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.