James Surowiecki

Titled “Kevin Spacey Has a Secret,” the piece is a bit of a narrative striptease act. Which makes sense: Secrets are interesting only so long as they remain on the verge of being revealed, as long as they’re charged with the possibility — and not the reality — of disclosure. A good way to keep that charge alive, in fact, is to almost tell a secret, to hint that what you’ve said is the truth while simultaneously suggesting that there’s more — or less — you haven’t yet disclosed. If Spacey were openly gay, after all, there would be no story. All the ambiguity and all the complicated interplay between public and private personas that Junod uses to structure his story would disappear. Junod didn’t want Spacey to be out. He wanted him in-between.

Junod’s story begins: “I mean, my mother knows. Or thinks she knows. Or supposes. Or suspects,” and describes Spacey passing on the streets of Savannah, where the actor is working on a new movie. He calls Spacey “a creature of entrances and exits,” which is just what you would have to be if you lived in a closet. But Junod also describes Spacey as someone who is “always playing,” always performing, as the one who knows that “he who keeps his secret the longest wins.”

Spacey and his supporters have read this as a not very veiled insinuation that there is a gay man hiding beneath Spacey’s straight fagade. But the curious thing is that in all his major performances — “Swimming With Sharks,” “Seven,” “The Usual Suspects” — Spacey’s fagade has been more mincing than butch. So if his outer shell and his inner self are at odds, then it’s not really clear which is which. He may be a gay man who plays straight characters whose slightly fey mannerisms are just a disguise. Or he may be a straight man who plays gay characters whose supposed heterosexuality is the real ruse. Who knows?

Junod is playing a fairly high-stakes game of hide-and-seek: Even if he doesn’t care about whether Spacey really is gay, lots of people do. And the truth is that although both Junod and Esquire editor Granger have vehemently denied that the profile makes Spacey’s sexuality “an issue,” without the metaphor of the closet the piece would have no juice. In that sense, even if the piece doesn’t out Spacey, its effectiveness arises from the possibility that it will, and that doing so would make a difference to Spacey’s career. There are, after all, still no major leading men in Hollywood who are out, nor are there even openly gay actors who regularly play straight characters. In that sense, there may be more at stake here than simply some ideal of nondisclosure.

That helps explain, at least in part, why the response to the article was so quick and ferocious. Almost as soon as the issue hit the stands, Spacey’s publicist was in the New York Times attacking Esquire and denying that Spacey had “come out” while playing a character in the film version of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” That was followed by Spacey’s public disavowal of the piece and a series of attacks on it in daily papers across the country. Reading over them, it’s hard not to envision the press-release machine that got going as soon as Spacey’s people heard the news. Of course, Esquire can’t have been too unhappy about the publicity, even if Granger’s repeated insistence that the piece is not about Spacey’s sexuality, oddly, ends up selling Junod’s rhetorical dexterity a little short.

Fittingly enough, though, the public debate over the piece has been as curious and many-sided as the profile itself. Spacey, for instance, said the article “proved that the legacy of Joseph McCarthy is alive and well,” which is a weird invocation when you consider that Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief aide, was a notorious closet case. Was he suggesting that it was Junod who has a secret? Meanwhile, the New York Post’s Page Six column reported last week that Junod’s original article had included material on Spacey’s “fun-filled nights out in steamy Savannah” and episodes of “illicit sex in his trailer on the set of ‘The Usual Suspects.’” The logical assumption was that someone at Esquire had leaked this to the Post, since it suddenly made the magazine look relatively restrained. But Junod told an Atlanta paper that the Post report was “an out-and-out lie” and that he “was not saved by a prudent editor.” But then standing by his piece only strengthens his cover story as a responsible journalist, doesn’t it?

In a way, everything that has followed “Kevin Spacey Has a Secret” has conformed to the same hall-of-mirrors logic that shapes the article. No one has denied that Spacey is gay, nor has anyone affirmed it. All anyone has really talked about is whether it’s OK to discuss an actor’s sexuality in public, but of course even those who say it isn’t find themselves doing it even in their rebuttals. One way or another, then, they have found themselves on Junod’s turf. The allure of the closet, apparently, is irresistible.

