Thinking about possible outfits during breakfast makes me break into a light sweat; a good half of the anxiety is over the fact that I feel anxious at all about something so completely trivial. I understand that many things in the ’90s have grown needlessly complicated or have been deconstructed beyond recognition: the shape of racism, political intent, soul music, communications technology. But why render incomprehensible something so socially insignificant as choosing my shoes?

My problem is that I don’t know how I want to look. Part of this concern is a function of age. I’m 36 and wonder, a little uneasily, how many more good miniskirt years I have left. Part of it is the utter devaluation of clothes as a measure of years, or taste, or style, or individuality. What, after all, does a 36-year-old woman dress like? More to the point, what does it mean to be 36, or any age, as far as a suit’s concerned? As markers of meaning vanish almost daily, it is perfectly ironic, and perfectly befitting this age of Orwellian logic, that we expect the slightest of things to provide us with a connection to the deepest. Not that it’s impossible — but fashion has been recycled and fragmented so many times over the seasons it’s lost its sense of adventure. Once the signifiers of everything from social status to political ideology, clothes are now side players to our overwhelming postmodern, pre-millennium angst; they make us nothing anymore except dressed. We have more retail options than ever now — from Gap to Barney’s to Gucci outlets — but that only seems to have diffused the power of fashion and further sapped it of its meaning. A million channels on TV and nothing’s on.

I don’t admit this to too many people, but I once set my fashion compass point to Madonna (the older, cheeky one, not the inner-peace guru of late). No offense to baby Lourdes, but I’ve been Madonna’s child for the last 10 years or so. The high priestess of presto-chango appealed to a lot of things in me: a lifelong theatrical bent and love of costumery; a spiritual wanderlust that seemed to be losing out to homing-pigeon tendencies, which grew stronger as 30 loomed. I wanted to be the divine Miss M as she appeared in “Desperately Seeking Susan”: coolly hip but humane; sporting dark glasses that acted as a one-way mirror, through which she saw the world perfectly while no one could see in; rolling around on an unmade bed snapping Polaroids of herself with a mixture of bemusement and solipsistic glee that I found engaging, and on point.

Madonna was trademarked with those rubber bangles and head ties but never married to them, inhabiting fashion moments fully and then slipping out of them like a snake out of old skin. Of course, the Material Girl could afford different outfits every day, and I could not; but that didn’t stem my desire to be, on a fairly fixed budget, as chameleonic as possible. I became a mall-troller, hitting the stores a minimum of once a week to hunt for those elusive wardrobe items that were current but not ridiculously so, eye-catching but not garish, substantial but cheap. In short, among the countless hangers I shoved apart over the years I was really searching for an equipoise in myself, which I believed needed only the right outfit to leap into definition. I figured I’d know that balance when I struck it, and so spent many hours in dressing rooms with my head twisted over one shoulder and eyes squinting, closed almost to a slit, willing the plaid to harmonize with stripes but clash enough to make a statement, hoping the elastic at the waist would hug, but not too much.

In this quixotic search for soul, I turned up no revelations, just stuff aplenty — shirts, scarves, trinkets — all of which served me well for six months, a year, two at the outside. Invariably I grew bored with it and packed it into shopping bags and sold it off to friends or sisters. I learned never to hoard these little worn items because I always needed ready space to accommodate the new clothes and baubles that speedily appeared. Now I seem to have finally run out of replacements, and it’s distressing. I haven’t bought shoes in forever (boots, sandals, yes, but no shoes) because, with loafers a sad lug-soled parody of themselves in every shop window, they have nothing left to say about me.

In his recent essay on loyalty, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote that our virtues have no face anymore, but that doesn’t mean we don’t still yearn for that face, some visible assurance that we still stand for something. The considerable burden of maintaining a personal image falls to clothes — understandably, since they have always borne that burden to some degree. The irony is that as our belief in image has declined, fashion has amiably followed suit, to the point that clothing today has no more moral import than a politician’s campaign promises.

As lines of difference blur and everybody says everything, so everybody wears everything. Red patent leather shoes were once strictly for little girls and worldly women; now kids wear rollerblades that color. Lycra, after moving out of dance studios and into the street, was almost exclusively for disco queens and other diva-fied spirits who dared to bare themselves in shrink-wrap relief; now Lycra is the very soul of conformity, as ubiquitous among corpulent housewives as it is among the super-fit. As moral entropy reaches further and further into public space, we become less able to know where, or how to look anymore. Clothes reflect that myopia. They have lost their clear ability to shock, to affirm, to demarcate; it is increasingly difficult to determine from glancing at an outfit if the wearer is rich or poor, young or middle-aged, hip or hopelessly out of step. (Is she a Melrose hawk or did she merely refuse to take those bell-bottoms off 20 years ago?)

