I've just been watching, with growing astonishment and not a little admiration, the Men's Fall-Winter 2024 Collection by Pharrell Williams as presented by Louis Vuitton in Paris. I laughed till I cried.

For those of you to whom those words mean little, if not less than nothing, let me hasten to add that this is a fashion show. The, er, fashions are astonishing. Especially the handbags. It was. . . highly entertaining. Flares seem to be 'in'. Cool. The designer seems not to have so much blurred gender lines as totally obliterated them. He may very well have bent spacetime in the process. I am not saying that this is a bad thing.

I liked it: after all, I'm not going to have to wear any of it. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is the anti-fashion vortex of the universe. Around here, a bold fashion statement is wearing a joke t-shirt containing a mathematical formula. (I supply these as Christmas gifts to the engineers and physicists.)

I showed the video to Elektra. She hooted. She watched. Finally, she said what I'd been thinking: 'This is Philip Dick stuff.'

'Yes!' I said. Philip K Dick was a visionary. He often described similar costuming in his set-in-the-future novels. This display reminded me of the book Time Out of Joint. In Time Out of Joint, a man named Ragle Gumm lives in a self-imposed delusional state designed to help him with his world-saving task of predicting the next airstrike aimed at Earth from some hostile colonists on the Moon. Unaware of this, Gumm decides to escape and stumbles into the real world – one utterly unlike his delusional one, which looks like the US in 1959. This 'real world' features teenagers who play nose-flutes and wear very odd clothing – at least, to him.

I suspect the Louis Vuitton people would find the clothing less odd than Ragle Gumm did.

Yesterday, somebody on Twitter said that if things didn't get better she was considering opting out of the human race. I sympathise. Humans seem to be acting nuttier and nuttier these days. It would appear that almost all political leadership consists of people who failed the Milgram Test. I'd rather be something else, too.

Maybe the fashion industry is trying to turn us into well-dressed aliens before it is too late?

Just a thought.

24 Hours Later. Back from an exhausting shopping trip. Today's temperatures ranged from -17°C at dawn to a balmy -8°C midafternoon. Unsurprisingly, we waited until then to go grocery shopping. We needed supplies because we were out of this and that, and it's supposed to snow some more on Friday. This is getting annoying. That groundhog had better have some good news for us in a couple of weeks, is all I'm saying.

Young man pumping our gas was surprisingly cheerful. We chatted about the weather, as one does about things that cannot be helped.

'At least it's sunny today,' I offered.

He grinned. 'I think it's only there for show.'

'You're right,' I agreed. 'It does seem like it's only pretending.'

Do not try to tell me we aren't a diverse community. Within ten minutes I saw a young man with an Afro (gas station attendant) and an Amish farmer complete with full beard and classic hat (in Aldi). Walmart wasn't too crowded: instead, an employee with a huge cart was going around filling delivery orders. We ran into a friend at the checkout. She said she'd seen just about everybody she knew somewhere on her shopping trip. We agreed that it was best to lay in provisions against the next act of meteorological perfidy.

Home before it got any colder. It's supposed to go up to -4°C tomorrow. Will we be able to cope with the heat?

In Walmart, Elektra and I discovered that, despite more than a half-century of acquaintance, we still do not speak the same language. While I waited in the checkout line, she went back to the gluten-free section for a cake mix.

'They don't have chocolate,' I complained. 'So grab one of those white cake mixes.'

After a suitable interval, she returned with a box. 'They didn't have white, either,' she said, handing me a box of yellow cake mix.

I shrugged. 'When I was a kid, we called any bland, generic cake mix that wasn't chocolate 'white',' I proffered in apology.

Anyhow, we are safely home. We are warm and dry. We can make stew and cake and watch the snowflakes fall some more. But we can't do anything about the way reality keeps getting weirder. Maybe we are headed toward some not-too-distant shore beyond which meaning breaks down irreparably – a sort of Chaos Event Horizon.

If so, at least there will be coffee and cake.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

29.01.24 Front Page

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