"For all the accusations of narcissism with which fashion gets pelted, the industry has remarkably little interest in making people look attractive."

Generally speaking, the place of models in fashion writing is far greater than need be. I don't want to hear about the village they were discovered in in Lithuania, the Italian soccer player with whom they're romantically linked, or what brand of jeans they wear in their free time.

I make an exception, however, for the NYT Model-morphosis feature. To anyone cynical, and with decent vision, it's clear that the "before" pictures are rarely if ever makeup-free. But the transformation bar is great fun, kind of like doing the makeup on one half of your face, then the next, to see what it is the makeup actually does. And maybe because full bodies don't enter into it, the fact that the images are of models isn't as distracting as it is when the topic at hand is, say, form-fitting dresses.

Meanwhile, the bulk of the commenters - straight men (or, requisite disclaimer, people who so present themselves online) - find the feature upsetting. They think the models look so much better bare-faced. What's with all the paint?

As I've said before, it's a good thing for women that men are attracted to a wider range of (wider) women than found on the runways. And it's absurd to celebrate the runway as a feminist space, where the male gaze is for once not catered to. I mean, far be it for me to complain that a touch of concealer, eyeliner, and chapstick is viewed as a more attractive look than some kind of garish art project that I wouldn't know how to achieve even with all the time in the world.

Yet there is something off-putting about the way men-who-just-don't-get-fashion march into the discussion. They seem to miss... that a runway is a stage, this makeup stage paint, not a suggestion for what your girlfriend might wear this Saturday night. That the look needs to be not only visible but also uniform - whereas day-to-day, women choose makeup to emphasize specific features, runways are all about one look for all. That the makeup is in part intended to disguise the youth of the models, to make it easier to suspend disbelief and imagine that a 16-year-old is really middle-aged - in real life a gorgeous 9th grader might not think to go in 45-year-old-woman drag. That makeup isn't permanent - a surprising number of the commenters (and some of these may be female commenters) pity the models, not because they need to weigh four pounds, or live in cramped apartments far from their families and their junior high schools, but because someone has put unflattering makeup on them, as though soap had not been invented. That the goal of runway paint isn't prettiness - people who I suspect would never dare enter art museums and ask why not everything there was a painting of a kitten nevertheless confidently announce that the goal of a fashion show is to present women at their easy-on-the-eyes.

But mostly, they miss that the way runway models are made up at a fashion show isn't about pleasing straight men. Fashion isn't about pleasing straight men. I mean, they realize this, but they see it as a strike against the fashion industry. Because this is how the commenters present it - that their preference for (what they perceive to be) bare-faced is evidence that the fashion industry is one big hoax. Women are being suckered into buying makeup and clothes that don't even make them more appealing to men!

Where to go from here? One might start with Hadley Freeman's brilliant take on the matter: "Is fashion a cruel anti-female industry whose sole goal is to make women feel bad about themselves and force them to wear crippling, uncomfortable apparel? Or is it empowering, allowing women to wear clothes that appeal primarily to themselves as opposed to men?" And, and! "For all the accusations of narcissism with which fashion gets pelted, the industry has remarkably ­little interest in making people look attractive. It's interested in making people look different." Yes, this.

Still, I think the relationship between What Men Want and Fashion is a bit more complicated than all that. In a sense, if it were up to straight men, there'd be no Fashion, just a timeless get-up pairing cleavage, long hair, miniskirts, and heels. In another, however, one that acknowledges straight men as complex human beings, there's the fact that looking of-the-moment (or of a particular subculture) is something humans value in other humans, across the gender and sexuality spectrum. A 1988 version of Sexy Women's Outfit would look off even to self-professed fashion-ignorant men of today. All of this is to say, even in dressing without pleasing men as a goal, women may end up doing so unintentionally, because looking current is a way of appealing to others generally.