So the search for the right ensemble is not simply the search for the right thing to say — the ’60s and ’70s took care of that nicely, with blue-jean patches and T-shirt slogans like “Hang ten,” and “Have a nice day.” It’s also a search for the right thing to be. And it used to be that what you said was what you were: Surfer boys “hung ten,” humanists suggested that you have a nice day. But these are meaner times, and the compulsion to share a personal philosophy with the world by wearing it on your sleeve — or your car bumper — is dead (unless you assume that the people wearing the “Shut up bitch” T-shirts down on the Venice Beach boardwalk are actually advertising a philosophy, and I’d rather not).

The ’80s gave fashion a whole new cynical spin: Instead of clothing advertising people, people started advertising clothing. The point of dressing was no longer to convey message or style, but to act as style’s messenger: Guess? Members Only, Calvin Klein, Chanel, Polo, Louis Vuitton. If the label didn’t show, neither did you. The conspicuous consumption trend eventually died out, but not its grounding notion of exclusivity; Gap and Banana Republic may have proliferated in the ’90s with their just-folks ad campaigns, but they proliferated most in the cologne-scented pages of Vanity Fair and W magazine. Sharon Stone wears a Gap shirt with a ball gown to an Academy Awards show and we laud her for her insouciance. In our hearts we don’t really believe that we can get away with the same thing because we, after all, are not movie stars. Sharon Stone is being clever, subversive; you are merely tacky. The enduring truth of fashion is that it can only be democratized to a point: The other half of clothes is always who’s wearing them.

Which leads me back to the original question: Who, as far as the world is concerned, am I? I should have started out by saying that even as I deliberate every morning, I know that famous people are not supposed to matter. I am supposed to be my own best role model. The latest, neo-leftist clothing ad campaigns insist that it is enough to be oneself, be an individual, break color lines, recognize it’s a free country, think different — certainly they all implicitly warn against herd-mentality activities, like reading billboards. Forget it. When self-actualization becomes the stuff of Madison Avenue campaigns, conformity starts looking awfully attractive. I hear Madonna’s look has gone Eastern this year — gauzy midriff tops, sari-like wraps, vacant stare. Contempo Casuals already has it all on the cheap. With about $50 and regular advice from my 13-year-old niece, I should, at least for a moment, be able to get into the groove.

That’s why the work of Sandy Powell, the costume designer who won an
Academy Award for her work on “Shakespeare in Love,”
could be considered a kind of fanciful flourish on the study of serious fashion history. Powell’s
costumes are as accurate as movie clothes need to be. But she’s gifted in
subtler ways: She has a knack for giving her costumes emotional accuracy.
In movies like 1997′s “The Wings of the Dove,”
and last year’s “Velvet
Goldmine” and “Shakespeare in Love,” she sends her costumes out to do a
pretty complex job — and succeeds on every count. The clothes tell a small
story about the period in question. They move beautifully when necessary –
and constrict when necessary. And they always represent something of
the character who’s wearing them, without sending a crushingly obvious
signal. Are the farthingales supporting the ladies’ dresses in “Shakespeare
in Love” precisely the right shape and size for the year 1593? Who knows?
But seeing Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth rustling along in her heavy,
pearl-festooned skirts gave me such an unshakable sense of the character –
she’s like an angry gilt cloud, annoyed no end at being earthbound — that
I couldn’t have cared less. Powell understands actors, movement and the
significance of clothing in a historical sense, but her costumes go even
further. In helping an actor bring life to a character, they give you a
sense of what old clothes were like when they had life in them.

The outfits Powell conceives can be sumptuous looking. But no matter how
beautiful or extravagant they are, they always look like clothes for real
people. In that respect they deviate significantly from the tradition
of the luxurious costume epic — for example, ’50s extravaganzas like
“Desiree” or “Scaramouche,” in which the dresses are terrific fun to look
at but tend to resemble birthday cakes from an Italian bakery. Yet as
intrigued as Powell is by the language of clothing, she never forgoes
aesthetics. For “The Wings of the Dove,” an adaptation of the Henry James
novel, Powell convinced director Iain Softley to set the story in 1910
instead of 1902, arguing that the clothing of that period was more
bohemian, more freeing. Then she went to town, putting the lead actresses,
Helena Bonham Carter and Allison Elliot, in cocoon cloaks appliqued with
floral designs poised precisely between Art Nouveau and Art Deco;
broad-brimmed, rakishly tilted hats; and sheer, shimmery Fortuny-pleated
gowns that transform the women into living caryatids. The beauty of the
characters’ clothes lies partly in their very casualness. The women’s
velvets, for example, always look just slightly rumpled; the chiffon veils
they wear for touring Venice look as if they were tied on with only half a
care. These don’t look anything like clothes that had been entrusted to the
wardrobe mistress’s care until just before the cameras started rolling.
They look as if a character had been wearing them that morning as she set
out to do an errand, returned later to write a letter or two, dropped by a
friend’s house for tea. They’re clothes that, their period look aside, are
just like the ones we wear today — in other words, they have a personal history built right in.

