but Chanel Handbags gets swept under the rug

Fake Handbags is a cautionary fashion fable, told, as it must be, in images, a parable of now you see her, now you don’t. Two weeks ago most major fashion magazines carrying advertisements for the new fall accessories from Christian Dior featured a pair of Russian-looking lace-up boots lined with woolly shearling and a matching purse slung over the shoulder of a beautiful woman with wide-set eyes, a leonine blond mane and a look so markedly vacant she seemed lost in, well, let’s say reverie.

The model in the pictures was Kate Moss. And of the many ways to calculate the velocity of her professional free fall, following publication by a London tabloid of a grainy video image said to depict her snorting cocaine at a London recording studio, the Dior ad comes as a revelation.

While a number of Ms. Moss’s corporate clients issued pious antidrug statements and well-judged disavowals as they politely cashiered her, Dior took the kind of tack one has come to expect from an industry where, as in the old Soviet Union, inconvenient truth is subject to revision. What Dior did in the double-page pictorials that ran this week in international newspapers was simple. Replica Handbags kept the boots and the bag and lost the girl.

There is no fashion Kremlin, of course, to issue fatal edicts. Yet the fashion industry has a long history of isolating rogues and banishing those who offend its codes to professional Siberia. And what the Dior ad suggested was that Kate Moss - the 31-year-old supermodel; the fashion symbol, as proclaimed by the glossies and by the Council of Fashion Designers of America; the creative inspiration for countless designers; the businesswoman for whose services modeling agencies collected an estimated $1.5 million in fees in the last year - has been disappeared.

Her offense was not so much her cocaine use (although Scotland Yard, which takes an intolerant view of traffic in what in Britain are termed Class A drugs, is investigating the model) as her hubris. Drugs of all Louis Vuitton Handbags, but especially cocaine, are commonplace in fashion. There are stylists and hair and makeup artists who consume coke by the shovel load.

There is a world-famous photographer who draws his inspiration from daily deliveries of high-quality pot rolled into fat spliffs. There are designers who keep “muses” with good drug connections on salary. There are models, and not a few of them, who snort cocaine discreetly from lipstick shaped “bullets” and who understand that “Do I smell Chanel?” is backstage code for “Got coke?”

That someone always has cocaine is hardly destined to shock or offend most people in fashion, where the unwritten rule is do as you like, but not on film. “If you don’t see Cartier Handbags everywhere in fashion,” the seasoned stylist George Cortina said before the Gucci show on Wednesday, “you’re wearing a blindfold.”

The amateur home sex video that seems to have made the career of Paris Hilton would have ended that of any reputable model, for the obvious reason that models are not meant to be much more than beautiful but neutral screens on which to project the allure of a new eyeliner or a bar of soap.

“It’s always been much more widespread than anyone says, but Chanel Handbags gets swept under the rug,” said Long Nguyen, the editor of Flaunt magazine. “We all know that fashion never looks under the rug, because it’s not pretty there.”

Mr. Nguyen’s metaphor, however, is not altogether accurate, since in many forms the ugliness of addiction has been in full view all along. For the half decade before the designer Donatella Versace went public with disclosures of severe cocaine addiction and sought rehabilitation last year, she presented the fashion world with a spectacle at once scarily compelling and morally perplexing.

Teetering down the runway twice a year in high heels at the end of each show, Ms. Versace looked like someone who had embarked on a course of highly public disintegration. The erosion affected even the features of her face. That the company she headed was disintegrating in parallel was lost on few in the audience or the business.

This little Fake Handbags, or crinkle

At the conclusion of Prada Wallets Week tomorrow night, when several extravagant events are planned to celebrate the Herculean feat of making it through some 180 runway shows over 10 days, the real partying should be taking place at the European fabric mills that specialize in silk chiffon. From the looks of the many collections that made liberal use of the breezy, gauzy fabric that evokes memories of grandmother’s closet, their proverbial ship will be coming in.

There was the chiffon blouse painted with blue and yellow flowers at Tuleh; the sheer shirts trimmed with bibs of chiffon tissues from the newcomer Brian Reyes; petals of butter chiffon stitched into floaty dresses at Cynthia Steffe; and Kenneth Cole’s finale of crinkle chiffon, light as air in magenta, olive, scarlet and topaz. Even Kimora Lee Simmons, who, in her sex-kitten romps at Baby Phat, is not one to dote on such a classical ideal of Alexander Wang Handbags, found herself layering a chiffon accordion skirt beneath a zebra-print toga or two.

Many editors and retailers must have found themselves writing the same thing in their diaries: “granny.” Had the ladylike fashions so prevalent in the early part of the decade already been replaced by old-lady-like fashion?

Besides chiffon there were other signs of a shift in the fashion winds toward looks conventionally thought of as matronly, which are sure to challenge retailers when the clothes arrive in stores next spring. There were dresses that fell awkwardly at the calf (Tuleh), white cotton gauze dresses that looked like flannel nightgowns (Proenza Schouler), silk blouses with working-girl bow ties (Oscar de la Renta) and pesky slips peeking out from beneath skirt hems, not to mention knee-high stockings (Marc Jacobs). Perhaps the most convincing call to the elderly citizen set came from Max Azria, the designer of BCBG, who trimmed his chiffon gowns - caftans really - with Prada Handbags.

“We support all kinds of chiffon,” Kal Ruttenstein, the fashion director of Bloomingdale’s, said, putting a positive spin on the matronly look of things. “Bally Handbags seems to be a very ‘wanted’ fabric in a lot of ways.” Mr. Ruttenstein was speaking on Monday night as he waited for the Marc Jacobs show to begin, which, in the view of many, is the real start of the fashion season, following the annual regurgitation from younger upstart designers still reacting to Mr. Jacobs’s designs of the previous seasons. But chiffon was already on Mr. Ruttenstein’s mind, and he didn’t see anything old about it.

“Nothing looks prettier than pale chiffon wafting down the street on an attractive woman,” he said. Another image that came to mind, at least when Behnaz Sarafpour showed her version of the drawstring chiffon top on Tuesday, was the cast of “Mama’s Family,” the 1980’s sitcom about a crotchety widow in rolled stockings. A silk animal print sundress worn off the shoulder had Mama’s daughter-in-law Naomi Oates Harper written all over Cartier Handbags ; the lace doilies draped over other models’ shoulders and the dickeys around their necks looked as if they were borrowed from the wardrobe of a preacher’s wife.

This little Fake Handbags, or crinkle, in style may not be the most appealing way to describe a fashion direction that is at once an evolution of the trend toward dressier clothes inspired by the luxury boom, and also a reaction against the bohemian looks born in recent seasons on the street. No designer wants to hear his or her collection described as matronly.

The use of such old-fashioned Replica Handbags has a lot to do with the success of a band of designers working in Paris: Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, Phoebe Philo at Chloé and Olivier Theyskens at Rochas. Elements of their recent collections have evolved into a regular formula of ingredients for some of those now working in New York, the world capital for giving artistic fashion a commercial appeal.

The more appealing, and youthful, of these Paris-inspired designs are the ones in which the designers have experimented with new shapes and proportions, with ballooning skirts and cocooning coats and waistlines that are as high as those of the Empire or low as a flapper’s, now reinvented with a drawstring at the hem and neckline to create a Louis Vuitton Handbags.