That’s where Kenneth Cole now comes in. The clothing designer has just launched a new crusade to tie his expensive clothing and shoes line to the elite’s movement du jour: the fight to demonize public schoolteachers and their unions. In a billboard and Web-based campaign, Cole’s foundation portrays the national debate over education as one that supposedly pits “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights.”

“Should underperforming teachers be protected?” asks the foundation’s website.

When asked about the campaign, one of Cole’s spokeswomen insisted the company isn’t trying to insult teachers or unions, saying, “It’s something in the news and being debated, and we wanted to provide a forum where people could discuss it as well.” But with the company using the same loaded language as the conservative political activists trying to undermine public education and teachers’ unions, the corporate P.R.-speak is, to say the least, unconvincing.

No, Cole’s campaign is thinly veiled ideological propaganda, and it comes with myriad problems, not the least of which is the simple fact that almost nobody believes “underperforming teachers” should be protected. That includes the nation’s biggest teachers’ unions, which have been outspoken in backing “accountability” reforms for teacher tenure. So right off the bat, Cole is constructing a straw man, one that has served over the years to pretend that public employee unions in general and teachers’ unions specifically are about nothing more than making sure bad employees get to keep their jobs.

Of course, there is a legitimate debate among state lawmakers and school boards about how to determine what an “underperforming teacher” is. Should a teacher be considered subpar if her students perform poorly on standardized tests? Should any teacher-to-teacher peer review be included in performance evaluations? And should any factors other than tests and grades — say, student poverty levels — be considered when using student achievement to judge a particular teacher?

As evidenced by the language of his new campaign, Cole, like the anti-union activists in the larger corporate-sponsored education “reform” movement, doesn’t want those questions asked, much less answered, for pondering them raises the very queries about power and wealth that Cole’s fellow 1 percenters don’t want to discuss.

For instance, actually taking an honest look at America’s education system brings up queries about why other less economically stratified nations have unionized teachers and far better academic results than here in America. It also forces us to ask why it just so happens that wealthy unionized districts in America do so well — but poorer districts have such problems. All of that consequently compels us to consider issues like poverty and funding disparities between rich and poor districts — issues that inherently threaten the status quo, and thus the interests of the super-wealthy. And so under the veneer of the term “reform” and with the backing of seemingly altruistic philanthropy via foundations like Cole’s, the super-wealthy work to avoid substance and instead define the education policy discourse on reductionist slogans like “underperforming teachers.”

Perhaps the biggest problem with Cole’s campaign, though, is how it forwards the “us-versus-them” notion that teachers’ rights to due process in the workplace are automatically at odds with their students’ interests. This so fundamentally misunderstands how education works that it perfectly underscores why a clothing corporation doesn’t have much credibility on education issues.

Think about it: We need our best teachers to work in the public schools that educate the most at-risk populations. Why? Because with decades of social science research proving that achievement is driven mostly by out-of-classroom factors (poverty, family dysfunction, etc.), those are the schools that need the most skilled pedagogues to overcome comparatively difficult odds for success. But why would a good teacher opt to work in such a school without basic protections — protections designed to make sure the at-risk population’s achievement-suppressing disadvantages aren’t used as a rationale to fire her? She probably wouldn’t.

In this way, “Teachers’ Rights vs. Students’ Rights” is the mirror opposite of how things actually work. Without extending teachers’ rights to, say, be evaluated fairly or to challenge a termination, it would be difficult — if not impossible — for public schools to recruit the best teachers to the specific at-risk schools that need them the most.

Most likely, these inconvenient truths are of little concern to someone like Kenneth Cole. According to Gotham Schools, he sends his kids to private school, making him part of the larger trend of elites who are trying to foist radical policies onto public schools, knowing their own kin won’t be hurt by those policies.

But, you ask, wouldn’t a clothing mogul with no kids in public school be averse to a divisive crusade against teachers, if only to circumvent a controversy? Even if he is a political activist, wouldn’t he refrain from such a campaign for fear of losing customers?

These are fair questions, and they highlight how Cole’s campaign may say something hugely important — and troubling — about the long-term future of education politics in America.

