Overheard Starbuck

"I like the way fashion takes skinny girls and boys from every nation on earth and turns them into ambassadors and beautiful advertisements for a perfect country that doesn't acually exist."

---"North Korea, Iran, Libya, Cuba?

"...A country that's everywhere and nowhere. Whose images and ideas saturate every form of media. ... With exports for the wealthy purchased by appointment only from the finest boutiques in the most cosmopolitan of cities and for everyone else anyday of the week at Sears or Walmart."

---"Both their finest and most mundane products are manufactured in the same factories?"

"Fashion's ambassadors and products are found wherever the most important red carpets are unfurled on the arms and bodies of today's movie and rock stars, bathed in camera lights for the latest images to peak the world's wistful or envious desires."

---"You make it sound like a wonderful... place."

"I know, I know." (big smile).