While chronicling the production of the then-largest issue of “Vogue” ever printed for his 2009 film “The September Issue,” documentarian R.J. Cutler captured the late, great André Leon Talley begging for sartorial reprieve. It was fashion week in New York, and the clothes hitting the runways were drab — plainly tailored and neutral, a far cry from Talley’s preference for eye-catching spectacle. “It’s a famine of beauty,” Talley complained to designer Vera Wang. “A famine of beauty, honey. My eyes are starving for beauty!”
My eyes have felt similarly as of late, wearied and underlined by dark circles after all their hours spent desperately seeking something exquisite. It does not just seem like the world lacks beauty; we can track the active campaign to remove it from our daily lives. Nature is being destroyed, violence rages around the globe and a handful of celebrities just expended innumerable carbon emissions during a two-second space flight for little more than a glorified press opportunity. We’re being inundated with mass amounts of ugliness, and the purveyors of this unsightly deluge want to bury us so deeply that we’ll forget how pleasant the world can be.