That’s a conscious choice on Powell’s part. “There’s a beauty in dirt,” she told the New York Times Magazine last year. “When I go to the movies, I think, Why is that dress so clean? The boat is going down and they look
perfect. You want to have beauty in a film, but if something looks a bit
worn, a bit soiled, it usually has more depth.”

That’s especially apparent in Powell’s costumes for “Shakespeare in Love.” As elaborate as the
garments are — many of them are trimmed with beads, embroidery and
even metal filigree — none of them have that garishly new, shiny look that
signals “rich.” Like old money, they speak a lot more quietly. The brocades
and metallic laces look just a little corroded, which gives them both a
degree of immediacy (these are tactile clothes — they look like they’d be
wonderful to touch) and a sense of history (they’ve been around the block a
few times — in the late 16th century, not even rich people had all that
many garments).

There’s always a sense of energy to Powell’s work — it never looks staid
or stagy. And for a designer so young (she’s in her late 30s), Powell
already has a formidable risumi. She started out designing for the London
stage in the early ’80s, and did her first costumes for film in 1985, with
Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio.” Since then, she’s worked numerous times with
Neil Jordan (“The Crying Game,” “Michael Collins,” “Interview with a
Vampire,” “The Butcher Boy”), and she received her first Oscar nomination
in 1992 for Sally Potter’s film of Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.” Powell is
frighteningly prolific. She received Oscar nominations for two 1998 movies
(“Velvet Goldmine” as well as “Shakespeare in Love”), but she also
designed costumes for last year’s “Hilary and Jackie” (the story of cellist
Jacqueline du Pri). Her next project is an adaptation of Graham Greene’s
“The End of the Affair” set for release later this year, starring Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes.

Powell has worked on such a wide range of movies that it’s impossible to
pinpoint her as a designer with an affinity for any particular era. In
“Orlando,” she devised costumes for a gender-switching hero/heroine who
travels through several centuries: We see Tilda Swinton in Elizabethan
doublet and tights, a massive ice-blue satin gown laden with rose garlands
circa 1750, and a Jane Eyre-style black day dress. It’s particularly
interesting to compare the Elizabethan costumes in “Orlando” with those in
“Shakespeare in Love,” which obviously had a much bigger budget. The
clothes may be less elaborate in “Orlando,” but they’re just as inventive:
Powell gives Quentin Crisp’s Queen Elizabeth (!) a ruff made of quivering
metallic quills, a forerunner of the savagely magnificent peacock-feather
ruff she would later do for Dench’s Elizabeth. And if you look closely at
“Orlando,” you can see how Powell managed to fudge elaborate details on the
cheap — using a pleated length of grosgrain ribbon as a decorative cuff
on an Elizabethan jacket sleeve, for instance.

The clothes in “Hillary and Jackie” evoke a mood and a time that’s much closer to our own, showing us little English girls in early-1950s hand-knit Fair
Isle sweaters and caps; later, we get a swinging-’60s Jacqueline du Pri
in a red vinyl minidress and shiny black car coat. And
Powell must have had a field day with “Velvet Goldmine,” set in London in
the early ’70s. Although the movie’s outlandish glam-rock confections,
replete with spangles and feather boas, are what stick in people’s
memories, the “street wear” garments Powell devised for the characters are
actually more effective, and brilliant in the way they evoke both the mood
of the era and the sensibilities of the characters who wear them. The
opening sequence shows a gaggle of kids running down the street in
bell-bottoms, tiny T-shirts and Edwardian thrift-store fare, set to Brian Eno’s
“Needle in the Camel’s Eye.” It’s a euphoric opening, and the clothes play
a big role in it — they’re clothes for playing dress-up, part of the
tool kit teenagers use to reinvent themselves, along with music and sex and
drugs and whatever else. One of the movie’s central characters — an ambitious and sexually adventurous party girl, played by
Toni Collette, who’s
ultimately crushed and humiliated by her rock-star boyfriend — is a
vision of careless, blissful freedom in her ’70s jewel-colored velvets and
quivering feathers. When we see her character circa 1984, after having fallen on hard times, her anonymous black shirt and pants and aggressively
somber silver jewelry mark her as a person who’s chosen to recede and
wither, in a wrenching contrast to her younger, bolder self.