Recall that Cole is in a zeitgeist industry that is all about lashing branded chic to the popular fad of the moment. That means his move probably reflects what he believes to be an ascendant cause célèbre — one that he thinks he isn’t joining in spite of his company, but in support of its profit-making objectives. Put another way, he probably believes he will gain customers if he ties his company to anti-teacher, anti-union themes.

Sure, that gamble could be wrong — and I hope it is. I hope America sees just how wrongheaded and ideologically extreme the crusade against public schools, teachers and unions is.

But as a successful mogul, Cole’s clearly got skill as a cultural seer; and if someone like him sees mass profit potential in not-so-subtly bashing teachers and unions, it’s a scary sign that such unhinged anti-teacher sentiment could be going more mainstream than ever.

Update: After a mass outcry from teachers, Kenneth Cole announced on Twitter Monday that it is removing the billboard. In its statement, the company said “We misrepresented the issue – one too complex for a billboard – and are taking it down.” It has also taken down the campaign on the accompanying website.

Preppies are most basically those people who don’t mind being associated with elite schools and the professions those schools feed into: banking, teaching, government (and one might add sailing instruction and magazine fact-checking). By virtue of the clothes they wear, they express their comfort being associated with a certain kind of cultural prerogative — one that is particularly suspect right now, in the era of foreclosures and Occupy Wall Street.

Stillman’s movies, from “Metropolitan” to “Damsels,” illustrate bigger ideas about the way preppiness is understood and misunderstood by Americans.

Like members of other subcultures, including Deadheads or Goths or English soccer hooligans, real preppies are at least willing to proclaim allegiances. Some of those allegiances are parochial, and might be represented by, say, a college scarf, while others are broader. But Stillman’s characters exist out of time and out of context. They may talk about politics (a bit), and may worry about how the lower classes perceive them, but they ultimately have almost nothing to say about, or even to do with, the institutions that form preppies: the universities, the banks, the government, even the yachting club. They’re all dressed up with no place to go.

Of course, thinking of Stillman as a preppy filmmaker is an understandable mistake. He is heavily responsible for his own inclusion in the pantheon of prep chroniclers, from J.D. Salinger to Louis Auchincloss, and Lisa Birnbach. His 1990 debut, “Metropolitan,” was the first movie to treat prep culture with a discerning eye after a decade that, despite the rise of Polo and other preppy brands, saw movie preps only as douffi (the plural of “doofus,” according to “Damsels in Distress”). I am thinking here of the Robert Prescott characters in “Real Genius” and “Bachelor Party,” or the golf-club villains in “Caddyshack.”

But “Metropolitan” was a shrewd movie about New York City private-school alumni on winter break from preppy colleges. It’s a movie whose plot hinges on a character’s decision to purchase at A.T. Harris the tuxedo he had been renting — after admitting to himself that if he’s to attend more debutante balls, he realizes he needs better threads — but that same character can have a thoughtful, if pretentious, discussion about Fourier. And Stillman, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, has the wit to give his characters names just a rep stripe away from caricature: “Tom Townsend,” “Serena Slocum,” “Rick von Sloneker.”

As if to further identify himself with prepdom, Stillman has always carried himself as a possible model for his characters. To this day, he meets reporters at the Harvard Club, and even when he is some miles away he still looks “like a wayward preppy trying to get into the Harvard Club” — a look, the New York Times Magazine recently noted, that involves “khakis, a white shirt and a blue blazer.” Stillman did, in fact, attend Harvard, which means that he could get into the Harvard Club, and if he had not attended Harvard he ought to have, being named John Whitney Stillman and all.

That willingness to dress a certain way — even when it might get you attacked by punks, as in “Last Days of Disco,” or called a fascist, as in 1994’s “Barcelona” — is a meaningful tenet of prepdom. But the clothes are not just an aesthetic choice. After all, it’s the rare preppy who does not know that she is wearing a uniform that, if not actually identical with an elite — anyone with a little money can buy the clothes — signals an aspiration toward elite society. To wear clothes made popular by the Ivy League is to announce an affirming attitude toward the Ivy League. That may not be a popular stance to take right now. For good reason, our country’s financial elite is under attack, and the schools that breed that elite deserve some of the opprobrium.