What’s remarkable about this is not that Whiting dumped the guy. That’s dismaying, but not really surprising (except for the fact that Whiting is so upfront about it) to anyone familiar with the New York dating scene. No, what’s remarkable about the story is that Whiting has elevated her insistence on being paid for into a principle. Because what, after all, could the principle really be?

Of course, there is no principle — at least no defensible one — behind Whiting’s behavior. She’s just borrowed an old custom, mixed it with a desire to live an easier life than the one she’d have to live if she paid for everything herself and come up with a slapdash ethos. And in this, Whiting might have walked right off the pages of Candace Bushnell’s new novella collection, “4 Blondes,” in which sex and commerce are inextricably linked. For Bushnell, relationships are essentially forms of trade, beauty and sex going in one direction, and wealth and the illusion of power going in the other. And no one seems to do anything in the war zone of “romance” — the word itself seems like a bad joke in the novel — without contemplating exactly what they’re going to get out of it.

The picture Bushnell paints may be bleaker than reality (though, to be fair, I may not know what I’m talking about, since I don’t own a house in Southampton, nor are B-list models trying to get me to take them to Nobu). But it’s closer to the truth than we might hope. To be single in New York right now is to live in a strange world, one where by day men and women try to interact as peers, but by night often revert to gender roles worthy of the 1950s, save for the fact that it’s OK to sleep together before you’re married. Men court; women are courted. Men make sure they provide; women make sure they’re charming and beautiful. New York in the year 2000 is the City that Feminism Forgot. Or maybe just the City that Forgot Feminism.

Of course, there are lots of exceptions to this, lots of people out there who don’t let rules about what men and women are supposed to do or be get in the way. Still, the general mood is one of confusion, a mishmash that’s equal parts “4 Blondes” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” And one way out of that confusion seems to be the solution Bushnell’s characters embrace: Men are expected to bring money and status to a relationship, women beauty and sexuality.

The curious thing is that Bushnell’s characters make this bargain so willingly. Janey could date the “poor,” sincere novelist, but prefers the rich and odious movie producer, and Cecelia could have married someone other than the Prince she’s so lukewarm about. And the obvious question is: Why did they settle? Now, Bushnell makes answering that a little complicated, since even the people who sell out don’t seem to enjoy the fruits of their mercenary ways. But even if we believe that money can’t buy happiness, it seems naive to believe that, all other things being equal, having money makes no difference at all. Janey and Cecilia may be shallow and corrupt for wanting to find a rich man to take care of them. But I think they’re right in believing that it will make a difference.

And so while Ann Marlowe suggests that money is tied to sexiness, I don’t think women’s pursuit of men with money is about sex at all. I think it’s really about money. It’s about being able to buy that dress you really want, to live in that beautiful apartment your own salary would never be able to pay for, to go out to dinner five nights a week and never once pick up a check. These are not inconsequential things, especially in New York. And in the end, it’s not actually about the things themselves. It’s about being able to be careless. It’s very difficult to live in New York and not worry about money, no matter how much you make. And the desire to be free of those worries, even if just for a little while, is an understandable one.

It’s also, in some sense, an economically rational desire. After all, whatever inroads feminism has made in the workplace, the income gap between women and men is still wide. And when it comes to relationships in New York, the real income gap — the difference between what you make and what someone you could date makes — is probably wider than ever, thanks to the flood of Wall Street money now sloshing around the city, almost all of it in the pockets of men. The life someone like Janey gets access to by dating a financier is not a life she could ever make for herself.

The problem is that you cannot acquire a bright shining life in that way and still be an adult. And in their faith that they can, these characters embody the central delusion of post-feminism — at least as it’s lived in the professional and upper classes — which is that you can be a strong, serious person while still living off someone else. But you can’t.

The really painful thing about our acceptance of female dependence as the basis for romance is that it does more than just wreak havoc on romance, though it does do that. It also makes it hard for men and women to deal with each other on an equal footing anywhere else. Independence is the prerequisite for respect. What happens at night affects what happens during the day. The more we assume that men have to take charge of women when they’re out on a date, which we do assume more now than we did a decade ago, the harder it is to let women take charge of anything anywhere else. And assuming that men are desperate for the adulation of young beautiful women makes it hard to take men seriously as well.

