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CHIC READING: TODAY’S FASHION MANUALS HAVE A NEW TWIST-INTELLIGENCE

By LIZ LOGAN |

METALLICS. Dressing for success. Preppie. The Santa Fe look. These too shall pass, as did hot pants and Ali McGraw-style knit cloche hats. Following fashion can start to seem the stuff of a bad dream for the thoughtful woman. All that money and all those hours spent to attain results that seem as shifting – and ultimately futile – as the desert sand. Taking the schizophrenic pronouncements of W, Vogue, Glamour and Mademoiselle seriously can quickly lead to feelings like those described in a Waylon Jennings song: broke and crazy.

One escape from the fashion magazine inferno is to be as untrusting and analytical as hell about clothes, to turn one’s intelligence to them as to the stock market. And to read.

As far as periodicals go, I am convinced that I could happily pare my requirements to a subscription list of just two: The Village Voice, for its “V” section, edited by Mary Peacock and featuring the writing of the incomparably pragmatic and witty Susan Lydon; and – disregarding charges of nepotism – “Fashion!Dallas,” the Wednesday section of the Morning News. Tracy Brobston and Glenna Whit-ley are reliable, amusing observers of fashion in Dallas, and the clothes featured are actually available in Dallas.

But periodicals alone are not enough. In my reading about fashion, I have been trafficking in books that I would ordinarily be embarrassed to be seen with. My aim was to assemble a collection of useful, trustworthy books, a sort of vain, thinking woman’s library. I was looking for an antidote – or adjunct, depending on your outlook – to the slick monthly bulletins issued by the Cond坢 Nast corporation. I found much of value – books that offer perspective, consolation, advice – and much of laughable utility in my reading.

The Fashionable Mind by Kennedy Fraser (Knopf, $14.50). For my money, Kennedy Fraser is the best writer around whose subject is fashion. New Yorker devotees are probably already familiar with her witty musings, which appear randomly a few times a year. This book is required reading for them as well as for those who haven’t discovered the pleasures of her prose.

Her collected columns are arranged chronologically from 1970 through 1981, in a volume with a pretty, powder-pink jacket that, unfortunately, smudges if you look at it too hard.

Reading about fashion over the course of 11 years is curiously reassuring. It’s the same old song, though the melody certainly changes from season to season. (It also resurfaces. The lesson: Never throw out anything flattering; it will be back.)

Fraser is smart, an attribute that gives her an edge over the vast majority of her peers. And she approaches her subject seriously and skeptically. But what makes her a joy to read is that she also loves her subject; she is capable of awe at “the secret power of dress.”

If that’s not enough, she also has the gift of perfect description, as in a throwaway mention of a sweater that fits “as neatly as a coat of paint.”

And the appeal of being in the avant-garde of a trend: “The real aim of fashionable purchase is not uniqueness but the appearance of belonging to a company of leaders. If you buy a Burrows outfit, you should look as though your rightful place were Burrows’ world, and Bendel’s.”

She muses about makeup: “Makeup begins by being a trick to play on society, then becomes a trick we play upon ourselves …. Fashion magazines deal with makeup in a section touchingly called ’Beauty.’

“The language of cosmetics is almost entirely euphemistic and incantatory…. In some strange way makeup persuades us to feel better and more confident. Irrationality and insecurity are the very stuff of makeup. We know that our makeup cannot look the same at the end of the day as it does in the morning, but we feel easier if we know that it was once there and once looked satisfactory.”

She can be disquieting: “There is a cult of luxurious simplicity that is often mistaken for style, but this is only a sophisticated level of good taste. The woman who extolls perfectly plain white silk shirts and perfectly plain black cashmere pants and who expresses utter loathing for frills and ruffles almost never has real style.”

And she can be appreciative. Her loving description of Biba, a now-extinct London institution, reveals the charm of a good department store: “a unique synthesis of promenade, living theatre, gallery and classroom of taste as well as marketplace.”

But I like her even better when she dislikes things, such as “miserably unflattering khaki and olive drab.”

Some targets are more serious, as in a quietly scathing denunciation of most fashion reporting: “Reporters of fashion’events’ share with motoring critics andState Department correspondents the humiliating need to depend on those they write about for information… The world’s fashion press, whenever it prates on about the divine new tendencies in a couture collection, is simply serving up propaganda for a group of successful international corporations.”

