Is Heaven Fashionable?

There it is, alwaysinfashion.blogspot.com

Why didn't I see this before? allwaySINfashion. Is Fashion a sin? Lord knows, it's my downfall, my budget breaker, my self-control slugger, my I-can't-stay-away-I'll-just-look temptation whether a store, a website or a magazine.

Not a fan of exercise, I used to joke that I would walk ten miles to a good sale. I always rewarded the trek from work to Grand Central by allowing myself one stop in a store before boarding the commuter train. I did indeed travel 60 nautical miles each way— from Provincetown to Boston and back— to pick up a copy of Vogue Knitting Magazine. I wasn't walking. On the slow P-Town/Beantown ferry, it sure felt like it.

The web weaves a trickier web. A new definition of trigger finger: the digit that pushes "Complete Purchase". There are some regrets in the moments immediately after; more regrets when the stuff arrives and disappoints. But like Santa Claus, online shopping is a hard concept to let go of. Maybe it's more like a blind date— sometimes it really does work out.

Fashion magazine obsession is easier to deal with, unless you are regularly plunking down $10 for a British Vogue or actually considering a $160 subscription to Grazia Weekly. Guilty and guilty. As it is Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, Elle, InStyle and Lucky fight to squeeze into my mailbox, along with catalogues from Anthropologie, J Crew, Chico's, Talbot's and the Vermont Country Store. Lucky may be the unlucky one soon as I don't think I'll renew. It's become elitist, expensive and a trifle outre.

So if Fashion is a sin, it's surely a little one, a transgression that makes us human. After all, saints don't change their robes, do they?

St. Peter's thinking about it