Even Rags itself occasionally succumbs to the temptation to laugh. Photo features on cosmetic-counter saleswomen ("a salute to the painted ladies") and middle-aged, uniformed delicatessen waitresses ("they always seem to accent their service with a gourmet seasoning called soul") are often less cruel than they first appear. For, if anything, the corporation is Rags's enemy and the corporation's victims, especially when cast in the role of cultural or economic underdogs, often become Rags's friends. In fact, the November cover story on girl-watching hardhats even manages, however perversely, to suggest that New York's construction workers may be the only men who really understand fashion. "Only a hardhat can separate the 'B' from the 'S' when it comes to fashion," Blaire Sabol concludes. So, while "you don't have to take a hardhat to lunch, just listen to him for once."

THE UNDERLYING assumption, here and in a lot of what Rags prints, is that bodies, regardless of sex are meant to be sexy. Bodies are to be decorated and adorned and, yes, even treated as objects, for only by individualizing each physical unit do you begin to get at the human potential it possesses. The argument is a refreshing one, particularly after the semi-Puritanical strain that infects certain women liberationists, though hardly the platitude on which one can slide home.

For while the first issues of Rags, by necessity, grope around a good deal in search of their thing, there is a real identity crisis that sends shivers through the magazine's stapled spine. For you don't aspire to be a successful, national monthly without being driven to drink the same polluted waters on which the competition thrives. February's Special Report on Boutiques and Hip Capitalism posed the question quite succinctly:

Can any revolution be financed by $200 leather jackets? Why not? After all, if you believe in the revolution, it shouldn't matter where the money comes from. On the other hand, the moral fabric of such an operation feels a little like chintz. But that's probably middle-class folk-purist inverse snobbism. Or is it?

Well, while you're hassling it, you might also try to figure what you do with advertising layouts like an 8-page spread by Truth and Soul Fashions that puts models aping 7 world famous revolutions, from "Geronimo and the Indian Revolution" to "Carrie Nation and the Revolution for Prohibition," in poor-boy sweaters, mock ammunition belts and knickers? And how do you claim that a cover story on Fashion Fascism, The Politics of the Midi, is any more anti-Establishment than Time magazine's cover attack on John Fairchild of Women's Wear Daily? What about the failure to produce writing and reportage worthy of the movement? (For Rags often follows the meandering, point-of-viewless perspective of Rolling Stone's sprawling, directionless Altamonte coverage. Much of the rest-sentences like "Shoplifting at Macy's is like cunnilingus-illegal but you probably won't get busted for it"-is even more of a calculating attempt to be Where It's At.) And how do you explain dumb little typos like "With a few exceptions, the counter-culture business heads get thrashed along with Cambridge Bank and Trust"?

ESCHEWING ideology for style, Rags has only begun to answer such questions. But the inevitable answers are there to be found. Although refusing to resolve the issue in its Boutique number, Rags reporters do make it clear that individual craftsmanship, even if it embroils you in buying and selling and warding off rip-offs, is pretty cool-as long as you watch where your head is at. And Rags admires those who break corporate rules-whether they be designers on the Lower East Side or secretaries who flaunt the company's dress code. There is a real effort being made throughout Rags's pages to return to a simple era; and despite all those nasty advertisers, by the very nature of its subject, fewer corporate shadows darken Rags than they do Rolling Stone.

More significantly (?), Rags has introduced an advice-to-the-small-businessman column, authored by Philip Freund, himself former business manager for RS. "Like everything else in life, business is neither a good nor an evil," Freund writes. "What makes the business trip a bummer is the same basic number that screws up almost everything that man attempts. The Uglies-greed, competition, false pride. . ." To combat the Uglies, Freund recommends self-discipline: "Don't try to get too big too fast, don't engage in competition for its own sake, dig what you're doing." Wow, man, self-discipline! Some trip.

It's do you own thing, sure, but it's also more than that. Rags's call to revolution is really more of a nostalgic attempt to return to the nineteenth century. It's a clarion call reverberating with notes of simplistic iconoclasm, Emersonian self-reliance, a Thoreauvian communion with the land, and, ironically enough, a championship of the small businessman. Spelt out in those terms, it's just not that revolutionary. More like Consciousness I in bell-bottoms. Which means that where Rags is at may be just about midway between the late Herbert Hoover and the early Yves St. Laurent.