Out of Its Depth

There's something sad about the Times when it tries to cover gossip. It cannot bring itself to be as sharp-fanged as gossip requires, but it has some vague sense that it must keep up with the competition. It gets caught crossing the road like a deer in the headlights.

So the big deal of the week is the fashion designer John Galliano, a 50-year-old man who may be the only man to wear his own clothes, and his dismissal by Christian Dior for a drunken rant or two against Jews. The story still on the front of the web page this morning is a think piece on whether Dior can weather this storm. It acknowledges the naked power of the actress Natalie Portman, who endorses or advertises, Dior's perfume; she said she was disgusted by Galliano.

Reader, forgive me but I don't quite get the fashion business. I have seen some high fashion on TV, and in the last two days plenty of photos of Galliano all dressed up for Halloween, but I have no clue about the connection between these and the Dior products I have seen in department stores. Fashion is something that governs how far off the ground are women's hems and how wide or narrow are men's lapels and ties. It changes mysteriously -- though the motivation is clear, for example in the plot of the movie Zoolander. The mechanism that governs these changes bears no relation that I can see to the costumes on the runway.

The sidebar in the Times to this looks like a fairly common type of story in the Times. With its headline At the Bar in the Galliano Case, Silenceit promises one of these floundering attempts to get underneath a juicy story, but no one will talk to the poor Times reporter.

The story strains a nuclear metaphor beyond the limit, though it doesn't work: "Nobody here was talking about it. Nobody would even talk about not talking about it. So radioactive was the atmosphere Tuesday at La Perle," it says.

But then the story moves on to quote three people, two by name, about the story. Technically these three were not inside the bar but sitting outside, where customers actually occupied the tables on a winter night. But then they didn't have much to say, either.

Compare all this the viciously catty piece that made up the the New York Post's Galliano offering today. The reporter unmasks Galliano for painting on big muscles on his body a few years ago when he was claiming to be a body builder and athlete. She writes: "... you know, when you use a darker shade of fake tan to do contouring. He wasn’t really buff or ripped — his arms were pretty spindly."

The moral at the risk of being Timesian myself: If you can't tell jokes, don't try.

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