The Meridian Archive
MER
July 1997
The Look and the Death Behind It

The Look and the Death Behind It

Closed mid-June 1997 · On stands late June 1997

The Front

The President's Remarks

President Clinton condemns 'heroin chic' fashion imagery in an address to the U.S. Conference of Mayors

The Meridian Index: July

Fireworks-permit applications filed with small-town fire marshals, the average price of a lakeside cottage rental, sunscreen sales nationwide since Memorial Day

The Bookstore With No Store

An online retailer that sells nothing but books goes public in May at a valuation the business desk has to explain twice; there is no shelf, no clerk, no lease — the piece admits, a beat late, that it doesn't yet have a vocabulary for a company like this. Assigned on Dez Washington's memo arguing the desk stop treating the thing as a curiosity and start treating it as an industry

The Essay

The Foreign File

The Flag Comes Down

Final preparations proceed for the handover of Hong Kong from British to Chinese sovereignty, set for July 1st

The Feature Well

The Silence Breaks

Davide Sorrenti's death and President Clinton's condemnation force the fashion industry to answer for the heroin-chic look it had defended as aesthetics

The City

The Back

The Fortune That Wasn't

Roseanne closes its run revealing the family's fortune as a fiction the whole season had been