Americana

Now that First Lady Michelle Obama has given J.Crew her imprimatur, making it all right for black people everywhere to line their closets with wool gabardine, I thought I'd make a confession: For years, the mere sight of the J.Crew catalog in my mailbox has brought me untold, sentimental joy.

I was an undergraduate when I first started grabbing the seasonal books; they'd be in piles next to stacks of the Daily Orange, at the entrance to our dorm. After months of pushing to get through a particularly brutal upstate winter, I ordered a candy-striped cashmere sweater with streaks of pale blue that I thought would cheer me up. And it did - for a while. But I soon realized that I derived a heady kind of contentment flipping through the pages of the retail mag itself. The WASP-ish model with freckles and beach-battered skin, clad in my cashmere sweater, seemed a world away from the stresses and concerns of life on campus.

Indeed, the genius copywriters and art directors at J.Crew (which launched as a catalog in 1983), have created a blissful world untouched by recession, environmental crises, you name it. Houses are built on the water, couples perch on a front stoop perusing The New York Times or The New York Observer. Weddings are on Martha's Vinyard, receptions follow in Nantucket. Now, I know this is a feat in advertising as clean and calculated as Ivory's well-known "99.99%" campaign, but I fall for it.