The point is not to implement intricate check-splitting schemes every time we go out to dinner (or, for that matter, to condemn a marriage in which the husband is the breadwinner). What I’m really talking about here is the desire to find relationships that are based on something more than exchange, and that amount to more than elaborate power plays. Let’s admit that that’s a naive desire. But if you give up on it you end up in one of two places: back in an Edith Wharton novel or else in the world of “4 Blondes.” Those are both unpretty places to be.

But framing it this way makes it sound as if it’s all just a matter of individual choice, when in fact so little in the realm of sex and custom and money comes down to that. It’s not that Bushnell’s characters, men and women, are bad, exactly. It’s just that, like Kristin Whiting, they’ve taken the worst aspects of traditional male-female relations, tossed in a hefty dose of materialism and faux careerism and thrown out the inconveniences of raising a family. (The thought of any of Bushnell’s characters — even the ones who already have children — as a mother or father inspires horror.)

What they’ve given up on — actually, what they probably never embraced — is feminism’s idea that life is made of whole cloth, and that something truly powerful could happen if men and women met as equals in the workplace, in the home and in the bedroom. That idea still strikes me as the only one worth striving for. But when I look around and ask myself whether we’re close to making it real, the only answer seems to be: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

So will people turn away when they find out they can’t sit together at a particular movie? Probably not. “We asked people about this, we tested this, and moviegoers said they wanted it,” says Howard Lichtman of Cineplex Odeon, which is working with MovieFone on the system. “It’s just like reserved seating for a concert or a play. People want to know that they’ll be able to sit together, and they like being able to call up ahead of time and get the seats they want.”

Sounds sensible enough. So why does reserved movie seating feel like yet another step in the spread of hierarchy through a democratic culture? The movies have always been the democratic medium par excellence, because they’ve been cheap enough for everyone to afford and because going to a movie is an unavoidably public experience. You can sit at home and watch television, but if you want to see a movie you have to wait on line with everyone else and sit in the midst of hundreds of others. Some part of the American mind likes the thought that if Bill Gates wants to see “The Jackal” on a big screen, he has to see it the way we all do.

European countries generally feature reserved seating (which might be thought of as a good reason not to adopt it). That’s true even in Eastern Europe, although, as one writer put it, in Poland the attitude seems to be: “Sit in your own seat unless, of course, you fancy someone else’s seat or it’s dark and you can’t find your own.” Moviegoing in Europe is, however, a much bigger deal than it is in the U.S. The less common and casual an experience is, the more likely people are to tolerate elaborate planning processes. But with the possible exception of India, there’s no country in the world where people go to the movies as much as Americans do, and the ease with which we go to the movies is part of what makes reserved seating feel so unnatural.

Anyway, Americans have already tried and rejected reserved movie seating. Film historian Thomas Schatz, author of “The Genius of the System,” points out that so-called prestige films were shown in large theaters on a reserved seating basis in the 1930s and that David O. Selznick made the practice work on a big scale with his roadshow presentation of “Gone With the Wind.” In its first run, “Gone With the Wind” played only in theaters with more than 800 seats, and tickets were sold on a reserved-seating basis. The film played like that for almost a year before making its way into general release. Hollywood continued to pursue that strategy during the early 1940s — because, Schatz suggests, the revving up of the U.S. war machine brought workers flooding into the cities with money in their pockets and little to spend it on because of rationing.

Selznick tried to duplicate his “GWTW” success with the preposterous Western “Duel in the Sun,” which flopped, but the birth of Cinerama gave the roadshow new life in the 1950s and into the 1960s. Big films, often musicals like “My Fair Lady,” “Hello Dolly” and “Paint Your Wagon,” all played movie palaces on a roadshow basis, but by that time those palaces — of which the Ziegfeld is a glorious remnant — were on their way out. “You have to remember, this was all before the multiplex,” Schatz says. “The transformation of moviegoing and movie exhibition has been so profound in the last three decades, and that’s been largely a function of two things: suburban migration — since the movie business has always done its best business in the cities — and the rise of television.” As the number of moviegoers shrank, and as the number of choices at any one theater complex expanded, the kind of buzz that makes reserved seating seem necessary or even essential disappeared.

