failed but honorable gestures

"A certain sartorial intersection of glamour and trash, a louche but lovely address at which reside faux leopard anything, cloches, art deco jewlery, silk scarves worn as head wraps, tiny black dresses worn with a black leather jacket. Lynda looked wonderful, and she loved looking unlike anyone else; she wanted her unlikeness to be seen and appreciated. Her style, as her body fell apart over time, became more and more the sort she admired, a panache which triumphed over difficutly without exactly concealing it; she adored Frida Kahlo, Marianne Faithfull, Lotte Lenya, women made more beautiful by a certain broken quality about them, by the acknowledgment of that quality ... the artifice of making oneself be whomever one liked always revealed the reality beneath, and therein lay both its failure and a good part of its charm. She was a lover of appearances, of performance, of bravura, of failed but honorable gestures toward beauty.

Because the world was ruined, wasn't it, and how could its children not be ruined as well?" (96)

Doty, Mark. Heaven's Coast. New York: HarperCollins, 1987.