Clothes make the person -- or rather, the persona. Time's Fall 2006 Style & Design Supplement: "Going for Gold, The Art of the Luxury Deal,“ explains why luxury fashion -- haute couture that's increasingly taken from the streets, refined, given elite prices, and then sent back down the social pyramid -- is no longer the exclusive province of fashion designers. Increasingly, corporations are determining what gets absorbed into the luxury fashion melange before being dispensed to the rest of us. In ”Who's Got the Power?“ Marion Hume observes:

ONCE UPON A TIME, FASHION WAS A BUSINESS defined solely by creative talent. A bubble skirt, a padlocked handbag or any other commercial success was attributed to the ”artiste“ who sketched out his or her dreams and somehow, with just a hemline or a dangly tchotchke, was able to seize the zeitgeist and magically send millions of cash registers ringing. Every six months, newspapers and fashion journals would feature quaint headlines announcing the dictates of those creative types—PARIS SAYS PANTS! Nobody paid much attention to the anxious number crunchers in the back offices studiously poring over sales estimates and marketing budgets.

That was then.

Global luxury has wrought billion-dollar businesses and dizzying amounts of dealmaking—which means that today's fashion stars aren't only those manufactured in schools like London's Central Saint Martins or New York City's Parsons. A whole new breed of fashion influencers are formed at hard-core business schools like Harvard, HEC, ESSEC and Bocconi where the syllabus doesn't include patternmaking but rather an altogether different kind of intangible skill set, namely the ability to manage intensely creative talent. Dior president Sidney Toledano, a graduate of the top French engineering school ECP, compares the structure of his company and his role within it to a nuclear power plant: the brand is the sun, the source of raw energy, the designer supplies the radium to set off fusion, and those highly skilled managers run the plant.

It turns out the managers aren't just managing the talent; they're directing it. Those trendy dresses and rustic jeans we wear as publicly illustrative tokens of our fashion sense aren't necessarily a designer's dream. They could very well be the result of a textile plant manager in China, where much of the world's clothing is produced, recommending -- prior to the designs being drawn up for the luxury crowd -- that knockoffs will be more economically produced if the luxury design conforms to thus and so. What's so luxurious about haute-couture if it's the consuming hoi poloi that's calling the shots via its purchases at Wal-Mart? God Lord, it's fashion socialism, and the global corporations are waving the flag of revolution!

The Supplement's two-dozen articles are available online, written and illustrated in the esteemed Time tradition but spunked up for a younger breed of readers. They got and kept my surprised attention. Hey, except for adoring Heidi Klum's Project Runway (which I appreciate even more after reading the Supplement), what does fashion mean to me? A lot, I learned. Or it should. Our clothing is the most intimate projection of our personalities that others experience, short of the bedroom. Knowing from whence fashion choices arise is real power. Being able to avoid the banal and achieve a truly authentic presentation of one's self is no mean feat.