But preppy clothes have been the uniform of other products of the university, too, not just the bankers. Who loves a tweed jacket more than a humanities professor? And who loved a sack suit more than the elegant political radicals of the early 1960s? Take Malcolm X: For him, conservative attire was not ironic but proprietary. His clothes announced that he, and the Negro more generally, was entitled to the uniform and the prerogatives of power. Preppiness, in other words, is not inherently reactionary, and it is not inherently exclusionary; indeed, in a sense it is very democratic, precisely because one only needs the clothes, not a family crest. But it is not demotic; it is elitist. It is concerned with access to hierarchies, not the abolition of them. There have been left-wing preppies, but there have rarely been populist preppies.

In Stillman’s movies, however, preppiness almost never carries this complicated, interesting philosophical baggage. There are movies far less accomplished that nevertheless have more to say about the contradictions of prepdom. “School Ties” examines the anti-Semitism that used to pervade prep schools; “Igby Goes Down,” the nihilism and dysfunction of Manhattan private-school culture; “Dead Poets Society,” intellectual conformity; “Love Story,” the class chasm on Ivy League campuses. “The Rector of Justin,” the 1964 book by the dean of preppy novelists, Louis Auchincloss, depicts a rotten ethical core at the heart of a Groton-like boarding school. These works vary in quality, but they at least treat prepdom as the site of interesting, and often timely, dilemmas. They feature preppy clothes aplenty, for authenticity and because the clothes are beautiful to look at. But the clothes are just the superficial signifier of preppiness; the movies are about much more.

Stillman uses preppy clothes for an entirely different purpose.The clothes round out his characters, give the audience shorthand for what kind of families the characters come from, but above all take them out of time. For Stillman, preppy clothing is not a way to evoke, say, a Kennedy-era boarding school, but rather a way to defeat dating altogether. In short, if you wanted to make a fantasy movie set in some unidentifiable period of postwar America, you could use certain articles from Brooks Brothers and J. Press. And, indeed, that is what Stillman, who is not a realist or ethnographer but a fairy-tale fantasist, has done.

Consider “Metropolitan.” A screen card at the beginning says that it is set “not so long ago.” The characters seem to have late-20th-century diction — they don’t have the quasi-Brahmin speech patterns that persisted in the Ivy League into the 1960s (see the young John Kerry here) — but the yellow cabs are of an earlier vintage. The lapels on the men’s jackets are neither early-1960s narrow nor late-1970s wide. But the cut and the shoulders are not from the 1980s. Like the women’s gowns, the men’s dinner jackets are, in fact, designed to straddle all eras while beholden to none. It turns out that there are few styles harder to date accurately than the clothing appropriate for a debutante ball, or the preppy casual clothes one relaxes in afterward. The mystification of time continues in “The Last Days of Disco,” which according to the screen in the beginning occurs “in the very early 1980s,” but shows footage of the Disco Demolition Night held at Comiskey Park in July 1979.

In all Stillman’s movies, there is no racial or religious tension, no class envy, no religious bigotry. Stillman’s world even lacks many of the interlopers who have kept prep schools and elite colleges vital and meritocratic (and fashion-conscious): There are no obviously Jewish characters in Stillman’s movies, no Asian Americans, only one black character who so much as gets a name, and no gay men or lesbians.

There is nothing wrong with Stillman’s World, this alternate reality in which conversation is snappy, the young men and women are all attractive, and their clothes are tailored awfully well. There are times when I would not mind living there. But that’s because it’s a Utopia, literally a nowhere — it does not exist, it cannot exist. That the resident characters wear certain clothes we associate with certain schools, certain professions, certain vacation spots and certain stores does not mean that these characters are like the real-world people found in those schools, work professions, vacation spots or stores. Whit Stillman characters are not preppies; they just dress like them.

But more than ever, what is true of Stillman’s characters may be true of anyone wearing preppy clothing in America today: He is not exactly a preppy. It’s not that he lacks money or schooling — after all, the majority of preppies were always aspirational, rather than bred. It’s that the statement he is making has nothing to do with elite institutions or power. In fact, preppiness today is a way to avoid those conversations.

To wear such timeless clothing in 2012 is a bit like wearing very preppy clothing in 1970, when Whit Stillman was in college. Outside the haberdasher’s doors, there is warfare, recession and class anger; but on one’s back there are the clothes of another era, indeed clothes that transcend all eras. In a time of tumult, preppy clothing is escapist. It does not imply that its wearer is a conservative or a 1-percenter or opposes birth control for women. But it does suggest that, at least for the moment, he would rather talk about something else — as if it were a few years ago, or a few years from now. As if talking about something else were ever really possible.

