And it made me reconsider fashion – and the clearance rack – in a new light.

But if Andy didn’t care–if she would have been just as happy had the fashion machinery delivered some other color to the bargain bin and thought all serious people should be similarly indifferent–then Miranda’s argument for the importance of that machinery is beside the point. The color choices of the fashionistas had no effect on Andy’s ability to make her statement that she didn’t care much about her clothes. So Miranda’s argument that the colors had been “chosen for her” by the fashion community was irrelevant.

One does not simply find oneself at the bargain bin. One makes a long series of choices, some less reflectively than others, to get to that place. Somehow, they are all connected with one’s “identity.”

Observers may be able to draw correct inferences about a person from his apparel, but that is not proof that the person is making statements; otherwise, observing that his fly is open would be proof that he is a flasher. A person may simply be unaware or not pay attention to certain aspects of his personal presentation. This inattention could be due to inadvertence, incompetence, or indifference.

Andy was subjectively “unaffected” by fashion to the extent that she didn’t notice it. (Of course, she was objectively affected by fashion because other people noticed her appearance in comparison with others and treated her differently as a result.) But to the extent that she didn’t give a damn whether her sweater was cerulean or aqua or azure, Miranda’s rebuke misses the mark because it doesn’t prove that she should care.

The idea that any of us are outside the coding mechanisms of culture is impossible, as you know very well, Grant. “Not participating” in the system that produces “this stuff” would mean dropping out in ways too radical for most of us to contemplate. Grabbing a sweater from the bargain basement of a department store is as much a “fashion statement” as wearing an Hermes scarf, just a very different one.

So what? That should do nothing, logically, to change Andy’s opinion that it was a matter of complete indifference to HER whether she ended up buying a cerulean, white, or orange sweater, nor her opinion that people who do worry about such things are frivolous and superficial. You can’t derive an ought from an is–in this case, you can’t derive “you ought to care about the fashion process” from “color diffusion in the apparel market results from conscious choices by particular designers.”

Exacting choices of color can be defended better than that.

Candy who is a bit of a fashionista…

The surface thrust of the emotional scene (her husband had left her) was, she had poured too much into her job. But I thought, plenty of marriages break up, more’s the pity. If that happens, it’s kind of nice that the wife rolls off in a limo with an assistant.

Not a bad film, with probably necessary sops thrown to the feminist (fashion is too much ado about too little) and post-feminist (don’t shortchange your emotional life [while having everything anyway]) narratives, but setting up some traction for more humane ambiguities.

Don’t you think the tonal mix observable in Devil/Prada would work well in 21st-century advertising (and other messages), which seems to have tilted thus far toward GenY(?)-ironic and neo-hip audience flattery? But then I don’t see TV, so maybe it’s already there.