She doesn’t always hit; some essays seem slight; some are boring in spots; others, including the title essay, are almost impenetrable.

But I like her approach: philosophy and eye liner. Any fashion writer who cites Henry James to make a point, and who can send you to the dictionary as often as William F. Buckley Jr., is doing something right.

And Fraser is only rarely stuffy; she can be wickedly witty, as in describing clothes designed by designers’ underlings: “The cheaper groups are often delegated to a disciple under the supervision of the Master; many outfits look as though no one would willingly take full responsibility for them.”

Best of all, she can be perceptively funny. Describing the scene at fashion shows, for instance: “To the high level of anxiety imposed by physical conditions is added a psychological stress created by the peculiarly self-conscious and competitive nature of many professionally fashion-minded people. Even as a professional fashion woman elbows another in the ribs, she narrows her eyes to take in the details of her victim’s cunningly draped Parisian shawl. Even as she glares down to see who has crushed her toe, she assesses the style of her assailant’s shoe and the color of her hose.”

Sometimes, she is a little too raffine for me, finding wit in “the contradicting possibilities of style for heads and feet.”

But on the whole, Fraser is peerless. In her introduction, she modestly claims to have begun writing about fashion at precisely the time at which it ceased to matter. In fact, these strange times for fashion – with everything “pouring down: wide skirts, slim skirts, short ones and long; jeans and running shoes one day, teetering heels the next; trousers in every imaginable shape and length; women moving schizo-phrenically from buttoned-up board room suits to near-naked evening silk” – are all “The more cause to think about what it means to be well-dressed.

The Language of Clothes by Alison Lurie (Random House, $20). Like The Fashionable Mind, this book is an attractive physical object, with its flesh-colored jacket showing “Madame X” by John Singer Sargent. It has the look and feel of a luxe textbook, with large, square, smooth pages and lots of white space. Happily, there are lots of illustrative photographs and reproductions of paintings. Unhappily, the captions thereto are nothing more than irritating recaps of what one has just read or what one is about to read. Worse still, there is no index. (For $20, you expect the little conveniences.)

Lurie takes language as her metaphor for clothing: “Between clich坢 and madness in the language of dress are all the known varieties of speech: eloquence, wit, information, irony, propaganda, humor, pathos and even (though rarely) true poetry.” Carrying out her scheme quite literally, she analyzes the sartorial equivalent of parts of speech and foreign languages, sometimes with illuminating effect. Only occasionally does her determination to explain everything in terms of language become a little wearing.

Perhaps because fashion writing is not her profession (she is a novelist and English professor), Lurie is more playfully caustic in her approach than is Fraser.

She skillfully uses scholarly sources, most notably the work of Anne Hollander and James Laver. Much of the book is organized around Laver’s threefold scheme: the Utility Principle, the Hierarchical Principle and the Seduction Principle. (In other words, clothes are useful, reveal status and/or are sexually appealing.)

Her literary references, however, are often labored. There is a sense of straining dutifully to include footnoted information. Over the course of the book, I grew especially tired of hearing from Dickens.

Her social commentary is enjoyable: “Times have changed somewhat, and the fashion pages of magazines such as Cosmopolitan now seem to specialize in telling the career girl what to wear to charm the particular wrong type of man who reads Playboy, while the editorial pages tell her how to cope with the resulting psychic damage.”

And she is viciously funny about what she scorns: “There is also the floppy Irish tweed hat; widely advertised as becoming to all ages and sexes, it is in fact becoming to no one, but has the advantage that no type of precipitation can make it look worse than it already does.”

She is not always on target; her celebration of “the black talent for dress,” for instance, is perilously close to congratulations for a racial sense of rhythm.

The chapter that perhaps best applies to life in Dallas is “Fashion and Status,” an enjoyable examination of the rationalizations of the rich. Status is more and more a subtle thing, she points out: “The wives of our wealthy men are no longer praised for being glorious in garb; indeed, they constantly declare in interviews that they choose their clothes for ease, comfort, convenience and practicality.”

Lurie can startle with perception: The typical English punk, she says, resembles nothing so much as a “viciously angry, miserable baby.” (American New Wave proponents are dismissed as being much less effective.)

