High fashion is the final bastion of American artistic achievement. Music desecrated, the visual arts a cruel joke, acting as an art form totally forgotten, and architecture an afterthought, any young person born with real artistic instinct is bound to find themselves lost in a bureaucracy founded on mediocrity and the pleasant falsetries of democracy.
Sontag blames Whitman, and I, the leveling effect of anti-Papal post-Enlightenment ideals that only a young fool with the soul of a poet could buy. If you don't read bell hooks when you are 15 you have no heart, but if you don't read Bronze Age Mindset when you are 21 you have no brain ! I believe in hierarchy, and so did Christ.
From what I can tell, it is in luxury fashion alone where the singular genius is able to thrive. Whereas in the past the Catholic Church was able to fund the creation and promotion of the greatest music and musicians in human history, and the plays of Shakespeare supported by a curious and learned aristocracy, the American cathedral is populated by lowbrow elites of no real taste or learning. They are dumb, fat, ugly, their class unearned and their fate ill-favored. They possess neither biological kingship nor a believable claim to meritocratic position.
I should clarify - the global state of fashion has never been worse. Civilized Humans have never been more poorly dressed, or clothed in more toxic fabrics (plastic fibers and lead dyes). The median consumer, unsightly overweight, having no taste and possessing no eye, has never looked worse. It is a specific capitalism of a higher scene able to promote true accomplishment in fashion design.
I am speaking of the cadre of sinister homosexuals and hyper-competent women who have reinvented a sort of fascism financed by a class of their less creative wealthy friends. In the arts today we have no Callas, Warhol, Fellini, Balanchine, Stravinsky, or Vidal, but we do have a set of minds with no prior parallel - Demna Gvasalia, Marc Jacobs, Tom Ford, Thierry Mugler, John Galliano, to name a few. These designers (who I will only point out just this once are all white males and will not mention this fact again or elaborate further) are genuine stars. Coco Chanel, born in 1883, is one of the only early examples of a designer in this medium being exalted in this way - you can't name great designers of any earlier period the way you can namedrop Bach or Chaucer or Van Dyck. Nor were there ever, anonymous or otherwise, men praised for fashion design of the greatest artistic epochs of ancient Athens or Rome.