebel by Pedro Almodóvar. We also had two directors make "silent movies" for us on the pages, Tom Tykwer, the director of Run Lola Run, and Janusz Kaminski, who won two Academy Awards for his cinematography in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan. I got my first bound copy of the issue, only the third one I've edited since being at the Times, on my way into the dark room where the first show I saw today was held. It was very frustrating.

But probably less frustrating than how women must feel: They're turning on their televisions and getting live coverage of the shows going on in New York this week, and magazines that feature spring clothing are just emerging. Fashion is outdating itself before it's even in stores. So maybe Marc Jacobs, the last show of the night, had the best approach. His offerings had a sort of vintage-store look, secondhand-bin chic. Which makes it possible for someone wearing their mother's clothes, or secondhand clothes, or their oldest clothes, to look like some sort of front-row starlet. It was designer clothes with a hint of democracy. And it's hard to get hostile about that.