"To be pleased means to say yes."

I made that much-noted Adorno phrase a touchstone in 2005. Later, I realized (thanks sis) it hardly meant what I'd imagined. In my mind, not being a great pinko (or art historian), it was a neat piece of music about affirmation and enjoyment/fun. In the author's, I think it might have been a warning against the lazy openness big consumption breeds. I can't very well go about pointing fingers at the lazy and bourgeois (because HOLA). So, for the zillionith time, I'll flip-ly appropriate the text for myself, shape it to my pleasure. Adorno was a "no guy;" he worked through a v. significant "no era." Occasionally, I succumb to "the no's"--blogs, for instance, are so often sticky "no territories." But it's not in my nature and I'm vowing to cease and...embrace. Nobody needs my negativity heaped on top of their own (or the rest of the Internet's) prodigious sum. When it comes to discoursing other folks' creative endeavors (and I'm not talking about Justin Bobby) best to avoid the stuff I don't admire. There's a lot that pleases me, a lot I say "YES" to. Here goes:

Alexander McQueen is absolutely important. Each season in Paris, people make so much noise about Karl Lagerfeld (and I'll refrain from getting into why I don't join in the noise-making...damn). But A.M. really has the goods as far as I'm concerned. These textiles! It appears no one (but for lovebug, Dries) uses difficult, think-y prints enough. I usually hate (gulp) Space and the unceasing, willynilly co-opting of Ghesquiere's brilliant early-aughts Space-Age shapes, but here it all works and it looks new (and also Elizabethan) and it's not fussy or forbidding so much as fine and full of stories. And everyone's really been listening to my advice about corsets and/or bare breasts...