She makes an interesting connection between preppie and punk, noting that both styles have an excess of unnecessary fastenings – buckles, safety pins, straps, buttons: “Though Preppie and Punk Looks were in almost every particular as disparate as the people who wore them, both styles graphically conveyed the sense of a world, or a personality, in grave danger of coming apart.”

There are a number of unexpected things to be learned from an afternoon with this book: a guide to the significance of beards in combination with different lengths of hair in one chapter, an exploration of the subtexts of different colors in another.

A random assortment of her insights:

On consumers’ willingness to buy overpriced designer goods: “It soon became apparent that even obviously inferior merchandise, if clearly labeled and known to be extravagantly priced, would be enthusiastically purchased. There was, for instance, a great boom in the sale of very ugly brown plastic handbags, which, because they were boldy stamped with the letters ’LV were known to cost far more than similar but less ugly brown leather handbags.”

On the correlation of dress and interests: “The wearer of ’ethnic’ costumes of this sort is almost always into one or several of the following: acupuncture, astrology, cannabis, Eastern religion, ESP, folk song and folk dance, homeopathic medicine, Indian or Near-Eastern music, massage, meditation, natural childbirth and lactation, organic gardening, solar energy, vegetarianism, weaving, yoga and Zen. A complete ethnic get-up, especially one in which items from several different Third World countries are combined, usually indicates a full-time member of the counterculture, someone who is professionally involved in one of the interests above. At the other end of the spectrum, conventional clothes spiced up with exotic accessories (an Indian-print scarf and a heavy silver bracelet, for instance) suggest a merely avocational concern with one or two of the more respectable items on the list.”

Lurie has an enjoyable, loony an-thropologist’s view of the most unlikely aspect of life. Her tongue-in-cheek analysis of the significance of different colors of lingerie is a good example: “One of the most interesting moments in any incipient love affair – or in any public dressing room – comes when someone whom we find attractive takes off his or her clothes and reveals a new message written in underwear.”

She seems, incidentally, to approve of lacy, revealing black as a choice: “Women who prefer it are more likely to become bored with partners, places and sexual positions; they are also less likely to sit up in bed exclaiming tearfully ’Oh, this is awful! What am I doing?’”

And the woman who chooses red “may actually enjoy jealous scenes and prefer the sound of doors slamming and plates crashing to the music of Mozart.”

Pink, apparently, is bad news: “Pink and rose, with a good deal of lace, are favored by women who think of love as romance…. The way to their private parts is through their hearts, and the man who neglects to take this road.. .is apt to be received with hurt looks and half-suppressed sighs – if not rejected with headaches and tears.”

Generally, though Lurie has a feminist, albeit pessimistic, outlook on what our culture deems sexually attractive: “The entire history of female fashion from 1910 to the present can be viewed as a series of more or less successful campaigns to force, flatter or bribe women back into uncomfortable and awkward styles, not only for purposes of vicarious ostentation and security of sexual ownership, but also and increasingly in order to handicap them in professional competition with men.

“The high-heeled, narrow-toed shoes that for most of this century have been an essential part of woman’s costume are considered sexually attractive, partly because they make the leg look longer – an extended leg is the biological sign of sexual availability in several animal species – and because they produce what anthropologists call a ’courtship strut.’ They also make standing for any length of time painful, walking exhausting and running impossible. The halting, tiptoe gait they produce is thought provocative – perhaps because it guarantees that no woman wearing them can outrun a man who is chasing her.”

Seeing Through Clothes by Anne Hollander (Avon, $8.95, paperback). This is quite literally the heavyweight of the group, at 500 pages (50 of which are scholarly annotation).

Hollander is an art historian; her stated concern is dress and the relationship between art and life: “Each of these chapters explores the idea that in civilized Western life the clothed figure looks more persuasive and comprehensible in art than it does in reality. Since this is so, the way clothes strike the eye comes to be mediated by current visual assumptions made in pictures of dressed people.”

Seeing Through Clothes is required reading for the art history buff, extra credit for the mere fashion junkie. Its serious, academic tone makes it rough going at times, but Hollander’s ideas are so original and important that Alison Lurie summarizes many of them in The Language of Clothes.

