A rose in the desert

Vogue February 2010

Asma al-Assad is glamorous, young, and very chic--the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies. Her style is not the couture-and-bling dazzle of Middle Eastern power but a deliberate lack of adornment. She's a rare combination: a thin, long-limbed beauty with a trained analytic mind who dresses with cunning understatement. Paris Match calls her "the element of light in a country full of shadow zones." She is the first lady of Syria.

Syria is known as the safest country in the Middle East, possibly because, as the State Department's Web site says, "the Syrian government conducts intense physical and electronic surveillance of both Syrian citizens and foreign visitors." It's a secular country where women earn as much as men and the Muslim veil is forbidden in universities, a place without bombings, unrest, or kidnappings ........

Author Joan Juliet Buck has now acknowledged this puff piece to be something of a faux pas. You can read her mea cupla here. It is, if anything, even more ridiculous than the original article. "Syria. The name itself sounded sinister, like syringe, or hiss" she recalls of her doubts.

It's the Zoolander sequel we've been waiting for, and it's a documentary.

Myself: Medic! Jeez, you gotta help me get this wound bound up somehow .....

Prodnose: Gauze may sound more like a hospital bandage than high fashion, but the essence of sheer is that it should be sculpted, not droopy