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"  Fashion has become one giant blur to me. When I started in this industry in the early &amp;#039;90s, the structure of the design world was easy to understand. There was an elite group of talent at the top of a stylish pyramid. They designed ridiculously expensive clothes and made fashion headlines with the latest trends, while editors like me flocked to Paris and Milan to ooh and aah over these creations every six months. All other fashion outside of this rarefied world was considered\u2014good heavens!\u2014mall clothes: the poorly dressed black sheep of a very chic family. Then in 2004, things went topsy-turvy. That&amp;#039;s the year Karl Lagerfeld declared it cool to love cheap clothes by partnering up with H&amp;amp;amp;M, the affordable, trendy Swedish retailer. The deal single-handedly ushered in a new fashion era\u2014&amp;quot;the collaboration&amp;quot; between couturiers and mass-appeal stores. A Karl Lagerfeld original for less than $50? You bet! Today, those same top-of-thepyramid designers are still showing in Europe and we continue to ooh over their creations, but they embrace those previously unmentionable mall clothes. And now we see this mash-up of style everywhere: Comme des Gar\u00E7ons launches a new collection for H&amp;amp;amp;M! Alexander McQueen signs with Target! Pierre Hardy designs shoes for the Gap! Juicy Couture does couture! In fact, if our new first lady can wear a $148 Donna Rico dress one day and a $420 Azzedine Ala\u00EFa belt on another, then what exactly is the fashion message for this new era? Can we all really embrace the high with the low? The answer, of course: Yes We Can! This month, I wanted to share my styling tips on this season&amp;#039;s seven strongest trends while performing a fun experiment to test the blurred line between high and low. To do this, I dressed a model in two versions of a similar look. Then I quizzed 100 tourists and shoppers in Manhattan on which they thought was more expensive. The verdict? Many were baffled. See if you are, too! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/a9726/fashion-foolery-284983/>