For girls, maxi skirts and dresses, and tights patterned with dated or otherwise "ironic" patterns are a smart investment.
India is both a crucial and an ironic manifestation of this pattern.
Several years ago Piers Paul Read predicted "the end of the Catholic novel that flourished in Britain from Cardinal Newman to Graham Greene" and, he might have added, himself, since his 1969 debut Monk Dawson established the pattern for darkly ironic but deeply reactionary novels about church politics and repentant sinners.
Frank Stella, who wowed New York in the Fifties with his Black Paintings, has created a design - nudgingly ironic cardboard sewing-machines and blow-ups of paper patterns, a chic, stylised boiler-room - that is occasionally disarming and always distracting.
More to the point, the breakup of the photos into a jigsaw play pattern gives the viewer an ironic distance from the events.
A painting of an endless row of Oreos can be interpreted as an ironic statement about gluttony and commercialism or as a study of a pattern seen by millions of people every day that has its own ubiquitous beauty.
His 1973 screenprint of a tank camouflaged in a leaf pattern, Arcadia, is described by the Tate as drawing "an ironic parallel between this idea of a natural paradise and the camouflage patterns on a tank".
Included in the idyllic pattern (which may well find its way into the hands of ironic decorators) are the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, the bald eagle, the Capitol building and the White House, held together with cherry blossoms.
Ian Hamilton Finlay's 1973 Arcadia was a screenprint of a leafily-camouflaged tank, "an ironic parallel between this idea of a natural paradise and the camouflage patterns on a tank", as the Tate Collection describes it.
"Miss Porter makes none of the melodramatic or ironic points that are the stock in trade of ordinary short stories; she falls into none of the usual patterns and she does not show anyone's influence".