“Velvet Goldmine” and “Shakespeare in Love” may seem like two
disparate projects for one designer to have worked on in the same year, but
they’re really just an unusual and slightly mismatched set of bookends.
Because they’re both about performers, people who devote themselves to
creating new, miniature worlds for audiences, they’re both excuses for lots
of excess and pageantry and rich fabrics — a costumer’s dream. But even
though “Shakespeare in Love” may seem like the less contemporary of the two
pictures, in some ways it’s actually more modern, with its little
anachronistic jokes and often breezy dialogue. Its story is a piece of
whimsy held in place by a few real-life historical figures and a fragile
fact or two. And because it’s set in a time none of us actually remember,
it’s relatively untainted by nostalgia.

In fact, what’s striking about the costumes in “Shakespeare in Love” is how
modern they are — they’re more like stylized love letters to the clothing
of the era than faithful re-creations. Powell admits certain
sacrifices of historical accuracy: Reportedly, Miramax studio executives
wanted to make sure the men wouldn’t look “silly” in their tights, so
Powell made the jackets a little longer. But even Powell’s sacrifices have
the ring of truth. It was a stroke of genius to put Joseph Fiennes’ young
Will Shakespeare in a quilted, fitted gray-blue leather jacket — to
reincarnate him as a sort of Elizabethan Wild One. If you’re watching
carefully, you’ll notice that sometimes the jacket is worn as a vest,
sleeveless, over a loose-fitting shirt. I’m not sure zip-off sleeves
existed as an option in the late 1500s, but it’s an idea whose time
should have come long ago. Will’s jacket is a marvel of dawn-to-dusk
versatility, the kind of thing that could take you from an early morning of
scribbling with a quill pen through a sword fight to a late night of
revelry and carousing — without even a change of accessories.

Yet it’s the dresses and jackets Powell devised for Gwyneth Paltrow as
Viola that stand out most. Viola’s costume changes are almost a plot device
– they help move the story along, if only because you wonder what she’s
going to turn up in next. The detail on each of Viola’s costumes is a
source of wonder: The filigreed metal “cages” that encase the cap sleeves
of one of her dresses are almost like jewelry in themselves. The blue
velvet jacket she wears when she’s disguised as a boy looks fairly
undistinguished until you see it from behind, particularly in the scene in
which she reveals her identity to Will. Then you notice the rows of tiny
tucks lined up along the collar, fanning out like the sun’s rays. They seem
like a frivolous detail — who, save clothing junkies, is going to be
looking that closely? — but in addition to being simply beautiful, they’re
probably a shaping device, allowing the collar to fold softly around
Paltrow’s swan neck.

The lines of Viola’s clothes tell us almost as much about her as her spoken
lines do. Powell puts her in iridescent pleated gauzes, a golden peach ball
gown that shimmers like a dragonfly’s wing, a pale aqua dressing gown that
looks suitable for an undersea princess. Even her high ruffled collars
don’t restrict her movement; there’s always something light and airy about
the way they frame her face. Viola seems sparrowlike, free, a delicate but
willful creature that could be borne on the air. Only in her heavy, pale-gold wedding dress — worn as she’s being married to a man she doesn’t
love, an arrangement she’s bound by law and family duty to honor — does she look stiff and restricted. Not even her flowing wedding veil lightens it.

The wedding gown is the only one of Viola’s dresses in “Shakespeare in Love” that’s “wrong” — which is precisely what makes it right. Viola moves
differently in it; she’s more tentative, uncertain, and suddenly, less girlish — its thick quilted bodice seems to be her first lesson in feeling
weighed down and bound. Of course, in real life, Elizabethan women’s clothes were mostly uncomfortable and restrictive by today’s
standards. That everything Viola wears, save for that wedding dress, looks
so light, so casual in a way, is part of Powell’s triumph. She’s not out to
capture history in the circumference of a farthingale or the diameter of a
ruff. She’s out to write another kind of truth — a kind of truth that anyone in a Polartec pullover and a pair of jeans can relate to — in the
drape of a skirt or the cut of a sleeve.