When you’re trying to buy tickets to the 9:45 showing of “Amistad” on a Friday night, the fact that only a fifth as many Americans go to the movies today as did during the 1930s is hardly going to be any consolation. But in most places in America, if you don’t get in to “Amistad” you’ll be able to go to “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” “The Rainmaker,” “Starship Troopers” or even “Boogie Nights,” and the difference probably won’t matter that much. Schatz says that as many as 20 to 30 percent of the movies that get seen are movies that people didn’t plan to see. So, while reserved seating might fly in New York — especially at places like the Ziegfeld, which are so big that where you sit really does affect your moviegoing experience — it might not be all that well suited to the multiplex. It’s not something the company has to worry about now, since we don’t have MovieFone in the suburbs yet.

But Lichtman of Cineplex Odion thinks reserved seating will fly anywhere. “It’ll work anywhere where people go to the movies on a Saturday night and can’t get in to the movie they want to see,” he says. Omaha, here we come.

Notorious does have photo spreads that feature men and women who seem vaguely connected. This is a real departure from typical fashion spreads, in which the representative of the minority gender (men in women’s magazines, women in men’s magazines) ends up looking more like an accessory than a person. Notorious also supplies a list of stretching exercises you can do with your “mate” and a piece on starting a business with your “spouse or lover.” And the magazine has the admirable desire to be something men and women can both use.

Unfortunately, that’s about the entire list of ways in which Notorious actually differs from other magazines in its treatment of sex, relationships and the problem of gender. (Well, there is an interview with a couple — Eva and Tico again — that seems vaguely novel, but the interview centers mainly on how he’s such a man and she’s such a woman, so it can hardly be said to break new ground.) Indeed the men in this magazine are guys, meaning they mainly hang out with other guys, go to Havana to check out the chicks at the Tropicana, sit around in their underwear and talk to other guys about where to meet women. Notorious’ women, meanwhile, loll around in bright red bustiers, talk about their bed sheets and read Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.” For a magazine that’s supposed to be about men and women together, Notorious spends an awful lot of time pushing them apart.

Bafflingly, the magazine features a series of top 10 lists “by the sexes.” This section provides plenty of disturbing information — men’s top three Web sites, for instance, are all X-rated, while women’s top site is Disney.com — and plenty of unbelievable information: Men’s third-favorite video is “The Mirror Has Two Faces”? Women’s third-favorite video is “The Mirror Has Two Faces”? But its mere existence erodes Notorious’ claim to be something different. I know people love lists, but wouldn’t a section dividing people according to “single vs. couple,” “married vs. living-together,” “no-children vs. children” have been more in line with the magazine’s editorial mission? To say nothing of the fact that we might actually have learned something interesting, as opposed to being told, once again, that men like “nasty teenage goddesses.”

Notorious’ two round-table discussions about sex — one all male, the other all female — are even weirder. How segregated round-tables are supposed to offer a more complicated or nuanced understanding of what relationships mean today is a little hard to understand. We’ve all read way, way too many of these discussions — even if only in doctors’ offices — to expect that yet another one will shock us with its sudden insights into the human condition. Even the most devout believer in the ineradicability of gender differences would have to admit that men (and women) are going to say different things about sex if they’re called upon to answer “what men want” and “what women want” as opposed to “what couples want” or “what single people want.” It’s probably true that all round-table discussions about sex end up sounding like outtakes from “The Real World,” but at least “The Real World” featured boys and girls talking with each other — not just among themselves.

Notorious isn’t really a magazine for “women and men” so much as it is a magazine for women and a magazine for men squooshed together. This is especially disappointing since glossy magazines almost all accentuate their identities as either men’s or women’s publications, leaving a real opportunity for a magazine interested in border-crossing. Straight men and women, after all, sleep with each other and spend much of their time worrying about how to be happy with each other, but for some reason they all read magazines that institutionalize their distance from each other.

The problem, of course, is that gender conventions play such a huge role in shaping our expectations of what romance and relationships should be. A magazine that took seriously the idea that other factors might be more important to our sex lives than gender would run the risk of appearing (a) incomprehensible or (b) thoroughly unsexy. Notorious most certainly does not want to be either of the two, and who can blame it? Still, there’s a lot of terrain between Cosmopolitan on the one hand and the radical gender theorist Judith Butler on the other, and it doesn’t seem like too much to insist that a magazine dedicated to women and men should try to explore the similarities between women and men as much as the differences.