The hoodie is not the most vilified garment in American history — that can be gauged by the fact that no member of Congress has shown up to work in a burqa, along the lines of U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush’s hoodie stunt last Wednesday. In the past century, the lineup of suspicious clothing has included trench coats, jeans and stiletto heels. And they are all presumed innocent until proven guilty.

View the slide show

When you find out he is a man, does he become less beautiful? If so, does that challenge your thinking about beauty?

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2012.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

Jason Wu is the young, impeccably elegant designer whose career went into the stratosphere when high-profile Michelle Obama chose his dreamy, one-shouldered creation for her husband’s inaugural ball in 2009. His preppy-with-an-edge ready-to-wear designs retail at high-end stores like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom for upward of a thousand bucks a pop. So from the moment Target – which has in the past done wildly successful collaborations with the likes of Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and Rodarte — announced that it was teaming up with Wu for a February launch, the slavering began. And when Target released a preview teaser of zippy little navy and cream ensembles, we all pretty much knew: There would be blood.

Sure enough, there was. Across the land, you could hear the cries of disappointment as the entire collection was snapped up before most of America had brewed its Sunday morning coffee. In some quarters, it got downright ugly. In Miami, a couple cleaned out the entire line “in two minutes.” Store security was called to intervene, the mob turned angry, and one of the Wu vultures allegedly taunted the other shoppers by saying they could “buy it off him outside.”

I’m a fan of Wu’s cool, ladylike and eminently wearable designs, and, as it happens, live near a Target. And because I usually swing by the superstore after my Sunday morning run anyway, I figured this weekend would afford an opportunity to at least check out the Wu wares. I assumed it wouldn’t be crazy there, because believe me when I say that the Bronx Target, conveniently located near the Applebee’s and that guy selling incense on a card table, is not exactly the fashionista Mecca of Miami.

It was not yet 10 in the morning on the line’s launch day when I entered the store. What I found was a scene of devastation unlike anything I’d since, oh, Filene’s Going Out of Business sale in December. The entire accessory line of cute purses and scarves was nowhere to be found. And the handful of racks that had held the promise of cap-sleeved blouses and pleated skirts was picked as clean as a cow carcass in piranha-infested waters. The real pros had likely cleared off moments after the store opened at 8. But around the racks, there still hovered a group of what appeared to be three teams of shoppers, who, by the random assortment of wares in their carts, were not there to beef up their own wardrobes. What was left? One XL trench coat. One XL gold peplum top. One L short-sleeved tee. Over in the children’s department, I noticed that someone had squirreled away a cream-colored shirt in a medium. I felt a momentary impulse to snatch it up like a gold nugget in a stream before remembering that it wasn’t really my style.

It was a scene being replayed in Targets all over the country, where the line swiftly disappeared — only to reappear soon after on eBay. There are currently well over 11,000 Jason Wu for Target items up for auction – most promising “NWT” (new with tags) — and selling at considerable markup. A $39 poplin dress is going for $180. A purse that was $49 is selling for $280. Free enterprise in action.

Designer collaborations with low-priced chain stores – and the frenzies that accompany them — are nothing new, as those of us who still wake up screaming from the flashbacks of the Lagerfeld for H&M stampede back in 2004 will attest. And they will no doubt continue — though Target imposed limits on how many items customers could order online, it set no such restrictions on what went down in the stores. Company spokesman Joshua Thomas told the Wall Street Journal this week “the company was ‘disappointed’ there was so much hoarding.” EBay put it in more calculating terms, noting that “this week the marketplace … reflected the public’s enthusiasm.

It may be “disappointing” that a handful of eBay-savvy pros can change how an entire line of clothing is distributed to the masses. But just because a designer goes down-market at the same place you buy your economy-size bags of cat litter, it doesn’t make the world of fashion any more inherently fair or democratic. If it were, designers wouldn’t be creating clothes with size 0 teenagers in mind. It’s just how it is. And so I left Target Sunday morning with dishwashing liquid but no new dresses. I didn’t mind. I’ve got my sights on spring’s new Marni for H&M line anyway.