The headlong pace of the seasonal haute couture collections, which over the last decade have taken as text an inexhaustible, onrushing stream of inspirations: refugees, prisoners, Hasidic Jews, porn stars, heroin addicts, fighter pilots, the Amish, 1970's porn stars, amputees, the guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra, Catholic nuns, brownshirts, surgeons, Dickensian street urchins, fictional 1970's porn stars, and so forth.