Perhaps the most striking concept is that the body as portrayed in art changes to suit the fashions of the time: “For six centuries fashion has perpetually recreated an integrated vision of clothes and body together. There is a strong eroticism in this method, since it plays on the dialectic of dress and body while constantly changing the rules. Fashion is in itself erotically expressive, whether or not it emphasizes sex.

“People usually see one another dressed; the most general perception of bodies is filtered through clothing. When, after such conditioning, nudity is confronted directly, the observing eye may tend to idealize it automatically – to edit the visual evidence.

“The unclothed costume, when it is intended to be looked at – by an intimate, a camera, an audience or in a mirror – is subject to current standards of nude fashion. Its ’natural’ gestures and postures of the neck, head and shoulders, of the spine and legs, will be worn according to this mode, in correct period style – and consequently even nude snapshots will betray their date. People without clothes are still likely to behave as if they wore them.

“Clothes, even when omitted, cannot be escaped.”

A sobering thought, and inescapably true, I think. Look at historical nudes for proof: How odd, unappealing and flabby they look to our modern fitness-obsessed eyes.

Her ideas about comfort are also striking; she proposes that it is the idea, not the physical actuality, of comfort that is important: “Jeans worn so tight that the labia majora are clearly molded, and the wearer has to lie down to get the zipper closed, cannot exactly be called physically comfortable; it is the image of comfort that is desirable, the look of wearing something sanctioned by the fashionable ideal of comfort. Trousers are actually no more physically comfortable than skirts, with a few exceptions.”

Hot Tips by Frances Patiky Stein (Putnam, $12.95). With Hot Tips, we leave the realm of the philosophical and enter that of the practical. The subtitle is unpromising (“1000 Fashion & Beauty Tricks”) and the cover photograph is strange (a model dressed in an unappealing combination of a baggy blue-and-white-striped shirt open to the waist, coral and silver beads, too-large khaki pants, a loose metallic belt, white socks and moccasins). But the content is a gold mine of thoughtful, original strategy on how to dress well.

Stein is a former fashion magazine editor; her collaborator, art director extraordinaire Rochelle Udell, designed and illustrated the book with line drawings that are pleasing and useful.

The book has three aims: “Looking and feeling your most attractive, always; dressing with ease, simplicity; developing and maintaining a consistent, uncomplicated sense of your personal style.”

Suggestions are organized by topics, such as proportion tricks. This section alone could be worth the price of the book.

Length of line is an authorial obsession: “Your legs can never look too long!” the reader is exhorted. “Never wear anything that cuts the leg. No ankle-length pants. No midcalf skirts. No knee socks. No ankle-strapped shoes. No shoes with bows at instep. No short socks and sandals with skirts. No Bermuda shorts, mini-skirts, etc.” This is brave – and wise – advice in a season filled with knickers and culottes.

And the chapter called “Basic Wardrobe – Day” is simply invaluable. Stein succeeds in outlining the specifics of what sounds like a pipe dream: “This wardrobe is based on pieces which are all toned to work interchangeably, the theory being that this is the most classic, modern, functional way to dress. It is especially economical.”

The resulting wardrobe formulas – combinations of pieces, accessorized, are workable and pretty. Explanations of what fabrics and colors work with what style of skirt, sweater or pants are revealing and can be translated into real life.

And the advice on makeup is blessedly streamlined: Choose flattering rosy or tawny shades of makeup, depending on what light you’ll be seen in, and stick with them.

This book works best as a reminder that simple, good-looking, sexy classic shapes and colors do exist and are the best way to circumvent Fashion Madness. If only the author revealed where to find these well-cut, beautifully colored, carefully chosen clothes, this book would approach perfection.

There are a few flaws: The incomprehensibly poetic names for colors are almost useless without color photographs to define what is meant. What color, for instance, is peanut? Or vicuna? Damned if I know.

But even if the writing style is breathy and Vogue-like, the advice is still near-indispensable.

The Fashion Survival Manual by Judith H. McQuown and Odile Laugier (Everest House, $10.95, paperback). This book also is better than its alarmingly busy subtitle would suggest: “How to Find It, Fix It, Make It, Fake It on a Budget.”

Still, I wouldn’t organize my life according to the authors’ advice. Listen, for instance, to their theory about dressing for work: “It’s a shame that so many women have sacrificed their own taste for the ’Dress for Success’ strategy…. Instead of this sort of uniform dressing assuring career success, we wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it were interpreted by management as an uninspired, playing-it-safe attitude rather than the intelligent risk-taking approach characteristic of the fast-track personality so necessary for promotion in today’s business world.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but it has not been my personal experience that turquoise lizard pumps are the keys to the kingdom of upper management.

