If we accept as a given in the fashion/celebrity complex that public figures sell clothes (and cars and cookies) — that their carefully constructed image transfers itself to the stuff that surrounds them, along the way suggesting that if we get that stuff, too, we might be more like them — does it then follow that the obverse is true? That the tarnishing of public figures tarnishes that which is associated with them, too?
Last week, Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan ordered the National Football League and the N.F.L. Players Association to engage in settlement talks (a lawyer in Texas helpfully posted the judge’s order on Twitter); N.