‘What do you think?” said my daughter, parading up and down the kitchen in a pale pink dress and a pair of heavy black lace-up ankle boots with two-inch platforms. They looked like the sort of thing that polio victims used to wear to increase the length of a limb foreshortened by disease. Torn between honesty and appeasement I made, as usual, the wrong choice. “The dress is lovely. Couldn’t you wear some pretty shoes with it?”

“Omigod you just want to make me look like something out of your childhood,” she said, and stomped out. The boots may be hideous, but they emote effectively.

I thought of this conversation while reading a report from Global Future, a think tank, on “openness”. The young are