Someone I know said that only the fashion industry knows that it is the fashion business. The implication of it was the the so-called "serious" areas of public life is also in the fashion business without realizing it.
I would take one exceptions - politics. Those clowns know darn well they are in the fashion business and stretch that beyond what fashion industry would dare to do. The first rule of fashion is attention grabbing - but few fashion designers would do it by, say, using paraphernalia from the Nazi death camps or American slavery (albeit Lars von Trier triad, without much success). Politicians have no such qualms - Ahmadinejad made publicity by Holocaust denial, and his fellow clowns from the Republican Party do it by invoking Southern slavery paraphernalia. Clown Berlusconi's sex scandals from a third rate soap opera are in the same league, but still withing the fashion industry bounds. It is pure circus but it works in attracting attention of stupid people. Democracy - or rather electioneering - is a circus and a silly popularity contest. That is why popular entertainment figures like Reagan, Schwartzenegger or Berlusconi fare so well in politics.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."