Bill Clinton on looking bad (the "heroin chic" in advertising).

Here's one for you.

President Bill Clinton recently came out raging against the fashion industry for "heroin chic" which, with its drugged-looking, unkempt, white-as-Warhol models, is everywhere these days. "The glorification of heroin is not creative, it's destructive," he said. "It's not beautiful, it is ugly. This is not about art. It's about life and death, and glorifying death is not good for any society."

Clinton, the first president to grasp the post-sixties youth culture, said recent fashion images made heroin seem glamorous, sexy and cool. "As some of the people in those images start to die now, it becomes obvious that is not true. You do not need to glamorize addiction to sell clothes."

Once again, the president of the United States has missed the point, though he's not alone.

While Calvin Klein's heavy use of the wasted-heroin-look in advertising campaigns has prompted at least one FBI investigation, all his critics say is that, having gone through a drug treatment course in 1988, he should know better.

The issue of "heroin chic" has been simmering for several years, but since the fatal overdose three months ago of fashion-photographer David Sorrenti, whose work often caught the "junkie aesthetic," the veil over the fashion world's worst-kept secret has begun to lift.

"I think some people went overboard," says Patrick McCarthy, editorial director of fashion magazine W. "They don't do it deliberately, but people got carried away by the glamour of the decadence."

In British advertising, it's the same story. Ads in London's Underground preach that having a drink is a good way to get through the day--so long as it's the right brand. Mainstream periodicals such as ES Magazine routinely run fashion features of concentration-camp chic in which all the models appear decidedly unwell. And in more controversial, avant garde magazines such as Dazed and Confused, where the trend is even more extreme, photos of young women eagerly licking bloody cleavers and razor blades are standard fare.

Sure, it's abhorrent. But one must ask why such images exist at all and what they are really saying? The Benetton commercials featuring boat people and AIDS victims that caused so much heat a few years ago were not accidental. Nor were they an ill-conceived or inaccurate reflection of life in the 1990s.

One need only remember Dior's New Look and the innocent Pepsodent ads of the 1950s to understand how far we've regressed, however fashionably.

But it must also be remembered that while advertising is intended to increase sales, it is an art form too.

Art invariably reflects the society which produces it. Unfortunately, most people expect art to be beautiful when its fundamental purpose is truth, however hideous.

While Clinton rails against the ugliness of "heroin chic," and critics rant on about the fashion world's refusal to accept responsibility for either drug abuse among its own or for those it influences, the truth underlying such images is more profound.

Ironically, it was Sorrenti's own mother Francesca, herself a well-known photographer, who saw it most clearly. "Heroin chic isn't what we are projecting," she said in an open letter to magazine editors and advertisers. "It's what we are!"

Yes, that's the point.

It's no good fuming about how awful it is that so many sick images fill our advertising pages and screens if such images are, in fact, an accurate reflection of the culture that feeds them.

Yet once again, Clinton, like the media culture that supports him, has tried to make himself look good by hitting all the high notes of moral outrage in a 30-second soundbyte. But if you pay attention, his message reveals him to be a man for whom appearance, surfaces and image are everything, a man more preoccupied with how horrible such advertising looks rather than what it tells us about our culture. But being the superficial guy he is--all image and no substance--it would never occur to him to look behind the Brooks Brothers for the deeper truth, however dreadful.

In the old days, persons who spoke against evil but did nothing were called hypocrites, whited sepulchres. Today, they're called celebrities.

Too strong, you say?

Think about it. While Clinton's comments will undoubtedly trigger the usual harrumphing about how the public won't stand for this, everybody knows such pieties are empty rhetoric and that any attempts to stem the tide of perversity and decadence will be criticised as censorship, an attack on personal freedom--which includes the right to kill ourselves if we feel like it.

Perhaps New York advertising columnist Barbara Lippert understands this better than most. In her opinion, Clinton's comments were not only shallow but simplistic.

"It's the whole culture of youth. It's movies and books and videos and music and commercials, not only fashion," she said. "In this media culture, to get attention, there's been every sex act and every tattoo and every piercing possible and they have to keep getting more and more extreme until they get to death.

"Now they've done death."

Who says there's no truth in advertising?

Not me.