The Robin Givhan chronicles

I'm a humorless liberal, so I suppose it won't surprise anybody that I strongly disagree with Dana Goldstein's take on the Robin Givhan chronicles. Note: it's not that I think fashion writers should be expected to just ignore political figures, or that I can't imagine a world in which people are able to distinguish between the substantive views of famous politicians and the clothes they wear; it's that Givhan does a bad job of all of it, writing in an authorial voice that isn't light on political interpretation and in a newspaper that almost never provides its readers similarly detailed critiques of the candidates' actual views. Imagine a Hollywood fashion rag that tossed out for your consideration the possibility that Brad Pitt's Academy Award-night tuxedo choice cuts against his believability as American outlaw Jesse James... but that didn't actually say anything about the tuxedo or what makes it elegant; then you can maybe sort of see why this is all ridculous--and why, of course, good writers don't absurdly conflate things that genuinely have nothing to do with one another.

But here, we learn that John Edwards' populist rhetoric doesn't match his wealth; that his clothes, which are in fact quite similar to the clothes of the working class, don't exactly look working class when John Edwards wears them; that this is all part of John Edwards' credibility problem. Tomorrow, we'll likely hear that Fred Thompson pulls off the roughneck look with great success (this despite the fact that he isn't anything like a roughneck). Hillary Clinton, as Dana points out, is apparently signaling that she "doesn't need to blend in with the boys to play hardball with them", but, as Dana also points out, she consciously never wears a skirt. So she's not a manly woman, but she's not a womanly woman either? Is that it?

It's all personality-based stuff. And even though none of it is "correct", it's by some coincidence that these interpretations map perfectly on to the same hollow narratives that Givhan's colleagues at the political desk continue to push at readers with a sweaty fervor. Which, I suppose, is all good news if your goal is to make sure that vapid political coverage enjoys the deepest possible penetration. But it's bad news if you want anybody to know anything important about politics or fashion or anything else, for that matter.