And to suggest that if the greatest playwright who ever lived had had the chance to reinvent his jacket as a vest by zipping off the sleeves — well, he just might have taken it.

So it is not surprising that the fashion world is now genuinely mourning
Ms. Tilberis, who died Tuesday morning after a long struggle with ovarian
cancer at age 51. Ms. Tilberis helped transform href="http://www.bazaar411.com/" target="new">Harper’s Bazaar from an
also-ran futzy fashion magazine into the most cutting
edge and experimental of the big fashion glossies, became a prominent
advocate for cancer research and managed to make surprisingly few enemies
in the process.

Tagged as part of the British invasion of the New York fashion scene,
Ms. Tilberis was the editor of British Vogue before she migrated to New York in
1992 and took over the helm of fashion institution Harper’s Bazaar. A year
later, Ms. Tilberis was diagnosed with ovarian cancer — a disease she publicly
blamed on her use of fertility drugs in the 1970s — and spent the next seven
years at Bazaar balancing chemotherapy and
revitalizing the 125-year-old magazine.

Perhaps the greatest revolution that took place at Harper’s Bazaar under
Ms. Tilberis was a new focus on experimental photography and
fashion. Ms. Tilberis was perhaps the first mainstream glossy editor to
champion upcoming fashion photographers like href="http://www.studionet.com/demarchelier/" target="new">Patrick
Demarchelier, David Sims and href="http://www.postershop.com/artist/lindbergh_e.htm" target="new">Peter
Lindbergh; She emphasized still-life art photography, and took the
relative risk of working with artists like href="http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1997/12/08media.html">Cindy
Sherman. Under her lead, the magazine pioneered experimental typography
and minimalist art direction. Although Harper’s Bazaar did not put a focus
on quality writing, art critic and former contributing editor Jim Lewis said, “Visually I always thought Bazaar was the most expensive, best produced
art magazine in the world.”

Harper’s Bazaar publisher Jeannette Chang explains, “Liz Tilberis has
always been about influence; she followed the guidelines of one art
director who told her ‘astonish me.’ She had an elegance, energy and
simplicity that just wasn’t done in any other magazine. She was
controversial, yet she loved fashion.”

Ms. Tilberis’ dedication to her magazine was reknowned, and employees describe
how she continued to run Bazaar even while she was hospitalized. “She wasn’t vain in a nasty way, but for someone who was so
conscious about how she looked, she was remarkably brave to come in to the
office when she was looking terrible. She would come in even when people
thought she shouldn’t be there,” recalls Dwight Garner, who worked as an
editor at Harper’s Bazaar in 1995.

Although Ms. Tilberis was guilty of the same kind of breathy celebrity
name-dropping that permeates most of the fashion world — including
prominently flogging her close friendship with Princess Di and her time
with Hillary Rodham Clinton — her magazine was generally free of the kind of
hoity-toity nastiness found in other glossy fashion rags. She positioned
herself as the antithesis of Anna Wintour, the ruthless editor of Vogue. Ms. Tilberis described Wintour in her book “No Time to Die”
as “peremptory and rather tactless, unconcerned with ‘the little people.’”

Ms. Tilberis, instead of hiding behind sunglasses and a snarky attitude, came
across as heartfelt, and the testimony of many of her former employees
reflects that. In a response typical of current and former employees,
Lewis describes her as “absolutely wonderful, incredibly warm. She was
really generous and from the get-go she would remember everyone’s name.”

This attitude was certainly prevalant during her open battle with
ovarian cancer. Instead of struggling silently, she became a vocal chairwoman
of the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, coordinated lucrative fund-raising
events and wrote “No Time to Die,” a heartfelt book about her battle.
Although the book was also riddled with light banter about the celebrity
lifestyle, it was an unusual and inspirational step for a fashion
editor to confront her illness in public. Also unusual, she used the book
as a platform to harshly criticize the fashion industry for its lack of
interest in anything that is not beautiful and fabulous.

Ms. Tilberis did, of course, make her enemies, some of whom describe her as being
self-aggrandizing and overly concerned with the superficial — which,
considering her profession, isn’t particularly shocking. Chalk it up to the
larger-than-life personality necessary to make it in the fashion world.
“She holds a powerful position in my psyche,” says Scott Baldinger, who was
a senior features editor from 1992 to 1994. “She was this dream image of your
mother protector — glamorous, lovely. She had star personality and charm.
But you always felt very nervous about your status with her.”

