Star Struck Style

Marilyn Manson (source: IMDB)

January 5 is Marilyn Manson’s birthday.

I owe something to Marilyn Manson. Bear with me while I tell this story . . .

I suppose that I was about fifteen when I really started to appreciate fashion. Like a lot of teenagers, though, my sense of fashion quickly started to turn toward what was odd, or different, or shocking — I just liked whatever seemed weird to me at the time.

The next phase I went through was the one where I discovered “taste.” Of course, it was more fun to have bad taste in the mid-eighties than it was to have good taste. It was the decade of over-the-top everything and defying convention with exuberant excess.

By the late eighties and early nineties, however, I was exploring ideas of beauty more than notions of taste. I was asking myself why this was considered to…