If Fashion Week is truly going to be about the uptight, pre-feminist 1950s, as today’s lead story in Thursday Styles asserts, I am going to stay home. How boring can you get?

What’s distressing is that it’s not just old war horses like Michael Kors, but also promising young guns like Thakoon Panichgul, who are embracing a conformist past in which women did housework in high heels. Didn’t they watch Betty, January Jones’s immaculately turned out suburban housewife on “Mad Men”, slowly go insane last year?

Even more distressing is fashion designers using a complete lack of imagination as an excuse to essentially copy old styles, instead of taking on the harder job of making clothes that speak to these troubled times. I understand the backlash against the casualization of America — I despise the dishevelment too. But fashion has got to give modern women options that acknowledge their go-go lifestyle.

By wishing it all away, these designers are living in the same fantasy world as Dubya.

Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Maureen Orth is a total MILF, and she’s got all the connections in the world. No way TR landed such a brainy babe with his genial personality alone.

I love how John Heileman breaks down the Hillary-Barack duel down to whether voters are realists or romantics. But he’s neglecting something obvious and major: the woman vs. black thing. As a feminist, I would love to be able to say to my own daughter, “When you grow up, you can be President.” She wouldn’t even need to be a trailblazer. And I’m sure a lot of black parents have the same dream for their own children, though the day this country is ready to elect a president that is both black and female seems, sadly, a long ways off.

You see, Heileman doesn’t consider people like me who are both realist and romantic. He only considers how people vote with their heads (even the kind of romantics he’s talking about are voting with their heads). But, despite all the talk of electability, when it comes time to pull that lever Americans vote with their hearts.

A 75-foot-tall likeness of the iconic cardigan jacket? Coco Chanel is surely rolling in her grave at the sight of the hideous, faux-concrete cheesiness from which models emerged at the spring haute couture show. I get the symbolism — it all comes back to the jacket — but where is the subtlety, joy, or beauty?

Perhaps Karl Lagerfeld is trying to tell us that he feels trapped by the assignment of constantly updating a decades-old look and philosophy that he did not create, largely for customers whose lifestyles the obsessively knowledge-seeking multitasker has got to privately disdain.

Keeping Chanel alluring to generations of new customers is no easy task. And despite the success, it must start to seem like a chore when it needs to be done over and over and over again, especially for someone so consumed by the changing currents of culture that he drops friends who no longer fit his vision of the present.

After 25 years at the helm of Chanel, during which time it has become one of the most profitable luxury brands in the world, it’s hard to imagine anybody else on the job. But Lagerfeld is all about change, and it would be fascinating to watch him work his magic at a fusty old fashion house in need of a facelift.

There are so many reasons to love Valentino — the tan, the coif, the clothes, the shameless extravagance. But the brilliant old-world snobbery of the just-retired couturier is best summed up in this excerpt from Michael Specter’s 2005 New Yorker profile:

There are limits even to Valentino’s love of celebrity. … Paris Hilton was in the news for a change. Her engagement to the scion of a Greek shipping fortune had just been announced, and I asked Valentino if he wanted to design her wedding dress. He shuddered and replied, “No. I don’t like her. … She is vulgar and she is not even pretty.” Then he added, dismissively, “The Hiltons. They have nothing.”