Although she was public about her illness, Ms. Tilberis’ death came suddenly to
those who weren’t closely tied to the magazine. In “No Time to Die” she wrote
of conquering her illness, and just a year ago, she seemed relatively
recovered. As Ms. Tilberis told the New York Times last spring, “When I was
first diagnosed, I was very melodramatic and I wondered if I’d make it to
the end of the year. Now I never think about it. When I wake up in the
middle of the night, I don’t worry about cancer. I worry about Harper’s
Bazaar.”

Harper’s Bazaar has yet to name her successor, but as Chang puts it, “The
staff here has followed her for years, and they will absolutely continue to
follow her direction.”

Ms. Tilberis is survived by her husband, artist Andrew Tilberis, and two
teenage sons. Ms. Tilberis’ family has requested
that donations be given in her name to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund (1-800-873-9569).

She is instead a thoroughly savvy and, by her own admission, predatory businesswoman who just happens to possess a spunky narrative sense and an affection for old-school children’s books, as well as chutzpah by the gallon. Spending an hour with her in the Manhattan offices of her stakehorse, Nicholson NY, you can almost hear the pitter-pat of the business-magazine profile writers in the distance. With her streaky blond hair, braided in signature twin tails across her strap-halter-encased collarbones, thick stripes of black eye shadow and Paper magazine wardrobe, she could be a Condi Nast scout or a stylist for Marc Jacobs. Duncan’s image is just that, however; beneath lurks the spirit of a true player.

I’m immediately taken aback. I’m wearing a suit — a cotton summerweight Brooks Brothers suit that isn’t doing its job on a muggy and overcast August afternoon — so as to better confront the diva-ish Duncan. But I’ve completely overdressed for the meeting at Nicholson’s Puck Building suite — the kind of place where molded plastic chairs in very retro burnt avocado await the arrival of the first iMac. Plus, I’m in no mood to come off as a prototypical Alley scrivener, swaddled in St|ssy, Gap khaki and treads by somebody with point guards on the payroll.

Duncan’s latest undertaking is an hour-long, digitally animated mockumentary film called “The History of Glamour.” It’s a merciless satire of New York’s incestuous ’90s cultural moment: fashion, art, celebrity and various downtown style tribes converge and are shredded for our delectation. Clearly, Duncan is growing up, and I want her to think she’s being interviewed by an adult.

That didn’t work. Duncan, at 29, is engaged in a sort of preemptive maturation driven at least partially by market forces, and all my delusions of simpatico — not to mention the theory that I might snag a few pointers about exiting my current Peter Pan mode — quickly vanish. Duncan is making it up as she goes along, counterbalancing her Liz Phairish tomkitten chic with fabulous press and a slightly ballsy manner that at times can be patronizing.

I cringe a little, for instance, when an e-mail response from her describes Manhattan’s mopey gallery circuit as “the rarefied world of the New York art scene,” from which was drawn a “Glamour” collaborator, artist Karen Kilimnik. Duncan says that if she used live actors in her work, rather than just voices, she’d want to follow the ensemble model of Woody Allen, Hal Hartley and … Werner Herzog! She is not a woman who levels her cross hairs on the middlebrow, but the naked aspiration strikes me as more than a little overwrought.

Nothing to get all that ruffled over, of course, since her bootstrapping enthusiasm and indefatigable confidence in her ability to get noticed have resulted in a crucial whammy to the core assumptions of the interactive gaming cabal. “I’ve been thinking of us in terms of something like the Warhol factory,” she says when asked about the composition of her creative team, which includes illustrator/boyfriend/partner Jeremy Blake and Washington, D.C., punk stalwart Brendan Canty of Fugazi, plus former Bikini Kill bassist Karhi Wilcox and a pair of Mac-jockey animators. It’s a telling comparison: Like Warhol, Duncan’s business is her art, and even if she hasn’t completely abandoned her childish ways, she knows exactly what she wants.

“I was initially attracted to CD-ROMs because they’re driven by the reader’s curiosity,” Duncan says, “and for kids they offer multiple points of entry. But I really wanted to make something for adults, because with kids’ stuff you have to go through the parents to get to your intended audience.”

Of course, this turn has been prompted at least in part by the consolidation of the CD-ROM business, which now resembles the assembly line universe of so much other children’s publishing and entertainment, controlled almost entirely by licensers and a few central distribution outlets. For Duncan, the Web doesn’t necessarily represent an escape from this kind of constraining uniformity. But she doesn’t buy into the notion that the digital future is all secure transactions and Dow Jones downloads, either.

“Every time anyone talks about content on the Web anymore, it’s with a sneer. There a kind of Schadenfreude, like, ‘OK, now the artists have to move over and make way for the advertisers.’ But the idea that it’s all about e-commerce now is ludicrous, because everyone knows that’s not making any money either.”

