intelligence gathering.(fall season in clothing)

The September issue is always a challenge and an inspiration for all of us at Vogue. Our assignment this year was to understand and dramatize the new mood that has taken hold of fashion: a much darker, more aggressive, and more intellectual aesthetic that I believe can only be the result of the darkening political climate. The four Japanese designers whose work is stunningly captured in "Fight Club" by Irving Penn used their Paris shows to stage an extraordinary series of protests against corporatism, conformity, and militarism. Penn's images of their work are as chillingly beautiful as anything I've published, and it's hard to view them without a haunting sense of

the ideological turmoil in which much of the world, our own country included, now finds itself.

It's not unexpected that Rei Kawakubo and her crew should challenge us.

("Staff is too boring a word," she tells Sarah Mower about her Comme des Garcons design team. "We are co-combatants.") But even Miuccia Prada turned away from ladylike dressing to something that would be of great interest to a very chic protester at the Sorbonne. And I have just returned from the haute couture collections, at which John Galliano for Christian Dior imagined Joan of Arc as an armor-clad Power Ranger villainess. So there is a radical change afoot, and whatever your view of the global situation, you will be confronted by clothes with radically different proportions from those you've worn before. Thus, enormous tops and tiny bottoms, or vice versa; dresses that look like eggs or balls or, conversely, something shrink-wrapped; hips that jut out provocatively. Shoes and boots have never been higher, heavier, or more stompingly cool.

How, then, to wear these new silhouettes? This is the question we put to a number of real women in our View and Index sections; and it's also the one that Patrick Demarchelier and Tonne Goodman take on in "Speak Volumes," their lovely and instructive portfolio of the season's voluminous offerings. What we learn is that there are clothes for all of us out there, and that this is a thrilling opportunity to update our closets and our visual sense of ourselves. (Incidentally, these new shapes are not going to disappear anytime soon, as the resort collections and the couture made clear.) One happily notes ...