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  So I, too, a belated bellweatherer or maybe not one at all, made it to the Shocking show at the Mus é e des Arts decoratifs. Others went there – the young and the old, the models (there is always a fashion happening somewhere in Paris) and the wannabes – to see, perhaps, Dali. The surrealism is the emphasis of the show’s program, and was the vibe the reviewers picked up. Myself, I was in search of one of Schiaparelli’s biggest clients and supporters, Daisy Fellowes. Much to my surprise, even the famous shoe hat – which Daisy was the first and more notable fashion figure in the international smart set to wear – was purged of her presence. Instead, we have a photo of Dali’s wife, Gala, wearing a shoe on her head. I was the more surprised at this as the Rezeptionsraum in fashion, which is a very Darwinian space – if you don’t sell to the uberwealthy and this isn’t the punky 1970s, you are done – is so imbricated with the design space that Fellowes, for instance, was offered, and accep

  “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” King Lear asks about his daughter, Regan. The phrase goes back to the Bible, of course. Kabad is the term in Hebrew for the canonical instance of a hardened heart. The heart in question is the pharaoh’s, and its hardening is, in part, the work of the Lord, not nature. In Exodus 9:12, it is written” And the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh.” Franz Rosenzweig, the great Jewish philosopher, found an interpretation of the verse in a popular Yiddish religious book: “… whereever a person wishes to go, God helps him. If he wishes to be good, God helps him. If he wishes to be bad, God also helps him.” In the latter case, by hardening – making heavy – the heart. There is something wonderful and terrifying in Rosenzweig’s trouvaille. It is akin to Leibniz’s theory that this is the best of all possible worlds, for that transforms evil in the world into a quality as necessary as the good for the world’s perfection. I can grasp thi