Much of the authors’ advice seems selfevident, but may bear repeating for the sake of reassuring those whom W (which has a lot of room to talk) calls Fashion Victims. To wit, stick with colors that flatter you, rather than being swayed by what is fashionable. (It is ironic that most of these books spend so much time telling you to bravely resist what is fashionable; as Kennedy Fraser and Anne Hollander point out, to claim to flout fashion is fashionable now.)

The authors are certainly dedicated to their subject. In a sample closet inventory, one reveals that she owns 31 cashmere sweaters.

They do have good, if obvious, ideas: keeping a working scrapbook of what you like from fashion magazines, for example. Although cutting out pictures would make me feel like a 5-year-old, it is undeniably an invaluable way to learn what you like, as patterns – certain silhouettes, colors – emerge.

There is also good advice about skipping trends in shoes: “Either buy classics that will look as attractive and stylish a year from now as they do today, or buy a shoe that is so eccentric that it makes a statement of style that is dateless because it is so powerful.” If I had acted according to this principle, I wouldn’t feel a pang of regret every time I look in my closet at the metallic sandals that cost $70 and were worn twice.

There are long chapters on fabric and construction. This kind of dictionary-like cataloging of the obvious (e.g., “Wool is the oldest fiber known to man”) does nothing but get on my nerves.

There is also a section on making and fiddling with clothes yourself (recycling, dyeing, appliqueing, embroidering, sewing and so forth). This is the kind of Crafts 101 mucking about that I’d just as soon skip entirely, thank you. As for alterations, all I need to know about them is my tailor’s phone number.

The authors’ shopping strategy is detailed, the chief tenet of which seems to be: Always carry a tape measure. Admittedly, whipping out a tape measure and checking sleeve and waist measurements may postpone try-on burnout (as well as get you regarded as a little eccentric by your fellow Fashion Victims). But the authors tell you this four or five times in each chapter, in case you’ve forgotten since the last. (There is, however, a clever idea for trying on clothes in public dressing rooms: Wear a leotard with a full skirt zipped over it, to be shucked at will.)

I do like the title of the last chapter, “A Biased Bibliography.” Acknowledging sources and inspiration is always a good sign. 1 found books I never knew about, along with deserved sniping at the shoddy Underground Shopper series. And the book is well-indexed.

Cheap Chic Update by Caterine Mili-naire and Carol Troy (Crown, $6.95, paperback). When the first edition of Cheap Chic was published, it was a breakthrough: breezy, grounded in real-world economics and offering a refreshing perspective. The substantially unchanged second edition is still good reading.

Here is a sane, wonderful perspective: “The most basic element of Cheap Chic is the body you hang your clothes on. Building a healthy, lively body is far cheaper than buying a lot of clothes to distract from it. And once you really know your flesh and bones, you’ll find it easier to choose the clothes you really need and love.”

What the authors consider to be ideal basics – first layers (T-shirts, jeans, turtle-necks, leotards), classics (riding jackets, boots, trench coats) and second-string classics (Brooks Brothers and Western clothes) – are discussed in turn. “In the basics,” they say, “you can remain anonymous, observe and stalk the life you’re after in a quiet and individual style.”

There is the equivalent of a celebrity cameo appearance at the end of each chapter, with true fashion confessions from the likes of Gilda Radner (“With all this new self-acceptance, it takes a lot less time to get ready in the morning”) and Fran Lebowitz (“If God meant for people to walk around in coats that have pictures of butterscotch sundaes on them, then why does He wear tattersall shirts?”)

Good Garb by William Dasheff and Laura Dearborn (Delta, $9.95, paperback). Good Garb is more prosaic and utilitarian than the rest of the lot; I read it because The Next Whole Earth Catalog (which should be in everyone’s library) recommends it. Subtitled “a practical guide to practical clothing,” this book has almost nothing to do with fashion, as can be confirmed by looking at some of the definitely dowdy selections, and nearly everything to do with dependable clothing that will last.