A magazine that wanted to be about real relationships could generate a lot of copy out of the central paradox of heterosexual romantic love: It’s built on the idea that men and women are basically different but creates a situation in which a man and a woman feel much more like each other than like anyone of their own gender. “I am Heathcliff,” Catherine says in “Wuthering Heights,” suggesting that she and her lover have far more in common than she could ever have with other women. That’s a truth that doesn’t conform very well to a world of top 10 lists “by the sexes.” Needless to say, it’s also a truth that never gets expressed in Notorious.

As Art Cooper has done at GQ, both Caruso at Details and David Granger at Esquire are looking to make sports coverage as important to their editorial visions as it is to most men’s lives. “Sports is this really cool, exciting thing,” Caruso says. “It’s the place where a lot of what’s really interesting is taking place. It makes complete sense to me to integrate this into [Details].”

Caruso’s interest in sports stems not only from his own personal appetites — he left Vanity Fair to start a national sports magazine that would have been a competitor to Sports Illustrated — but also from his need to reinvent Details. James Truman’s recent pronouncement that “Downtown is dead” signaled the end of Details’ focus on downtown club kids and those who wanted to be just like them. And Caruso, clearly, intends to skew the magazine to appeal to older, more mainstream readers. It’s never said in so many words, but Caruso’s Details will undoubtedly be a straighter magazine than it was under former editor Joe Dolce. (Check out the young lingerie-clad TV actresses who decorate the October cover for corroborating evidence.)

Just as telling, though, is the October feature on Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Kordell Stewart, “The Athlete Formerly Known as Slash.” Stewart embodies Caruso’s vision of sports in the revamped Details: He’s young, edgy and urban, and he’s mainstream, masculine and far removed from clubland. Caruso’s betting that figures like Stewart will keep him, and Details, ahead of the curve. “There’s been this explosion in sports,” Caruso says. “It’s a whole culture. It’s fashion, it’s crime, it’s big business. There’s all this excitement about sports, and right now, you get more of that in Nike billboards and Reebok commercials than you do in magazines.”

Caruso isn’t the only one looking to capitalize on that buzz. The arresting photo of Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre and Tennessee godling Peyton Manning on the cover of the Sept. Esquire seemed to signal that magazine’s re-entry into the sports arena. New editor David Granger, who jumped from GQ to Esquire, has a long-standing interest in sports journalism, and all indications are that he plans to continue developing that interest at Esquire. His first issue included an excerpt from Favre’s new book, a welcome piece on Vince Lombardi, and a Charles Pierce cover story titled, “Does Football Still Matter?”

Before Granger’s arrival, Esquire readers would have to have answered “No” to that question. Under Ed Kosner, the magazine’s sports coverage was confined to Mike Lupica’s columns — which tended to read like extended versions of his Daily News pieces — and the occasional one-shot, including David Foster Wallace’s memorable 1996 essay on tennis player Patrick Joyce. In his inimitable, footnote-dropping manner, Wallace pointed the way toward a kind of sports writing that was both informative — you learned more about pro tennis from that piece than from ten John Feinstein columns — and stylistically dazzling. In the context of Esquire as a whole, the piece seemed a miraculous anomaly.

Esquire fancies itself far more of a literary magazine than GQ or even Vanity Fair; this may have contributed to the short shrift given sports writing. “There was almost a sense that sports were beneath [Esquire]” says Art Cooper, GQ’s editor-in-chief and Granger’s former boss. “This is what Granger has to deal with … we’ll have to see what they do over there.”

GQ, of course, has always put athletes on its cover, so Cooper speaks from a position of some authority. In fact, the changes afoot at Details and Esquire are hard to imagine apart from GQ’s successful attempt to prove that sports can be fashionable. “It’s always been a staple here,” says Cooper. “Some of our bestselling covers were sports figures. Dan Marino, Andre Agassi, these were some of our most popular issues. So I don’t think sports are suddenly hot. Sports have always been popular with men.”

