Calvin Klein has always been known more for his ads than his clothes; in his case the image preceded the product. He started with the provocative Brooke Shields jeans ads, and moved through the Marky Mark underwear campaign, then onto heroin chic and a campaign featuring pubescent-looking girls that drew criticism from church groups and politicians and was finally pulled. Klein’s clothes are conventional, but his world, as seen through the ads, is a dark, sexualized place. His considerable empire was built not on homely staples like jeans and underwear, but on this fictional place. His photo spreads project a casual amorality (She was fifteen? She looked eighteen.). The people in his ads look as if they stay out late, develop addictions, and end up (as Klein himself did) at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota.

Ralph Lauren’s ad campaigns form an epic narrative that catalogues his Gatsby world in meticulous detail. For decades now, we have followed these languidly beautiful people through a smartly dressed childhood, into prep school, onto the rowing team at Yale, and finally to the front yard of the house in Connecticut, flanked by golden retrievers. Lauren’s narrative is essentially filmic, and he has spoken of the influence of film in his life. You can see the elegance of 1940s-era movies in his collections. The life he conjures is, above all, filled with grace, the world seen in films by a boy from the Bronx, where Lauren grew up as Ralph Lifschitz.

Donna Karan went one step further and made an actual film, producing an eighteen-minute ad to showcase her 2003 collection. Titled “New York Stories,” it featured well-dressed models living in the Chelsea Hotel, looking for work, an abiding local fable: kid from the heartland makes good in the Big Apple. The New York-stories theme echoed throughout subsequent collections.

In 2004, Alexander McQueen used Peter Weir’s moody 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock as inspiration. But there are limits to using film as a narrative touchstone. British designer John Galliano’s Spring 2005 collection included a theme that echoed the very popular Pirates of the Caribbean and its sequel, Dead Man’s Chest. When interviewed on Fashion TV, Galliano was dressed as a pirate, including his trademark Errol Flynn moustache, and he told an interviewer that pirates are dangerous and that is why we are drawn to them. Galliano himself didn’t look dangerous. He looked as if he was off to entertain a group of five-year-olds at a birthday party. Galliano’s collection seemed like a film tie-in, like those plastic drinking cups with pictures of The Incredibles on them. The fact that the film was the sequel to a movie that was itself based on a ride at Disney World brought the dilution level to gloomy postmodern depths. Unsurprisingly, Bay Street wasn’t filled with fund managers dressed as pirates last summer, despite the obvious parallels. If the clothes aren’t really meant to be worn, what are they meant for?

When a Fendi executive was asked why they paid Karl Lagerfeld so much when his ready-to-wear collection wasn’t being bought by stores, he replied, “[Karl] gets reviewed and photographed and he keeps the whole machine going.” The machine relies not on clothes but on images that lend themselves to the media. Lagerfeld, with his Don Cherry collars, his severe diet, and that Teutonic head sitting atop his schematic body, looks like a T-ball game waiting to happen. He is eerie looking and reliably (even tediously) outrageous, and so he is often photographed and often interviewed. He is an effective commodity, much more effective than his clothes.

Meanwhile, back at the Dolce & Gabbana ranch, the models are hard at work, but without their fallen colleague. Perhaps there was a small, sad service (“Hansel gave his cheekbones to this industry . . . ” ). The surviving models are soldiering on in leather jackets and jaunty silk scarves. One of them has a gun. Another has a bleeding hole in his forehead, lying dead at the feet of a woman who is naked except for knee-high boots. Their teased hair and expressions of forced nonchalance suggest that life is a cruel, fleeting thing; that just as Beckett suggested, woman gives birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more. Though I might be reading too much into it.