In this sense, Duncan’s switch to film signals a savvy betrayal of the secret of her success. If anyone would know when to get out of a failing medium — or decline to take a stab at the one that’s now garnering all the frosty press — she’s the one.

“With the new project, I was interested in examining glamour as a semiotic system,” she claims, revealing her slightly wonkish academic background (her senior thesis at the University of Michigan was on technology and narrative). “In the film, the main character is looking for an identity, and glamour becomes for her a potent form of self-expression. She finds it very liberating, because she’s from a small town. But by the end of the story, glamour becomes limiting, then imprisoning, so she becomes a writer, chooses grammar over glamour.”

Duncan could be summarizing her own biography with these comments. There’s more than a vague resemblance between her and her antiheroine, Charles Valentine — who hails from the fictional backwater of Antler, Ohio, and who storms Manhattan with no coherent ambition beyond plying scams to get noticed (one of which involves smashing a window at the “Googenheim” museum with a fashionable baseball bat, dressed only in skimpy, iridescent underwear). Duncan herself was raised near Detroit and tumbled into CD-ROMs after first working as a rare-book cataloger in Washington, D.C. While her male colleagues at Magnet Interactive were enthusing over slaughter, she was putting $80,000 to a rather different use, spinning out the tale of two sisters who overgorge on Chinese food. Illustrated by Monica Geuse and narrated by David Sedaris, Chop Suey was praised by the Washington Post as “one of the finest stories-on-CD ever produced.”

Soon after, Duncan moved to New York, but by the time her second project, Smarty, came to fruition, the CD-ROM market had tanked and distributors were running scared. So Duncan took matters into her own hands, cold-calling stores and badgering magazine editors based solely on her avid perusal of mastheads. Gradually, a Duncan cult evolved, but it was short-lived. There was one more CD-ROM in the pipeline, Zero Zero, but after 1996′s Barbie Götterdammerüng, it was clear to Duncan that the good fight to empowering adolescent girls might be a field she’d want to surrender to the heavy hitters.

Her next frontier is indie-animation of the MTV variety, into which “The History of Glamour” could be tidily slotted. Charles Valentine, like Duncan’s preteen heroines, is an endearing individualist: pert lips, blond tresses and circumflex eyebrows mask a pilgrim soul with a built-in bullshit monitor. Fashion, with its host of pompous eccentrics (a crusty, limousine-dwelling agent, circa “Broadway Danny Rose”; a fashion editor whose mannerisms and diction are a mélange of Allure’s Polly Mellen, Vogue’s Anna Wintour and vintage Diana Vreeland; and a duo of pretentiously named designers), is an ideal medium through which to channel satire. Duncan’s own deep-dish clothes sense — desperately uncommon on the digital frontier — helps, of course.

“There’s a book that influenced ‘The History of Glamour’ called ‘Love, Loss, and What I Wore,’” she says. “It’s a series of strange little watercolor paintings of the author, Ilene Beckerman’s, outfits from childhood to the present. She describes all the things that happened to her in the outfits — being dumped, feeling beautiful, going to the prom, her mother dying, her marriage and divorce, her pregnancies. It’s a very spare but moving book. I, like Beckerman, remember incidents according to what I was wearing.”

Duncan’s shmatte devotion, which lent a hipster edge to her children’s projects, has now become the spur to her own developing sense of her glamorous horizons. Fox Searchlight is keeping tabs on her, and she has a literary agent at William Morris, with the possibility for a synergistic book deal hovering in the wings at HarperCollins. All the attention hasn’t slackened her verve for shepherding her projects through the media jungle, even though hustling up all her own press and advertising can be a drain. “I have such a passion for the product,” she says, “that I can do it better than almost anyone I could hire. Still, I’d love to be able to concentrate on the writing. But being in entertainment requires a lot of schmoozing.”

Her skeptical tone, however, disguises a genuine delight with the game she’s entered — a competition that goes beyond desktop animation and multimedia pioneering. Duncan seems to grasp concretely what dozens of other aspiring millionerds only understand in the abstract: that fluidity is pointless without products that can stand on their own. All the dazzling brainstorms in the world won’t amount to much more than a drizzle if consumers aren’t touched by what they buy — hooked, in a sense, on the personality pushing the fantasy.