While Cooper has always known that sports sells, he cautions that it’s dangerous to believe that putting an athlete on the cover of a men’s magazine guarantees big sales. Baseball, he insists, has yet to come back — GQ’s Ken Griffey issue sold very poorly, as did its Barry Bonds issue. Even with the eminently popular football and basketball, you have to pick the right athlete. And don’t even think about hockey.

Meanwhile, it’s not clear there’s an untapped market of sports fans who have been waiting for an excuse to start reading Esquire or Details. The best thing about the expanded sports coverage in men’s magazines may not be its impact on circulation, but the fact that it will align these magazines more closely with the interests of their readers.

It will be interesting to see whether stepping up sports coverage has any impact on the kind of writing these magazines produce. Big sports figures are, if anything, even more difficult about access than movie stars, which means that profiles of them tend not to be as in-depth as you might like. It’s probably no coincidence that the two most interesting sports pieces of 1996 — Wallace’s essay on Joyce and Tom Junod’s absolutely brilliant GQ piece “Tom Osborne is God” — were not celebrity profiles so much as off-center looks at the peculiar obsessiveness that sports breeds. Still, the hope has to be that Esquire’s and Details’ rediscovery of sports will change these magazines in important ways. And then someday locker-room chatter will consist of, “Did you hear who’s going to be on the cover of Details next month? Damn!”

Scanned, of course, and not “read,” because most of those pages are ads, most of which in turn are fine examples of the late-1990s passion for a world that’s almost decadently wealthy but that somehow seems to have at least one foot on the ground. And of those pages that are not ads — I believe they’re called “edit pages” — I wasn’t really able to make my way through all of the words on them. I tried, but the piece on getting rid of “unsightly spider veins” vanquished me (and yes, it’s probably true that if the piece had been about amazing abs I would have devoured it in a second), and twice I became confused when articles were interrupted by eight pages of advertisements before continuing on the other side. No one has that kind of concentration.

But then, even though the writing in Vogue is often quite pointed and clever, and even though scattered throughout this issue there are a number of pieces that are worth actually reading, the articles are in some sense beside the point. (In that way, it’s like Playboy, only more so.)

For others who hazard a flip though Vogue’s 730 pages, I’ve assembled here what you might call a concordance — though the phrase “haphazard collection of random notes” also leaps to mind — to Vogue’s September 1997 issue. On second thought, this resembles a guide to “Finnegans Wake” less than it does the Harper’s Index ™. Think of it as an attempt to bring some order to, to discern some pattern in, the flood of images with which we have been blessed. Or don’t. Herewith,

VOGUE FOR BEGINNERS:

Dollar value of clothes in the various fashion spreads: $412,504. That total doesn’t include shoes, nor does it include the $35,000 Louis Vuitton trunk, but it does include the items featured in the back pages, including a $4,050 Prada handbag and a $9,500 pair of Ralph Lauren boots that catapulted the total over four bills.

Pages featuring women with thick red stripes over their eyes: 17. I hope this is not a trend.

Fashion pages featuring red-headed models: 19. This was a difficult count to make, because of the fine line between strawberry blonde and blonde, but the general trend is what really matters. Redheads now inhabit the place of grace.

Fashion pages featuring models who smile: 25. I’ve always thought of high fashion as the home of severe looks and weighty sexuality, but the women in Vogue’s pages are happy. They’re not just smiling. In many of these photos they’re laughing. There’s something very sweet about it, actually.

Conclusions to be drawn from the Ralph Lauren Collection spread: Three. They are: Steel is in. Shoes that cover the entire fronts of one’s feet while leaving the backs open look odd. And WASPs still don’t smile.

Percentage of design houses which bear Italian names: Much larger than the percentage of people in the world who bear Italian names.

Lingerie ads: Three. Not surprising, really, that there are so few. Underwear is something that people actually buy, while one looks at the ads in Vogue not to figure out what to purchase, but to imbibe a certain sensibility about what counts as fashionable.

Pictures of Princess Di: Two. Very strange to look at the picture of someone who was alive when the magazine was printed.

Ad pages featuring Christy Turlington: 16. Two days before I saw the issue, I asked a friend of mine if Christy had lost supermodel status, because I hadn’t noticed her around much anymore. But she’s everywhere in the September Vogue. On the other hand, she doesn’t appear in any of the fashion spreads. Go figure.

