" The irony of a war fought largely by working class Americans against
Vietnamese peasants being used
by a haute couture designer is pretty great."
I seem to remember a truly repellent essay by Tom Wolfe called "Jousting
with Sam and Charlie," about American bomber pilots in the Vietnam war,
which attacked the Vietcong soldiers for their "inevitable black silk
pajamas"--which looked dangerously like justifying the whole brutal air war
against Vietnam on the basis of a negative aesthetic judgment on Vietnamese
fashion!
Rob Forbes