“You’re kidding. Tell me you’re kidding. At least I’ll know where to find my new wardrobe this year…in the nearest dumpster…talk about the Emperor’s New Clothes. Tsk, tsk.”—(Letter to the Editor)[1]
What’s more glorious than a girl in a field,
curled in the whorl of a deer bed, alfalfa
haloing her dreams of fashion magazines
while she plies matted hay, untatting her world?
Bales score the landscape, parceling
endlessness, parsing this solo tableau,
while her heroes wrench their music
into being in Seattle, gray, time zones away.
What’s grunge if not her dense crochet
of castoff couture curated from dumpsters
and worn with a frisson of pride and shame:
flowering nightgown, old ski boots, sweater
turned lace in places by moths and age?
And this field like where models pose
in Vogue, each page itself a piece of land
and an ethos framed inside a storyboard.
[1] Wynne Bittlinger, letter to the editor in Vogue US, February 1993
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