À LA MODE

Somebody should have told my good friend David Schoffman that it wasn't for the Arts section. His first portentous statement in the interview was a curt dismissal of an entire generation - the very generation that skips the Opinion page and goes straight to Styles.

"It is impossible for a young artist to do any work of significance,' he began, "because there is one and only one subject in Art and that is the subject of Death."

 "Words like mortality are meaningless to this brood of optimists just barely out of adolescence. To them the void and the abyss might be names of nightclubs and tapas bars not critical ideas and ultimate paradoxes." (Maybe the Styles section was in fact an inspired choice).

How my dear colleague David found his way into the paper of record is a story in and of itself. It seems that fashion's final frontier is the long neglected vestiary habits of bald middle-aged artists. Well past the prime of pink hair and nipple rings this crucial demographic (The Times readership skews radically toward the 55 and over crowd) is known to combine comfort with the casually mismatched. Add a few paint stains on a pant cuff and voilà , a look. 

It seems that the Italian designer Ettore Macchia has already come out with a line of pre-washed smudged distressed linen trousers and over-sized plaid hoodies he calls stracci artista. A typical pair of slacks sell for about 300 euro.

Here in France, a place notorious for its sartorial intolerance, there's been a gradual softening toward the disheveled. It is no longer unusual to see grizzled retirees waiting in line at the boucherie wearing brightly colored Converse high tops with a pair of black baggy cords.

I'm not entirely convinced, however, if our personnes du troisième âge are quite ready for hats.