Even though Duncan’s turn away from digital messianism, coupled with her gimlet attitudes toward multimedia’s artistic future, suggests that “The History of Glamour” is a retreat, in truth it’s a logical step toward the fulfillment of its creator’s master plan. A hard-working minor celebrity with an evidently carefree but actually quite deliberate business strategy, Duncan is exactly the sort of solo artist/entrepreneur one imagines surviving every market vicissitude — confirming that there’s no such thing as fleeting fame if it’s got talent backing it up.

If you’re not familiar with heroin chic, it’s a look “in which models pose dazed as if under the influence of drugs,” as the Reuters news agency put it in one of its reports on the controversy. Of course, most models, already waif-thin and anemic as it is, don’t actually need to use heroin to achieve the elusive half-dead-and-loving-it appearance originally pioneered a quarter of a century ago by Rolling Stone Keith Richards. (Indeed, some experts speculate that some models are so confused by bright lights and color that they remain dazed most of the time, with or without drugs, much like Dan Quayle.) Models who look like sickly heroin addicts may in fact simply be sickly anorexics.

Regardless, no one wants to take more than their share of blame for the corruption of youth, and so the fashion industry now finds itself without a look.

According to one photographer interviewed by the New York Times, fashion magazine editors have made “positive and healthy” the new industry watchwords. But this is a trend that’s not likely to last much longer than a week. Before too long, we can expect the industry to find some new horror to glamorize. Not necessarily drugs: Crack is clearly past its peak, and marijuana, while enjoying something of a revival, is just a little too retro to inspire a fashion industry Reefer Madness. (Just take a look at any Cheech and Chong movie and you’ll see the problem immediately.)

But as long as there are unhealthy lifestyles out there in the world, the fashion industry will be there to serve them up to us as the latest and greatest fashion “do.” Here are some hot looks for the upcoming season.

Everest Chic: That chill breeze you feel coming from East Coast runways? An unexpected storm on the slopes of Mount Everest! Last year’s disastrous season on the world’s tallest mountain only served to glamorize the difficult and often deadly climb even more. John Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” is clambering up to the summit of the bestseller lists — and a new crop of not-quite-prepared-enough climbers and socialites have made their way to the top of the mountain, and (in some cases) back down again. Survivors have returned with little souvenirs of the climb: Along with some snapshots of the magnificent view, they’ve also managed to get their noses blackened by frostbite, and their fingers and toes so damaged by the cold they’ve had to be removed.

This exciting trend offers a literally “cool” opportunity for fashion tastemakers. Models in parkas with artfully frozen noses and stumps where their fingers used to be will be short-roped by Sherpas to the end of the runway, clutching oxygen containers from which they take an occasional sexy hit. Those who can’t make it though the strenuous shows will be left to die on the runway, their bodies stepped over by other models on their way to the “summit.”

Possible downside: Impressionable college students, overwhelmed by the glamour of it all, will die with their heads inside dorm mini-fridges — trying to get themselves even more frostbitten than socialite climber Sandy Hill Pittman.

Carpal Tunnel Chic: Those shooting pains you feel in your arms and fingers aren’t just the sad side effect of too many hours wrestling with your computer’s mouse — they may be your ticket to fashion-world fame. As carpel tunnel chic spreads beyond the confines of the computer world, those splints you’re wearing will become the hottest fashion accessories since, oh, leg warmers way back in 1982.

Carpal tunnel shows will bring the pasty-faced glamour of the new media to the rest of the world. Models won’t actually walk the runways; with Day-Glo splints cradling their wrists, they’ll sit in carefully designed ergonomic work environments on the stage, bathed in the gentle light of the computer screen. Electronic beeps and modem screeches will fill the air as the models surf. Like the Web itself, the shows will be painfully slow. The models, jittery with Jolt cola and triple cappuccinos, will use the time they spend waiting to connect with their favorite sites to soak their hands in buckets of cold water.

Possible downside: Some impressionable college students, overwhelmed by geekery, will not only put on splints themselves, but will move on to the harder stuff: imitating the hairstyle and grooming habits of Bill Gates, or even more dangerously, Michael Kinsley.

Tamagotchi Chic: You may pretend to be sick to death of the little plastic cyber-pets that have conquered Japan and seem well on their way to becoming a Cabbage Patch-sized craze here as well, but admit it — you can’t help but love the demanding little creatures.

With Tamagotchi chic, models emulating the endearing helplessness that has made the Japanese cyber-chicks such hits with kids on two continents will lie down on the floor in a heap, beeping forlornly until their custodians feed them, play with them and clean up the small trail of model droppings they leave behind. If not attended to properly, they will wither up and die, returning in their spaceships to the mother planet.

Possible downside: None.