Here is advice on dressing to stay warm or cool as the occasion requires, and a directory of clothing available through mail-order catalogs. (The authors point out that “for the most part, you just can’t walk into a department store and start buying the kinds of clothes presented in this book.”)

Each item is clearly photographed and carefully evaluated for functional use and quality of workmanship. “With the current popularity of what some are calling ’outdoor chic’ many designers and manufacturers are producing clothes to look functional,” they disapprovingly note.

This one is a reference source for building a long-term wardrobe for the day you chuck it all and move to Maine to write a novel.

Fiorucci, the Book by Eve Babitz (Harlan Quist, $14.95, paperback). Fiorucci is about as far from the down-jacket-and-hiking-boots world of Good Garb as is possible. Eve Babitz, a wonderful LA novelist who writes like Jane Austen might have after dropping acid, provides the text to this art-director-gone-mad volume.

Babitz explains, “What Fiorucci has done is to capture a kind of international idea of teen-age promise and bottle it. Fiorucci’s aim, the illusion it creates, is that all your conventional reservations and stubborn navy blues are nothing more than prissy hangovers from a past life that is no longer useful. We’re going to have to live on what’s left, to recycle the remnants of things past, to survive. And in this future time, which is now, we’ll be glad for a little color, a little black joke in sticky orange plastic that has been wittily designed into a belt shaped like a cat with ruby rhinestones for eyes. And we’ll be glad that instead of stores that have become browbeaten into beige, elegant subtlety, there is a store with the wisdom to produce sunglasses in purple and chartreuse with glitter rainbowing into rims the size of Cadillac fins.”

But, you ask, why read a book about an Italian-based purveyor of clothing and unnecessary objects that was a really big deal in New York about four years ago -an establishment where, according to Babitz, “The clothes are crazy, the employees are from outer space and the customers are no different”?

To get a fix on the first mass-market source of intentional junky chic, perhaps. To read the memorably surreal dialogue, definitely. One discussion between the author and a Fiorucci designer concerns the designer’s wish to own a “Great Danish” dog. Another conversation concludes: “Enough of terrorism, now for satin asses.”

Dressing Sexy by Barbara Burgdorf with Sue Nirenberg (Fireside, $5.95, paperback). Imagine a 144-page-long Cosmopolitan article; the result would be Dressing Sexy. Facing the introduction is a photograph of a Vampirella-like model in a leather jumpsuit open to the navel, representative of the advice to follow.

I think there is a good chance that, like Michael Korda’s Success!, which was widely followed as a serious manual, this book is actually a work of satire. In either case, like Fiorucci, it makes entertaining reading for women trying to break the bonds of terminal good taste.

For those who feel “utterly beige,” as the authors sum it up, this book may be the ticket. And the how-to-be-a-devas-tating-siren advice is often riotously funny. The presumably timid reader is first taunted with the example of her more daring sisters: “They dress for men -and admit it. They don’t buy socks; they don’t buy loden coats; they don’t buy crew-neck sweaters.”

The Sensual Dresser by Brigitte Nioche (Perigee, $6.95, paperback). Addressing the same subject as Dressing Sexy, The Sensual Dresser is less determinedly outrageous and more quietly encouraging. While Dressing Sexy commands, “Try to achieve the after-five look before five,” The Sensual Dresser states, “Certainly, looking sensual does not exclude being elegant, stylish and appropriately dressed.”

There is a lot of good advice here. On color: “The contrast [with skin tone] a color creates is very important because contrasts bring out vitality, which is associated, even if unconsciously, with sexuality.” (For this reason, she thinks beige and flesh-colored lingerie is not a good idea.) Nioche also advises sticking to two main colors, eschewing flamboyant ones if they make you feel uncomfortable, and keeping unflattering colors away from the face.

She suggests acquiring fewer but better clothes: “It is not important to look different every day, but it is important to look good every day.”

The apparently foreign-born author (she thanks her editor “for turning my foreign-sounding English into American English”) is charmingly well-mannered, suggesting bras with front openings since they are “more gracious when getting undressed.” She seems to feel a maternal empathy for the reader: “Have you always dreamed of owning a pair of leather pants, but been unable to because they’re so expensive? Well, don’t feel bad; you haven’t missed a thing. Leather pants are very, very warm and not as comfortable as they look.”

Nioche has what every good fashion writer needs: sense and sensibility.

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