The thud wasn’t as loud when this year’s September Vogue hit my doormat, but my heart raced just as fast. I couldn’t wait to tear open the magazine and dive into the very best part of it: the ads. No one reads Vogue, thanks to Anna Wintour’s scan-and-run editing; glean the headlines and captions, and you’ve got enough fashion froth to last a season’s worth cocktail parties. But the ads, those expensive one-sheets aimed at luring people back into boutiques, are so layered with meaning, I spend hours with them.

“Back-to-work-at-my-glam-city-job-indeed-I-was-not-layed-off” is the dominant theme for advertisers this fall. Women stride purposefully through cityscapes and into marble-lined buildings in ads for Anne Klein, Bally, Piazza Sempione, Express, and, thankfully, Burberry Prorsum (whose past rumpled-Brit visuals were annoyingly twee). Who doesn’t feel that frisson of excitement when the first cold wind blows, prompting you to pull out—or buy—a new pullover? Who can deny that it was always fun to go back to school after summer? Fashion companies know that in this tough economy, workwear is the sort of purchase tightfisted women will still splurge on.

Calvin Klein and Mui Mui, notably, took another direction. Klein’s black-and-whites give off a faint whiff of Horace Bristol’s Dustbowl photos of the hardscrabble 1930s. One model’s dress has holes in it and her coif has the “not done” effect that takes hairdressers hours to achieve. In the Mui Mui visuals, wader boots suggest that the women depicted may have left their jobs, but, like Sarah Palin, can simply fish for dinner. This is the new luxury: not being afraid to look jobless.

Then there are the images of women who never needed a paycheck, leftovers from the time when a woman’s work was quaint. Offenders of the hoary aristocrats-in-country-homes trope are Alberta Ferretti, Tod’s and Mulberry. The models look like they have neither an appointment to get to nor a thought in their head.

Lesbianism suffered a blow. Only Cesare Paciotti depicted women in a muff-diving encounter; even Longchamp, which has pushed Sapphism in past ads, posed its models in a more chummy set-up. The disco, similarly, took a hit as the fantasy realm. BCBG, Gucci and, it goes without saying, Cavalli, conjured dance-floor crowds for their ads, although no one looks like they’re having much fun.

The Weimar Republic looks to secede Russia as the Eastern European fashion inspiration. High-contrast ads for Armani, Bottega Veneta, and Valentino show severe-looking women, pale with dark makeup, hair pulled back, glowering into space. Their expressions suggest they have just realized that “investment” purchases has led them into five-figure debt. Undaunted, they will ride out the recession in fierce glamour. Russia has become too associated with mafia money and crass consumerism. 1920s and 1930s Bohemia, on the other hand, appears steeped in kooky artiness.

Michael Kors, the first legitimate designers to successfully whore himself out on reality TV, pushes a red-carpet fantasy in his multi-page campaign. But he stands alone; no one else of importance is doing the Hollywood thing this season, probably because too much footage has exposed the city, and the industry, as the deeply unglamorous beast it really is.

Balmain is one of my favorite ads, though the outfit, cribbed from Dior Homme, doesn’t appeal. A rocker-chic woman trudges down a long moving walkway, the sort you find in European subway hubs. This is my fantasy: public transportation that’s clean–and free of any other human.

In the inevitable ready-to-screw category we find Hudson jeans, with a gap-toothed Bardot lookalike; Jimmy Choo, with a Sienna Miller lookalike; and of course, Guess, which needs no explanation.

I was surprised to see an American Apparel ad in the front section of Vogue. On second look, I realized it was Gap’s “Born to Fit” campaign, lifting wholesale Dov Charney’s font and layout.

There’s a narcissism to the Dior and Vuitton ads that throb with car-crash intrigue. In the Lady Dior slick, French actress Marion Cotillard gazes dreamily into a mirror, while a copy of the book The Catcher in the Rye peeks out from her It bag. Get it? I don’t. As for a solarized Madonna in designer bunny ears for Louis Vuitton? Well, it’s less laughable that the puffy lace number and mega-cross she wears in a YouTube video promo for her directorial debut. What was that film called? I Am Laughing Because You Are Insane?

-Gracie Reynolds