Of course, one expects to see Prada in Bazaar. And $650 "adolescent" khakis on Lauren Hutton, and models in gorgeous ice-blue lipstick that you will never wear to work and probably not even to a club, and really quirky examples of modern furniture design, and all sorts of other lifestyle accouterments that one can appreciate as art, if not actual acquisition. But this is a world pretty devoid of social content, and Betts' attempts to superimpose social meaning without social content merely flattens relationships, cash and fashion into a lovely, expensive but inscrutable montage.

In one of the most astonishing segments of the magazine, mom Laura Aldridge offers career advice as she passes around photographs of the members of Limp Bizkit "nuzzling" her 14-year-old daughter Lily, who appeared in their video "Break Stuff." Lily, described here as a "baby Catherine Zeta-Jones," didn't want to be a model until Laura gave her some motherly advice: "I said, 'Lily, girl, let's talk: Life is hard. You have to take every opportunity you can.' I was a Playboy playmate."

In a feature on pushy stage moms, or girls growing up too fast, or moms who ask their children to support themselves before the legal working age, this could be an insightful quote. But here it is frightening, wedged next to other surreal, chirpy bons mots, including one from a mother wearing "leather pants and a black studded Harley Davidson jacket" who says, "I think kids need boundaries. But you can't create boundaries in fashion anymore."

I don't mind knowing where to buy leather pants, or even being a mother in leather pants myself. But reading that knowing where to buy the right leather pants has some pivotal connection to my ability to love my daughter just pisses me off. In Betts' world -- one where she says she loves Missoni "not only because I love their signature striped knitwear but because I remember my grandmother talking about Missoni as a child" -- shopping and consuming are ways of demonstrating affection.

I was never a devotee of tough love, but somehow the concept of stuff love is deeply depressing.

But what does one expect from a parallel universe? After all, this comes from the same editor who admits, in her editor's note to the December issue, that in order to balance family and career, she tried to take her 12-week-old baby to the runway shows in Paris and Milan, Italy, but was stopped when she realized that children traveling overseas need a, uh, passport. She did the only sensible thing: She left her baby at the airport. (Her husband brought him to Milan a few days later, just in time for the baby to see his first supermodel, Amber Valletta.)

"Most of the way across the Atlantic," muses Betts, "I wondered how millions of American women manage the difficult balance of motherhood and work."

Best not to find out, Kate. The wardrobe is outré and the entourage cannot be carefully selected. But if you will, tell us where to buy spit-up-proof Dior.