and now, the intelligentsia approach fashion

en are seen and women are looked at, as Susan Sontag once observed, a truth that applies to nearly all cultures, but to none more starkly than our own.

Thus Guy Trebay begins an excellent article on this season's struggle to contain girl power.

For the next month, women will be looked at constantly, baldly, unashamedly, as they parade around runways wearing the latest fashions - and, in important ways, representing the latest fashions in how women are understood. Few things are less in vogue right now than intellectual dissection of fashion. And that is a shame, since the current runway season has a lot to say about how female emancipation retains the power to stir cultural unease. It is not merely that the First Lady - whose sartorial image seems engineered to quote a placid era before locutions like "lady" were given the boot - descended on Fashion Week to demonstrate her glacial poise and concern with "women's" issues (in this case, high rates of heart disease). It is not just that, when Carleton S. Fiorina, the chief executive of the computer giant Hewlett-Packard, a designer sponsor of Fashion Week, was ousted on Wednesday, criticism of her performance deployed all the clichés of the hysteric at the top. (Apparently her glamour and charisma did Ms. Fiorina in.) It is that designers were once again attracted to ideals of docility that one imagined had gone out with the corset. But hold on a second - corsets are back. So, too, are hourglass shapes (Narciso Rodriguez, Esteban Cortazar), dollhouse clothes (Marc Jacobs) and skirts that fit so tightly (Roland Mouret) they make mincing the only possible gait. It might surprise some people to learn how closely the vocabulary of dressmaking can resemble that of animal husbandry; words like cinch and harness and strap and hobble turn up a lot.