Some of them paid a very steep price, and AIDS can only imperfectly be compared to the syphilis that got Baudelaire and so many others. Fashion, however, moves too quickly, too brightly, too commercially to do anything in depth or really dip into the artistic past, or handle all this terribly dark-curtains stuff. Which is why there is something desperate and empty in these ads. Baudelaire's spleen without the poetic content. Fashion's genius is not in decadence, but in frivolity - the very best kind, the luxury of texture and color and draping and workmanship that makes fashion, at its best, come close to art.
Fashion designers are the masters of a decorative art that touches people more than any other.
The late 20th century is not a time for great art - indeed the sterility of the landscape is one of the reasons that Europeans and Americans spend so much time sniping at each other over who's ahead in the art race. And that is why fashion today at its best feels like art, why it projects a kind of aesthetic, almost spiritual, epiphany, that is lacking in art. Worth, Dior, Saint Laurent, Lacroix and more, not Damien Hirst and not Andres Serrano and not Cindy Sherman. This of course says more about art than it does about fashion.