Every city has street life of some kind. What arguably distinguishes ours are the extremes of self-awareness that go along with it, as well as the constant flux. In a city like Rome, there is a very particular look that dominates, a blend of style and physique; the prevailing aesthetic changes almost not at all. Italian women (and men) tend to favor long, slightly messy hair that they push around impatiently. The women play up their hourglass figures—the heirs of Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, they allow their gesticulations to become an extension of their looks. In Paris, for women, it’s seen as almost impolite to veer from the perfectly groomed, skirt-suited norm. Anyone who does is condemned to look like a perennial teenager. For men, in their narrow-cut suits, the look hasn’t changed since 1968. In London, which can rightfully claim its own rebel-beauty heritage (from Mary Quant to Sid Vicious to Alexander McQueen), the streets are now full of men and women with Hershberger-ized haircuts and Seven jeans. They all seem like Manhattanite impersonators.

In New York, of course, you hardly notice those people anymore. New Yorkers want to stand out. They’re constantly reinventing their appearance. They know you’re looking, and they’re looking right back.

If beauty has become more democratic, as some argue, one reason is that it can now be easily bought. Elaine Showalter, author of The Female Malady, suggests that “there is a feeling now that anyone can be beautiful who makes the effort, that beauty in a sense is a right. Now, is this a good thing or a bad thing? In some ways, it does democratize beauty. And if beauty is, as all the polls say, a major factor in success, then everybody at least has a crack at it. On the other hand, the beauty stakes continually go up, and once it’s democratized, then finer and finer distinctions are made. It seems to me that every year there’s a new part of the body that’s offered up for correction, and you never knew it had standards. What body part is immune? Since the bikini wax, as far as I can tell, none.”

The July issue of Italian Vogue contains a photo-essay by Steven Meisel that is the talk of the beauty business. Over 80 beautifully laid-out pages, Linda Evangelista checks in for plastic surgery. She is wearing spectacular clothes—a black Moschino suit, a Lanvin dress—smoking as she waits on the operating table, talking on her cell phone as her legs are waxed and lipo’ed simultaneously. So far, so glamorous: The bandages around her head and chin are made to look like the kind of thing André Courrèges might have designed in 1964. But the final frames show Evangelista—and if there were a single most beautiful woman in the world, she would be her—out cold under the knife. Her neck area is blotchy, reminiscent of the terrible photos of Marilyn Monroe’s corpse. Blood is seeping from cuts around her jaw and eyelids. She looks both dead and full of bright life, as if decorated for some new form of Kabuki theater.

The point of these photographs is not that they show the gory truth behind plastic surgery—though, of course, for some readers of Vogue, they might. The point is that it’s just another form of makeup. The essay (subtitled “Between Art, Realism and Irony”) constitutes some kind of happening, a fashion “act,” along the lines of the work of performance artist Orlan, who wore Issey Miyake for real facial surgery performed by doctors in Paco Rabanne gowns and relayed the procedure live by satellite into art galleries all over the world. It’s beauty against beauty, and it makes you wonder: What does beauty want to say about itself?

The influential makeup artist James Kaliardos says that “if you’re too polished or Botoxed, it just doesn’t work” in New York, that the city has “a harder, more honest edge,” and that New Yorkers have “a quick, unlabored approach to beauty.” Isaac Mizrahi says that when he was a kid, he always liked the idea of growing old in New York because he’d “always noticed gorgeous-looking old people on the street more than gorgeous young people. That seems truer lately because it seems to me that the least sexy-gorgeous person is one of those dime-a-dozen sexy, gorgeous, young things you see at those B clubs in high heels and bias-cut satin dresses. The most unsexy guy is one of those ‘sexy’ ones with giant muscles and a tan.”

A recent poll found that while only 2 percent of women worldwide said they thought of themselves as beautiful, 90 percent of women in the U.S. said their looks were average or better. There are only two possible explanations: either Americans are more narcissistic (or possibly just more honest) than the rest of the world—or that poll was conducted in New York City.

Indeed, if you glance at the personal ads online and in New York papers and magazines, there is remarkably little demand for beauty per se, maybe because we take it for granted. Though you might find the odd request for a “flexible body” or an “Olivia de Havilland look-alike,” what we seek is generally based on what we think of as character, however superficially rendered. “Intellectual type”; “bookish nerd seeks slightly sexier bookish nerd”; “art vixen”; “passionate, extraordinary, affluent gentleman”; “bad girl gone good”; “guy w/access to dirty panties”; “woman w/cultural ints & human frailties.”

Most New Yorkers, if pressed, would concede that they love living in a city where they are surrounded by so many stunning faces and stylish ways—even if that fact causes us, on occasion, to run home screaming, spasmodic wrecks of inferiority and anxiety. We take pride in the city’s human splendor. It is one of our attractions, like skyscrapers and good restaurants and intelligent talk.

Still, this is somehow hard to confess. We are taught that where romance is concerned, looks are unimportant. Every novel, every screwball comedy evokes a meeting of minds. The phrase “meeting of looks” does not exist. But how many couples do you know who reflect each other’s appearance?

I know a couple who met some years ago at Coffee Shop in Union Square. She was a waitress there and a model. He went for lunch and to look at her. She was Russian, he was English. Yet they shared such identically chiseled faces, it was a wonder they didn’t cut themselves when they eventually kissed. Although they couldn’t really speak to each other, they fell in love and he paid for her to have English lessons. Then he asked her to marry him, and they were still happily together the last I heard. Sometimes beauty is enough.

Related:

• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Gaby Wood
• Table of Contents: August 15, 2005 issue of New York | Subscribe!