Obvious questions this issue raises but does not answer: Why is Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece hanging out with Yasmine Bleeth of “Baywatch”? What does this sentence about Paul Rudnick’s charming love-in with Shalom mean: “[W]ill better half Amber Valletta be left behind?” Is Amber Rudnick’s better half or Shalom’s? How can a hair colorist afford an eight-page spread in the middle of the magazine? Carri Otis is still alive?

Woman I’m apparently supposed to know but don’t: Kim Delaney. She’s in an ad for Ultima II, staring intently at me, with “Kim Delaney” below her face as if it the name should mean something. Is she a new “Friends” girl?

Unanticipated coup: The overthrow of the Tommy Hilfiger girl — you know, the one with the narrow face and cute teeth — by a new, even blonder model. The first girl appears early on in the magazine, but the new girl gets four pages all to herself, wearing a cardigan letter sweater, no less.

Most unexpected resurrection: Celine as a designer. “‘Death on the Installment Plan’ and my anti-Semitic harangues were as nothing compared to THIS, my latest creation!”

Strangest name for a piece of clothing: ZCMI’s “Long Manchurian Candidate coat.” And here we have the perfect coat for those nights when you just can’t figure out what to wear to an assassination. I would have thought that marketers generally try to stay away from a too-explicit association with brainwashing.

Model who most reminds me of a bright yellow taxi cab on a rainy Saturday night: The woman in the ad for Andrew Marc. I don’t know what Andrew Marc makes. Nor do I care.

Worst ad: Misty cigarettes. When you think about it, in fact, just about all cigarette ads targeted at women are poorly photographed and garishly colored. Although it will be difficult to do if the tobacco deal is ratified, the ad agency that produced the equivalent of the Marlboro Country campaign would strike a gold mine.

Best ad: The killer eight-page Gucci spread, unquestionably. It looks like it was shot in Super-8, with the colors bleeding into each other, and flesh everywhere. Elsewhere in the magazine, Tom Ford says “Nineties sexiness is hard, violent,” and the pictures are fittingly jagged. Herb Ritts’ nine-page spread for Nine West, on the other hand, is singularly dull. The best single picture in the magazine is for J.P. Tod’s footwear, and is labeled simply “London interior: 1997.”

Smallest surprise: In Bruce Weber’s spread on evening wear, the one really memorable photograph features buff boys wearing mud-stained Polo T-shirts and sweats.

Most depressing sentence: “As the hoi polloi out in the stadium listened to Rage Against the Machine, U2′s opening act, the limousine crowd stood around sipping bottled water, feeling special, and quietly taking note of one another.” Well I’m rolling down Rodeo with a shotgun/These people ain’t seen a brown-skinned man since their grandparents bought one. Or something like that.

Best pieces: Wayne Koestenbaum’s short essay on the photographer John Deakin, who took jarringly ugly portraits of the famous, is a nice marriage of author and subject. There’s a terrific two-page spread of photos from Robert Rauschenberg’s life. And Anna Wintour’s eulogy for Gianni Versace is graceful and moving.

But enough. The September issue of Vogue is, of course, like most other fashion magazines. It’s just more so. What becomes clear after wading through it, though, is the way in which Vogue is able to bring high culture into the mainstream without dumbing it down. In publishing, film, art, even music, the best and most provocative work has a hard time finding a large audience. Yet every month Vogue brings precisely that kind of work in fashion to millions of readers. You don’t read the most sophisticated and difficult writers in Vanity Fair or even the New York Review of Books. But you do see the work of the most sophisticated and difficult designers in Vogue.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the millions are falling in love with Rei Kawakubo’s latest creations. But the fact that the millions are being shown those creations is important, and it explains why Vogue ultimately seems serious about fashion in a way that most magazines are not serious about whatever they’re covering. Save perhaps for its choice of photographers — do we really need another Bruce Weber or Steven Meisel shoot? — Vogue brings to its subject an intensely honed sense of taste that’s rare in the magazine world. In a strange way, it does not talk down to its readers, and in doing so suggests that, in the world of fashion at least, highbrow and popular are not antithetical terms.