My plastic python Devi Kroell hobo, a penny under $35 at Target (no, it no longer has that sweeping accent at the end—Target has so succeeded at appearing a harbinger of design to the masses it’s almost succeeded in making its name hip), stinks like a new vinyl kitchen floor. And I really want to love that bag. I want to wield it a discount diva. I want to pull my Target Isaac Mizrahi giant bugshades (fake tortoise to go with fake snake) out of it and make a big grand gesture of putting them on as I step into the sun, and I want to pull out a dollar for a cuppa coffee and have that bag be the flashlight beam of the moment. But it smells. The python texture? Yes. It is well done. Whatever mold they used at the factory—in—China?—they got it right. It looks like two python skins ripped right off the snakes, dyed metallic in some giant, poisonous vat and then stitched together in one quick pass by a woman who gave up her daughters. (And actually the color, called “Anthracite” has a strange eco-disaster ring to it.) But see? The stink of it has put me in that mood of you-get-what-you-pay-for. Can we have a few miracles every once in a retail while?

The Libertine for Target tank in charcoal gray with a giant, Edgar Allan Poe-esque bird on it nearly pulls it off. But the cotton is a bit thin. (Smitten with retail adrenaline, I bought it right off the website on Day 1.) A few washings and that will be it. So the idea of a designer doing a masstique collection that is only available for a little while becomes the idea of a designer doing a collection that is, in fact, disposable. And that goes against the idea of good design, which, if disposable, should degrade down like a dried bee on a windowsill under there is nary a trace. Should we remind ourselves of sustainability as we feed our own pleasure principles? The new shiny bag? The image of nature mass produced on a shirt that has a shorter lifespan than many bugs?

The morning being Monday, I woke up in a manifesto mood. There is a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico (7,900 square miles). The crabs are suffocating, so they come to the surface. Perhaps soon there will be colors based on our global impending catastrophes: Dead Zone brown (a dark, murky green, perfect for those scrunchy fall sweaters), Worcerstershire (a lighter, puddly brown, streaked with iridescent, oily splotches), Melt (glacial white phasing to dark, watery blue). Meanwhile a man in a small town on the South Jersey Shore has installed solar panels on his house and a windmill in his yard. So naturally his neighbors are taking the town to court for not enforcing its height ordinances when it permitted this upstart his windmill. Such a nuisance, that windmill, the way it just stands there looking so out of place.

Which takes me to the present perceived state of Kate Moss. Her face, so ubiquitous, is also slightly transparent: even coated with bronzer in those leopardesque Cavalli ads it shows feelings, it shows soul. And she has never looked so sad as she does right now. One blogger (call it  bloggip)  posted pix of her getting out of a car this morning: : trademark black knee boots with flat soles (60s waif), belt around tank top over jeans (only she can do this), waistcoat (is it Topshop?), and Edwardian-esque, multibuttoned cropped jacket over that (again, is it?). And, of course, a hat. A vintage fedora with a protectively broad brim pulled down. Commenters sniped that she looks like she gained a few. Or quipped, what do people see in her?

The best retort is Alexander McQueen’s brilliant holographic video of Kate for  Fall ready-to-wear 2006. For seconds we were enthralled by this apparition, clearly Kate;  the ethereal, reckless purity of her twirling like a sea creature caught in the blast of a diver’s lamp. Of course, responsible to craft as he is to artifice, McQueen also showed the live dress at the end of the show, and it was a masterwork in itself. But the video is a moment that keeps being revisited a year later—an extraordinary flash of empathy, grandstand showmanship, technology and zeitgeist-precision (created by Baillie Walsh and art-directed by the designer).

McQueen was fostered and nurtured by the great, late Isabella Blow, who also did not see fashion as a plastic copy of a snakeskin bag, but as a wild venture into the imagination, tapping into history and fantasy in equal parts and coming up with impeccable tailoring. Fashion, as she lived it, is by necessity eccentric, creative, renegade, and parts tragic too. (See Amy Larocca’s brilliant, empathetic and precise obit-profile of Blow
in New York magazine). As House of Diehl says during the Good Block Party vid here, “We are fighting against the Prada Army.”

We want our fashion and our icons fragile enough to cause that heartstab of desire and the urge to protect. But we want them to endure too. Don't die, python bag. Perhaps it’s better to allow them to disappear. Let the plastic bags be like souvenirs and the T-shirts shreddable. As Ingmar Berman said, “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

Tomorrow: songs about buildings and food.