City Desk: The Cutting Edge.

So much of New York life revolves around gratifying the appetites of people who do not care. That is one of the definitions of a trendsetter -- being impervious to the trends one sets. "There's nothing in the world so fashionable," wrote the English novelist Fanny Burney, "as taking no notice of things, and never seeing people, and saying nothing at all, and never hearing a word, and not knowing one's own acquaintance, and always finding fault; all the ton [the best people] do so." The world of the trendsetters is filled with the iconography of blankness: the stare of runway models, the hue of formal wear, the glare of flashbulbs that coats the photographed faces of hip and famous party-goers like leprosy. Indifference is a sign of confidence in one's social position, and in one's self. To make small and arbitrary, yet momentous, choices about things that fundamentally do not interest one -- what greater sign of security, of freedom from ordinary want and care and worry could there be?

When Fanny Burney wrote (the end of the 18th century), trendsetters were a tiny coterie at the pinnacle of English society. One of America's many gifts to the world has been to make trendsetting depend on money rather than rank, and then to shower money on the populace like ash in a volcanic eruption. Cool is the democratizing of aristocratic attitude. Here you don't have to be a viscountess to set trends; you can be a black criminal. Or at least, a black entertainer pretending to be a criminal. Check out the average rap video. The mise- en-scene would be the envy of a sultan: Approximately-naked girls grind the rapper's lap; his SUV gleams like a monstrous ice cube. Does the rapper look happy? No way -- he flashes gang signs and nods his head with all the energy of an expiring fish. Cast a cold eye on hos, on death; gangsta, pass by.

Yet here is the irony of modern trendsetting: All the appurtenances of life at the top, all the necessary but disregarded signs of success, are supplied by people who care about them passionately. The consumer must be cold; the creator must be hot with the love of his work. Creators are simultaneously Platonists and particularists: They have a vision of a perfect form, and an intimate affection for the muck of their craft. They come to New York in shoals because they can make money here; but they also come because here, and not upstate, or the Upper Peninsula, or the Boot-heel, they can do what they love.

A burgeoning Manhattan neighborhood is Clinton, formerly known as Hell's Kitchen. It was once the haunt of the Westies, a psychotic gang of Irish killers; it still attracts the wretched hookers who work the Lincoln Tunnel. But the bodegas are being sown with yupscale shops. I looked into a florist's shop, where the owner was busily at work on a phalanx of small boxes, each bursting with short-stemmed flowers of colors that God does not combine in the temperate ...